Al-Azhar’s role (est. 972) as an important center of Islamic learning, while routinely acknowledged in academic scholarship, remains “a phenomenon of arrested development,” historiographically isolated from the trans-imperial interconnection that characterized the early modern world. Located in the cosmopolitan metropolis of Cairo, a major trading post in the Eastern Mediterranean, al-Azhar was a nodal point in a network of teaching institutions and centers through which the traffic of contact and exchange passed. The mention of epithets (nisbas) like “al-Hindi” in the Ottoman court records of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Cairo represent historical traces of the movement of people, texts, and ideas between the Mediterranean Basin and the Indian Ocean. The general acceptance and mobility of international scholars into the Cairene knowledge economy is exemplified in the person of Shaykh Shihab al-Din b. Abi al-Abbas Ahmad b. al-Shaykh Muhammad b. al-Shaykh Shihab al-Din al-‘Abbadi al-Hindi. Hailing from a long line of religious scholars connected to al-Hind, Shihab al-Din was an imam of the Taybarsiyya madrasa at the turn of the seventeenth century, one of three Mamluk madrasas attached to the complex of al-Azhar. This paper will map a family tree of Muslim scholars stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Eastern Mediterranean in the 16th and 17th centuries using a set of hitherto unstudied teaching certificates (icazetnames; ijazas) issued by Azhari teachers that were found in libraries in Cairo and Istanbul, Ottoman court records from Egypt (sicils), and Ottoman and Mughul-era biographical dictionaries. It will offer some preliminary thoughts on how the study of trans-imperial networks of Muslim scholars can be used as a heuristic framework not only for investigating the broader cultural connections that grew out of robust trade networks between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean (connections that had been established under the Fatimids in the 10th century), but also for charting interconnections across the imperial and geographical boundaries of the Mughal and Ottoman empires. The implication of reconstructing trans-imperial networks of Muslim scholars will be to connect the changing contours of the early modern Islamic knowledge economy more solidly with Cairo’s position as an entrepôt par excellence for international trade with Yemen, Arabia, India, and the Far East.