This article discusses the global and transnational features of the Afghan Constitutionalist (Mashrūtah) Movement, and their later interlocutor, Mahmud Tarzī, who reconfigured mulk (country, land, territory) into Vatan (fatherland), and qaum (people, political community, and later nation) into a millet (nation) via the Ottoman concept of Ittihad-i Islam (“Pan-Islamism”) in the early 20th century in Afghanistan. Ittihad-i Islam, as a form of modern nationalism, had promoted an interpretation of world politics that strengthened nationalistic awakening in the late Ottoman Empire and Afghanistan. In essence, it provided faith-based politics in order to imagine a modern nation, which was morally distinct from Europe, but at the same time, shared Europe’s civilizational features. The Afghan constitutionalism reflected corollaries of modern state-building in Afghanistan as well as the exposure of Afghans to transnational ideologies such as modern Islamism, constitutionalism, and nation-building at the age of modernism. While the Afghan Constitutionalist (Mashrūtah) Movement (ACM) have remained on the dark side of history, the role of Mahmud Tarzī, an Afghan reformer, politician, and intellectual, in the Afghan-Ottoman relationship in the beginning of the 20th century has been overemphasized by historians. However, there has been a strong continuity in the intellectual, political, and social relationship between these two countries since mid-19th century. Certain personalities played crucial roles as interlocutors. Thus, this article stresses Tarzī’s global and transnational works, including the genesis of his intellectual character as an important ramification of modernity’s invention of a “universal man”.