Over the course of a life lived between metropoles within and alongside the Ottoman Empire—Beirut, Cairo, Valletta, Tunis, Istanbul—Lebanese littérateur Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq produced a number of texts concerned with how “the Arabic language” ought to be conceived and taught. In addition to three works explicitly framed as Arabic language primers, al-Shidyāq published an edited and abridged version of an 18th-century grammar composed by and intended for Arabophone Christians, an English-language grammar, and various articles related to the teaching of Arabic in and beyond the Ottoman Arab provinces. Produced in varied political and institutional contexts—while al-Shidyāq served as an employee of American Protestant missionaries in Malta, supervisor of the Education Directorate of Tunis, and head editor of an imperially-funded newspaper in Istanbul—these texts testify to “the pedagogical” as a site of complex intersections between “Islam” and “Christianity,” “Arabness” and “Ottomanness.” My paper argues that, for al-Shidyāq, these issues crystallize around the relationship between “language” in the abstract and Arabic as one of many “modern, national languages.” I suggest that a close reading of some of al-Shidyāq’s grammatical and lexicographical texts that are not explicitly pedagogical uniquely enables us to distill a distinctly Shidyāqian approach to Arabic language pedagogy. How, I ask, does al-Shidyāq think that “modern” Arabic can be taught and learned? And what about al-lugha—the Arabic language as conceived within a “premodern” Islamic episteme?