Drawing on sources from the Tunisian National Archives, this paper discusses the possibilities and limitations of political economy analysis with regard to the 20th-century reform movement at the Zaytuna Mosque-University, the main institution of Islamic higher education in Tunisia and eastern Algeria. I frame the Zaytuna as an institution riven by internal fault lines between students and professors, themselves divided into separate “classes” (tabaqat), and between the Zaytuna’s main site in Tunis and the twenty-five branches located in provincial towns. Much of the movement for "reform" (islah) should be understood as a struggle over the distribution of resources among the Zaytuna’s different constituencies. Yet, diverging from a perspective that would restrict itself to such political economy analysis, I argue that key ideas of the reform movement cannot be inferred from material factors or social relations.