Tunuslu Hayreddin Pasha as the late 19th century Ottoman thinker was known, is credited with being the towering figure of liberal constitutionalism that brought Tunisia’s first constitution in 1860. Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi, the Arabic avatar of the liberal constitutional thinker, was also the Grand Vizier of the Sublime Port for a year (1878-1879) under Abdel Hamid II. Al-Tunisi appears in all major intellectual histories of the Arab world in the late 19th century and is a towering figure in the al-Nahda historiography, appearing in the al-Nahda cannon in the works of Elie Kedourie (1980) and Albert Hourani (1962). Under the current historiographical turn of locating “early modern liberalism’s reluctance to endorse the imperial project” (Sartori 2006, 624), there is an effort to regain previously discarded intellects. Within this new epistemological space that was not yet wholly dovetailed to empire, and the turn to “rehabilitate an understudied period, roughly 1870 to 1914 (Khuri-Makdisi 2010, 7),” there stands a project that reexamines such figures away from Orientalist tropes that essentialize Arab intellects of the 19th century as backwards, but also as distinct from nationalist tropes that condemn such figures as reformist intellects who wavered in the face of colonialism. In locating how such texts travelled and circulated, as well as the rise of the kiraathane – reading coffee shops – an argument is made that these texts had a better receptability in the Ottoman world (Khrui-Makdisi 2010), as opposed to the Islamic manuscript. As a figure that travelled and witnessed turn of the century events, such the first constitution of the Sublime Port in 1861, al-Tunisi is lauded as an intellect that was a liberal reformer who saw no contradiction of the coupling of these reforms with al-shari'a. Yet how different would the story be told if all those who examine al-Tunisi were shown to rely on a faulty translation? Reading al-Tunisi's aqwam al-masalik fi ma'rifat ahwal al-mamalik in his native Arabic, compared to the canonical translation by Carlos Brown (1967) which most encyclopedic entries of al-Tunisi and those who see him as a liberal anti-colonial figure rely on, shows several instances of transplantation of a secular liberal meaning not in the author’s text. Thus, this paper presents al-Tunisi away from the turn to locate such figures within a liberalism that was not colonial, problematizing the emphasis on the politics of translation and circulation of 19th century Arabic texts in the Ottoman Empire.