This article engages al-Kawakibi’s Taba’i‘ al-istibdad (The Characteristics of Oppression) as an instance of how Nahda writing dealt with the anxieties and ambivalence inherent in Ottoman Arab modernity. The Aleppine author was a political philosopher who universalized the Arab Muslim as a political subject. The article examines how al-Kawakibi defined “oppression” and “tyranny” as political phenomena that cut across a number of social and political spheres and cross temporal eras and geographic boundaries. As such, al-Kawakibi articulated the epistemology of the reform era and its priorities, providing it with coherence, and stabilizing the subjectivities that were being enacted during his time.