Scholars in Middle Eastern studies interpret Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi’s travelogue An Imam in Paris as a work that documents the Arab view of the West as unfamiliar other, which sowed the seeds for modern Arab nationalist identity. I wish to undermine this interpretation by focusing on a section of Tahtawi's work hitherto unexamined, its epilogue, in which Tahtawi emphasizes that Arabs are more similar to French than to Turks. I argue that this claim, once historically contextualized, could signify a defensive, almost reflexive counter-reaction against a French mindset that homogenized the entire Middle East as a completely Turkified bloc. Building upon various 19th century primary French sources that reflected the French views on Egyptian students in Paris that included Tahtawi, such as newspaper articles and Gustave Flaubert’s letters, the paper demonstrates that Tahtawi confronted the menace of becoming shoehorned by the French into a monolithic Turkish identity, while key French figures that became actively involved in Muhammad Ali’s reforms, such as François Jomard who supervised Tahtawi's studies, brought to Egypt a repertoire of stereotypical codifications for Turks, projecting them as the savages that Arabs cannot afford emulating in their march towards civilization. Hence, Tahtawi sharpens the difference between Turks and Arabs in his epilogue, eventually seeking to create a narrative of the Middle East that does not centralize Turk or Ottoman. I also argue that it is no mere coincidence that Tahtawi writes about gender in his epilogue, since the discrepancies in gender roles seem the main obstacle against locating any point of reconciliation for the French and the Arabs. He claims that Arab and French women are not as different as we think, since the Arabs could find in the French a mirror image that reminds themselves of their ideal of manhood in an oppressive Turkish milieu that was adamant to eradicate it. Such an analysis points to the necessity of a revised understanding of Arab nationalism enriched by works that dialogize Turkish and Arabic studies in Middle Eastern scholarship, whose almost exclusive focus on the relations between the homogenized blocs of East and West eclipsed our understanding of the multi-layered intra-Middle Eastern interactions.