How is national identity shaped in the post-colony? This paper focuses on a crucial aspect of this question in Tunisia: namely how the ex post (re-)construction of national historical narratives contribute to the shaping of collective identities in post-colonial context. More specifically, it shows how Tunisian nationalist leader and first president Habib Bourguiba produced official historical accounts of the nationalist struggle against French rule in order to minimize the role played by the traditionally-trained Zaytuna Mosque ‘ulama’. Such narratives represented the religious scholars as ideologically backwards, accommodationist towards the protectorate, and socially secluded from the Tunisian independence movement. Yet Bourguiba’s selective depiction of Tunisian nationalism accounts for an important exception: those ‘ulama’ who subscribed to his societal project and were coopted by the state after independence. The result, as I show, was the implicit delineation of those ʿulamaʾ worthy of state inclusion versus those who were not—in effect, “good ʿulamaʾ” versus “bad ʿulamaʾ.” Using primary documents from the colonial era, my paper seeks to more precisely contextualize this assertion and deconstruct this binary that pitted “traditional” ‘ulama’ against “modernist” ones. Using these sources, I show that this narrative incorrectly depicts the role of the ulama in the independence movement, and that local units of the Destour and Neo Destour Parties were actually filled with ʿulamaʾ educated at the Zaytuna. This serves as a paradigm for addressing the broader theme of state intervention in the dialectic between Islamic authority and the construction of national identity. Thus, as Bourguiba kept a public presence, albeit sharply limited, of religious scholars, I demonstrate how this early moment in Tunisian statehood serves as a foundation for how the state would appropriate and rearticulate historical narratives in order to serve a particular societal project.