Current literature on Islamic reform in the 19th and 20th century emphasizes intellectual history, often focusing on how Muslim writers responded to the pervasive and violent phenomenon of European colonialism and to the influence of ideas originating in Europe. This article shows how Islamic reform followed other dynamics at a major institution, the Zaytuna Mosque-University, the center of Muslim higher education in Tunisia and eastern Algeria. Under the French protectorate in Tunisia (1881-1956), the residences for Zaytuna students in the medina of Tunis became crucial sites for the reform movement. These overcrowded buildings sheltering thousands of students were a basic infrastructure requiring urgent repairs as well as a hub for student activism. The student housing example reveals Islamic reform to be a praxis-oriented phenomenon reliant on petitions and protest actions, rather than a matter of Islamic law, theology, or social and political thought to be studied by historians using printed magazines, books, or fatwas-—the main materials in existing scholarship on Islamic reform in the modern period. During the colonial period, student housing became an intra-Zaytuna matter dividing the broad reformist constituency into two camps: students and faculty, some of whom were also high-level administrators at the Zaytuna. When the French withdrew from the Zaytuna housing sector in the interwar years, student activists trying to reform housing continued to encounter draconian management tactics from their own teachers who policed the student residences and used evictions to break strikes. It insufficient, I argue, to position "conservatives" against "reformists." The Zaytuna housing case shows the internal fault lines within the second category in relation to age, class, rank, and regional background.