The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islamic studies defines Islamic modernism as an intellectual response to the rise of the West that “promoted a re-interpretation of Islam which would fit in the modern world.” These ideas, the Encyclopedia explains, “implied an acknowledgement that the Muslim world had lost its position in the world.” Islamic modernism is thus understood as a religious intellectual movement that began to emerge in the late 19th century in response to a state of crisis made visible by the contrast between a declining East and a flourishing West. This paper seeks to challenge this view, arguing that the Islamic discourse on modernism is neither inherent to the Muslim World, nor opposed a priori to the West. It takes the 1930s writings of a group of religious scholars from the Zaytuna Mosque in Tunis as a case study in order to illustrate a universalist Islamic modernism articulated around ethics. For the Zaytuna ulama, the world as a whole is engulfed in a moral crisis, which can only be surpassed through an active cultivation of an ethics of the community. These scholars write out of concern for the state of the Islamic Umma, but contrary to Islamic modernism à la Rifat al-Tahtawi or Hassan al-Banna, their discourse is not built in opposition to, but rather in conversation with the West and some of its own modernist intellectuals such as Max Weber or Emile Durkheim. For the Zaytuna ulama, the advocacy for and cultivation of an Ihsas Mushtarik, or ‘sense of commonality’ throughout the Arab-Muslim world, is the direct and necessary response to the ethical crisis in which it finds itself.