Having just completed a manuscript on the history of nineteenth-century medicine in Egypt, I consulted a large number of medical books that had been translated from French into Arabic. These books covered such diverse subjects as morbid anatomy, pathology, gynecology, pediatrics, pharmacology, public hygiene, osteology, ophthalmology, physics, chemistry and veterinary science. One name kept on popping up in consulting these book, that of Muhammad ‘Umar al-Tunisi (1789-1857). A graduate of Al-Azhar who had grown up in Sudan, joined Mehmed Ali’s army as an imam of one of the regiments dispatched to Greece, upon returning to Egypt in 1827, al-Tunisi was appointed as chief editor of translated books in the newly founded Qasr al-‘Aini Medical School. This paper charts al-Tunisi’s biography as a way to revisit the manner in which the story of translation in nineteenth-century Egypt is often told. In addition to editing the Arabic translation of the numerous French medical books that the Bulaq Press published under his supervision, al-Tunisi also wrote lengthy introductions to these books. More significantly, and shortly before his death al-Tunisi supervised a mammoth task of translating Fabre’s eight-volume medical encyclopedia Dictionnaire des Dictionnaires de Médicine that had been published in Paris in 1840. The result was a hefty 600-page titled Al-Shūdhūr al-Dhahabiyya fī’l-Muṣṭalaḥāt al-Ṭibbiyya. A deeply pious man who gave weekly sermons in one of Cairo’s chief mosques until his death in 1857, Al-Tunisi’s biography offers an interesting example of an Azhari shaykh who was deeply involved in translating modern science. By having a close look at his magnum opus, Al-Shūdhūr al-Dhahabiyya, as well as the introductions to the numerous books he edited, this paper sheds light on a little known character whose biography sheds new light on the story of translation in modern Egypt.