What is the relationship between political reform, language reform, and translation in the Nahda? This paper demonstrates how the author and intellectual, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (1805-1887), developed an intricate system that linked politics to the role of Arabic as a living and autogenetic language in a global world. While the Nahda is usually read as a laboratory of language reform, these reforms have been read politically as ushering in early forms of Arabism or as capitulating to orientalist philological and linguistic paradigms. This paper will complicate this reception of Arabic language reform in the Nahda by arguing that al-Shidyaq’s theorization of language affords the Arabic language an inherent ability to renew itself, and more importantly, to engage with the other languages of the world. I argue that al-Shidyaq theorized language as a craft that ought to be in constant struggle with tradition as well as be porous to other languages of the world through translation. The paper closely treads al-Shidyaq’s journalistic writings on civilization and translation, and reads them in conjunction with his morphological studies, such as “The Secrets of Morphology and Metathesis” (1867). I show how these reflections on language and translation help us understand al-Shidyaq’s magnum opus, Leg Over Leg as an attempt to think of language as what we can transform in order to change not only ourselves but our world. I end by tracing the legacy of al-Shidyaq’s theory of language to other authors of the Nahda.