Once a province of Islamic rule, Malta has since and long before been a central locus of imperial administration and trade across the Mediterranean. A site of conquest both symbolic as well as material, absorbed under the suzerainty of the British empire from 1800 through the Second World War, the Mediterranean islands simultaneously housed one of the first major Arabic printing presses, put to use predominantly by Arab Christians who traveled with Protestant missionaries to work on biblical translations. Upon conversion to Protestantism––and following his brother’s martyrdom at the hands of Maronite church authorities––Aḥmad Fāris Shidyāq was exiled by local patriarchs and sailed with American missionaries to Alexandria before arriving in Malta where he spent 14 years as professor, Arabic translator of the Bible, and printer. Traveling thereafter to England, Paris, Tunisia and Istanbul, he worked as professor, publisher, translator and editor. A prolific writer of lexicography, grammatology, fiction, journalism and travelogues, among Shidyāq's writings is a work on Malta, al-Wāsiṭah fī aḥwāl Māliṭah, which provides an ethnography of the two islands, with particular attention to the Maltese language as a “corrupted” dialect of Arabic. Considering his study of Maltese alongside his more general philological writings, this paper outlines a methodology of Shidyāq's linguistic and analytical practices that historically situates his work between pre-modern Arabic philological traditions about which he was demonstrably erudite, and the bustling contemporary fields of European comparative linguistics, with which he was similarly familiar. While much of these writings contain elitist invective––attacking the Maltese people with crude generalizations about "moral character" and social "peculiarities"––Shidyāq provides a cursory dialectology of Maltese, speculating diachronically for its "corrupted" phonological transmogrifications from a heuristic conception of a pure Arabic language (al-fuṣḥā). Anticipating many arguments to come, I argue that Shidyāq situates the space and language practices of Malta, both literally and figuratively, to reflect on the threats presented by the projects of European empire to the history and future of Arabic language and civilization.