This paper uses _Nahdat al-jaza’ir al-hadithah wa-thawratuha al-mubarakah_, a 1965 Algerian nationalist history by Muhammad Ali Dabbuz, to argue that in the twentieth century a distinctive Ibadi orientation was subsumed into an anti-colonial nationalist narrative that emphasized common goals with Sunni Algerians for independence from European control while downplaying the vibrancy of trans-regional Ibadi networks in the nineteenth century. Al-Shaykh Muhammad ibn Attafayyish (1820-1914), one of the preeminent religious scholars of his day across both Ibadi networks and throughout the educated Islamic world, became a valuable symbol of merging Ibadi and nationalist sentiments for the subsequent generation of nationalists. By portraying Attafayyish’s political concerns as integral to his commitment to religious scholarship, Dabbuz implied that this nineteenth-century flourishing of Islamic learning was both constructed by a latent national identity and formative of the pan-Islamic inclinations of following generations of national leaders. While Attafayyish adamantly opposed European imperialism and advocated cooperation across the Islamic world, he did so within a distinctly Ibadi framework, and he derived his legitimacy and acclaim by representing his sect. Dabbuz’s work is one among early twentieth-century Algerian, Pan-Islamist narratives that sought to elide the tensions in Algerian society by means of a unifying Muslim identity. Much scholarship has focused on this movement and its intersections with nationalist thought, exploring, for example, how pious practices, religious learning, and gender roles were compatible with modernist and anti-colonial conceptions of Islam in this nationalizing period. This project aimed to achieve hegemony over Algeria’s history by funneling moments of potential discord into a unifying narrative of national achievement. Algeria’s Ibadi community in the Mzab, long distinct from dominant Sunni and coastal society, represented one such potential for rupture in a supposedly harmonious Algerian past. As Amal Ghazal has argued, their historical isolation diminished in the nineteenth century as the Ibadis of the Mzab benefited from greater access to other Ibadi communities as well as to centers of Islamic learning, which allowed them to expand their intellectual networks and seek greater dialogue with their Sunni neighbors. This paper seeks to demonstrate that it is precisely this quiet opposition in the form of persistent Ibadi scholarship that later nationalist historians like Dabbuz sought to diminish by presenting Attafayyish as a pan-Islamist, while relegating his Ibadism to a mere circumstance.