This article analyses the practical, political, ideal, and rhetorical connections characterizing the relationship between Tripolitania and Istanbul, between the immediate post-Lausanne period (1912) and the end of World War I (1918), which contributed to rearticulating the Ottoman Imperial Imagery as well as inspiring both Tripolitania’s and North African anti-colonial movements. As a matter of fact, even after the Italian colonial occupation, the political forces of Tripolitania resistance contributed in redefining the idea of the ‘Muslim world’, of which the Sublime Porte represented the epiphenomenon. This became clearer after the outbreak of the Great War, when Tripolitania witnessed the birth of several experiences of pan-Islamic self-government. Anti-colonial war, coupled with the pan-Islamic rhetoric, in fact, became one of the multiple declinations of 1914- 1918 ‘total war’.