While critical scholars, journalists, and the many ordinary Tunisians still living in harsh economic and political circumstances have done much to protest against the reality and implications of the country’s alleged “exceptionalism” in the post-2011 transition period, one of the key pillars of the notion of exceptionalism has received less scrutiny: the idea of “Tunisian Islam.” Drawing on print and archival sources from the interwar period, the following paper shows that debates at Tunisia’s centre of Islamic scholarship—the Zaytuna mosque-university—must be understood as part of a network of exchange with Egypt and in particular with the Azhar, the Zaytuna’s Cairo-based counterpart and perhaps the most important scholarly centre in Sunni Islam. I clarify the point through a case study of how scholars at the Azhar and Zaytuna used the identical 20th-century neologism—al-tashri' al-Islami (Islamic legislation)—to defend the shari'a’s existing provisions on women’s rights. There is another purpose to my argument that the concept of “Islamic legislation” was transnational rather than Tunisia-bound: to raise questions about the progress-oriented narratives implicit in subsequent depictions of reformist Zaytuna thought as leading inexorably to Tunisia’s landmark 1956 Personal Status Code. Diverging from these tendentious portrayals, I suggest that discourses at the Zaytuna had much in common with the Azhari intellectual trends with which they were endlessly entangled. In this sense, “Tunisian Islam” is partly a myth, traceable to the authoritarian age of the post-independence period when politicians and government-backed newspapers reframed Zaytuna history to suit the regime’s own carefully-curated image.