This article utilizes a broad notion of infrastructure in order to shed light on the pivotal role played by early Oriental studies in the making of the European Enlightenment. In a first step, it depicts how the huge cultural transfer initiated by northern European orientalists during the seventeenth century was itself dependent on various infrastructures such as human and technical infrastructures, institutions, infrastructures of communication, and the infrastructures of trade. In a second step, the article elaborates on the question posed by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity about the transcultural sources of Enlightenment thinking. Looking at the eighteenth-century, Europe-wide reception of a classical work of Islamic philosophy, Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, the article then highlights how the European Enlightenment used the Islamic sources provided by orientalists as its very own “epistemological infrastructure” and how, while remaining invisible in its quintessential function as any infrastructure does, this infrastructure pervaded the imagination of the age of Enlightenment, including its aesthetic expression.