The history of citizenship in modern North Africa—and the Middle East more broadly—long operated according to a diffusionist model of modernity: modern conceptions of citizenship originated in Western Europe and were then imported by reformist, westernizing officials. This paper seeks to offer an alternative approach: rather than presume that Tunisian citizenship was invented in the nineteenth century, I point to the arguments made by Husayn b. ‘Abdallah, a former mamlūk and a Tunisian government official. Husayn was charged with overseeing the government’s case in a lawsuit that concerned the nationality of Nissim Shamama, a Jew from Tunis who died in Italy in 1873. His approach to belonging suggests that North Africans did not necessarily understand citizenship as a foreign import, but rather as rooted in Islamic tradition. In the standard historiography, proto-citizenship in the Islamic world depended entirely on religious status—principally, whether one was a Muslim or a dhimmī (a protected non-Muslim monotheist). Only Muslims had full rights, as close to full citizenship as the premodern Islamic world got. But these rights did not amount to state-based citizenship; rather, Muslims’ rights derived from their membership in the umma, the community of Muslims worldwide—a group that transcended political boundaries. Jews’ rights similarly depended on their religion and their status as dhimmīs. Because rights were presumably located in religious identity, scholars presume that true, state-based citizenship could only emerge once states stopped defining personal status based on religion—a form of secularization imported from Europe. But this narrative fails us when it comes to grasping how North Africans understood what it meant to belong to Tunisia. In the context of the Shamama lawsuit, Husayn insisted on grounding his vision of Tunisian nationality in Islamic law. He also asserted that the model of belonging in Tunisia allowed Jews more freedom than did emancipation in Europe—a claim echoed by Léon Elmilik, Husayn’s Jewish employee from Algeria. Husayn’s conception of Tunisian nationality suggests that legal belonging—a more abstract category than either citizenship or nationality—existed in Tunisia well before the modernizing reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. Exploring Tunisians’ conceptions of Tunisian nationality frees us from the twinned teleologies of Westernization and secularization; instead, it shines light on the evolution of state membership in modern North Africa as part of an entangled process of legal change across the Mediterranean.