This paper will explore the ways in which colonial authorities and North Africans themselves employed Islamic history and traditions reaffirm or challenge the legitimacy of French control over North Africa (1830-1962). The paper will focus upon the written work of North African intellectuals and colonial officials from the period of the First World War until the Second World War. I am especially interested in examining the linkages between Algerian and Tunisian conceptions of Islamic history, especially given the close ties between intellectuals living in the eastern area of Algeria (the Constantinois) and Tunis during the early 20th century. The nexus of these links was the Zeituna university in Tunis, which provided the social milieu for both Tunisians and Algerians to formulate these historical theories which saw Western civilization as apart from, and in many ways, alien to Islam. These Zeitunian graduates’ work remains a powerful indictment of French colonial power today, but to fully understand the environment in which they were produced, we must also examine French colonial efforts to craft an opposing viewpoint. French officials, writing both in French and in Arabic, attempted to recast Islamic history in order to justify their rule in the eyes of their Muslim subjects. The author will use official French publications, such as the military journal “El-Nasr”, and archival sources to argue that the French wished to promote a vision of Islamic civilization as deeply engaged in the development of the West and open to assimilation, thereby justifying French control as a sort of reciprocal action in light of events. The author hopes to conclude this paper with a discussion of what aspects of each theory have been definitively discredited today and which remain analytically useful in understanding contemporary post-colonial North Africa. The sources will include archival evidence the author has collected from trips to Nantes and Aix-en-Provence, as well as archival sources located in Tunisia and Algeria. The paper will also examine the works of Algerian and Tunisian scholars such as Sheikh Mubarak al-Milli and Sheikh Muhammad Khidr al-Hussein and Sheikh Salah Sherif al-Tunisi.