In this paper I will look at the genealogies of constructing of the Zawaya identity in 19th century Mauritania. In the 19th century, the Saharan "religious" groups were seen by the French in Senegal as exclusively traders; while inside the Sahara they were largely perceived by the dominant Hassan groups, inter alia, as as settled people and subjects of taxations and hegemony. Their self-representation was largely ignored. Yet these zawaya perceived themselves as solely Islamic community, not defined by trade or by being underdogs. Indeed, they saw these classifications as distractions of an ulterior identity. This paper will try to navigate these conflicting representations through the genealogies of Zawaya. In additions to social histories (Ould Cheikh 1985; Bonte, 2016; Braham 2018) I will look at the works of Sidi ‘Abdullah Wuld al-Haj Ibrahim (d. 1818), Nabigha al-Gallawi (d. 1848), Cheikh Muhammad al-Mami (d. 1860),Cheikh Sa‘d Buh (d. 1917), and Baba Chiekh Sidiya (d. 1924). I will argue that a conglomerate of power and knowledge can explain the emergence of new religious identity as primary definition of the erstwhile Sanhaja tribes throughout Mauritania and western Sahara. By the 19th century, Zawaya, which indicated religious piety, spiritual authority, and “management of the unseen” (Ould Cheikh 1985) emerged as an ultimate social signifier that prescribed, ostracized, subsumed, and excised behaviors. This change in perception and self-definition involved also a gamut of existential techniques including politics of piety (Mahmoud 2015) and technologies of the selves (Foucault 1984). By self-defining, as well as being defined by dominant emirates, as a locus of disinterested and disarmed Islam, Zawaya, nonetheless, initiated a new moral and educational discours that contrasted identities in the Sahara. This discourse of identity was also significant in social critique, namely in conceptualizing and envisioning a Shari‘a system thought to be inchoate or distorted.