A number of authors have theorized that Islamist groups’ social service provision estranges recipients from their governments and acclimates them to activism outside ordinary political processes. This attitudinal shift eventually causes the regime to lose legitimacy and, subsequently, to collapse, ostensibly paving the way for an Islamic state. Popular and media discourse about Islamists’ efforts to cultivate a “parallel state” have buttressed this narrative. In this paper I advance an alternative reading of Islamist social services. Instead of being drivers of alienation and revolution, I suggest that they were a vital component of regime stability in Anwar El-Sadat and Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt. I outline two ways this occurred. First, by enlisting voters in support of Islamist candidates, these institutions invested citizens in Egypt’s democratic façade and supported the authoritarian regime’s public narrative of a democratic Egypt. Second, this growing provision of social services came during a dramatic rollback of the state’s welfare net. Far from agents of mass mobilization and revolt, these services actually became an important tool through which the regime defused popular anger and secured a series of cutting economic reforms. In addition to archival and historical materials, to make my case I rely on a survey experiment of 3600 Egyptians testing how exposure to information about Islamic medical facilities effects, and does not effect, feelings of political alienation and perceptions of regime legitimacy. By questioning the popular dichotomy of regime vs. Islamist opposition that pervades study of the Middle East, this paper advances a more complex research agenda dedicated to understanding the varying techniques by which authoritarian regimes stabilize and perpetuate themselves.