Animated by anxieties of European colonialism, Jamal ad-Din Al-Afghani argued for pan-Islamic unity as a political organizing principle to counter growing imperial threats. Al-Afghani’s pan-Islamic message imagined solidarity along creedal lines in opposition to divisions of tribe and ethnicity, in order to etch borderlines between Europe and an imagined “Muslim world.” Through a close reading of Al-Afghani’s writings in al-Urwah al-Wuthqa and Misr, this paper will analyze the role of a constructed territorial homeland at the heart of his political mission. For Al-Afghani, the Muslim world was a geographic place, a homeland of Muslims whose territorial integrity was under threat by European colonialism. Placing Al-Afghani’s writing within the context of the Ottoman Empire’s territorial loss and concession, the desire to preserve an imagined Muslim homeland becomes one of the central objectives of Al-Afghani’s project. Defining the citizen of the Muslim millet in broad civilizational terms, Al-Afghani fashions a modern Muslim world equipped intellectually to grapple with the threat of European colonialism. Islamic unity then is the method by which to maintain and preserve territorial unity even as Al-Afghani imagines the Muslim homeland into being. This paper will provide an intervention into our understanding of the mission of pan-Islamism, its relationship to nationalism, and the role of territorial imagining in political Islam.