Although Sufi scholar and anticolonial resistance leader al-Shaikh Ma al-'Aynain (1831- 1910) lived before the era of nation-states, his legacy is often framed as an early form of Moroccan nationalism. In the same vein, his resistance movement is co-opted to support a narrative of eternal political and cultural cohesiveness between ‘Alawite Morocco and the northwestern Sahara. This has taken both legal and literary forms, as Morocco relied on Ma al-?Aynain’s political legacy to bolster its claim to “immemorial possession” of the disputed Western Sahara at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 1975. Curiously, both the ICJ case and later academic studies of al-Shaikh Ma al-'Aynain fail to engage with the Shaikh’s own conceptions of Saharan territory, authority, and belonging. This is where his own legal ruling can help reconceptualize the Sahara on the eve of colonialism. Thus, this paper examines how Ma al-'Aynain actually framed Saharan space and the duty to defend it in his 1885 fatwa 'Hidayat man hara fi amr al-Nasara.' The fatwa reveals Ma al-'Aynain to be adroit at moving between negotiating Saharan politics defined by siba (the lack of central authority) and a global pan-Islamic ideal. This fatwa also puts the abstract ideal of jihad in dialogue with various Muslim struggles against colonial powers. As becomes apparent by reading 'Hidayat man hara fi amr al-Nasara' in dialogue with Saharan sources from the same period, Ma al-'Aynain’s political genius lay in his ability to translate Islamic solidarity and resistance into terms which spoke to the particular circumstances of the northwestern Sahara. He does so largely by making the imagined geography of “Bilad al-Muslimin” apply to the Hassanophone region.