Abstract
This article examines an Arabic guidebook on the late Ottoman capital (present-day Istanbul), published in 1913 with the title Guide to Asitana [Dalil al-Asitana]. A rich textual and visual narrative on the city as the capital of a caliphate, the guidebook's author was Muhammad Safa who fled to Ottoman Turkey from Egypt under British control in the 1890s and sought to navigate a publishing career in a vast political space across and beyond the eastern Mediterranean by the early 1910s. Written for the Arabic-reading public(s) of this multilingual space, Safa's Dalil illuminates travel and tourism as experienced and promoted in a particular late Ottoman context after the Balkan Wars. Given the complexity of motives that shaped it, the guidebook defies reduction to a work of propaganda for a colonial empire or a nation-state emerging in 'the Middle East'. Analysing its content helps to interpret travel and tourism in the early twentieth century with due attention to particular contexts of significance for vocabularies of empire and categories such as the colonial and the national. This helps to formulate historical analyses of tourism that transcend national and regional frameworks as well as limits of comparison and contrast with 'the West'.