How does one know the ummah? How one senses its presence and represents its actuality? The late 19th-century thematics of awakening, revival and reform in the Muslim world made the question of ‘civilization’ the central problematic of a new social question. Whether it is Tanzimat, Nahda or Aligarh, these movements sought to address the gap between their belatedness and the domain of the contemporary. Travel was indeed the practice of traversing this vertical gap back and forth, and it happened to be experienced not only as a translocation but, indeed, as a time travel. Muslim travellers of the 19th century had West as their telos both in their travels and intellectual labors, and both were marked by the lack of coevalness (Fabian 1983). Yet, towards the end of the century a new itinerary, contra the verticality of the West, started to gain precedence. Muslim travellers started to navigate the forgotten waters of Ummah. In this paper, I will look into this reorientation through Ottoman travellers and their journeys to India. My focus will be on S. M. Tevfik’s serialized journalistic reports from India for the leading Islamist journal Sebilürreşad (1913-4). Indian Muslims, especially after 1897 victory against the Greeks, became a curiosity of Ottomans for their Islamic transnationalism. Tevfik’s voyage was a reconnaissance survey for novel sensibilities and potentialities of an unprecedented future. Placing it among a number of travelogues written earlier, I will show how an aesthetics of pan-Islamism is mobilized to resignifiy daily encounters, objects and histories towards materializing the referent that is Ummah. Making things speak for Ummah, ventriloquizing them, I argue, is the constitutive moment of an Islamist sovereignty for it renders the speaker the authority over intentions unknown to things themselves. Tevfik’s travelogue unjams the ummah by positing a subject who can speak for it and thus opens the possibility for it to be heard. Rather than fixating on the question of Caliphate vis-a-vis Great Powers, a horizontal perspective embodied in Tevfik’s narrative can help us in rethinking the sidelined alternative of a civic bond interlacing anti-imperialism with an Islamic cosmopolitanism.