Abstract Devotional practices and Sufi rituals share a common textual basis, that is rooted not only in Quran and ??d??, but also in a large corpus of poetry produced since before the appearance of Islam in ?i??z. The expansion of Islam in Sub Saharan Africa has seen the flourishing of devotional literature, that constitutes, in many cases, the largest part of manuscripts and texts collections. The relations of the latter with the Arabic tradition is a wide topic that requires a multi-faceted inquiry. In this paper I would like to analyze one of these facets, starting from a few poems produced in the 19th and 20th in Ethiopia, that have been found in manuscript collections digitized by the Islam in the Horn of Africa Project. Being mainly anonymous and used in a variety of contexts (maw?l?d, ?ar?qa related gatherings, family meetings), it is difficult to put these texts in a defined frame of local use and practice. On the other hand, it is possible to relate them the to the previous tradition, on the basis of the other texts found in the area (in manuscript and printed form). To reach this aim I will present the Fat? al-ra?m?n? of the Ethiopian Sufi H?šim b. ?Abd al-?Az?z (d. 1765) and other locally produced collections of prayers on the Prophet and compare them with previous works diffused in Ethiopia, like the Tanb?h al-an?m of Ibn ?A???m al-Qayraw?n? (d.1565) and back to the ?a??’i? and dal?’il al-nubuwwa literature that flourished in Maml?k period. The adoption of foreign literary topoi and their transposition in a different context will help tracing a geography of quotations and a literary landscape where the Arabic literary production in a peripheric context will appear as one of many knots in a dense web of relations. The way in which this imagery has been re-used, with or without a re-adaptation will allow us to define the dynamics shaping those relations, from simple plagiarism to active re-elaboration. In this sense, the reference to historical or spiritual spaces (Mecca, Medina, the spiritual ascension) can function as a thread to follow in order to narrow the scope of the inquiry and to provide a clear and defined mean of comparison.