This paper studies the impact of legislated women's quotas religious parties in the Middle East. The adoption of women's quotas is destabilizing the Middle East's long held place at the very bottom of global rankings of women’s representation. But there is still much debate over the utility of descriptive presence for women's meaningful participation in political life. This study sets to demonstrate an important way by which quotas are in fact contributing to a transformation in attitudes toward women’s role in the political sphere. By examining the impact that women's quotas have on religious parties – affiliated with religious movements that advocate a divinely sanctioned and explicitly conservative gender ideology – the paper identifies the significant symbolic utility of quotas. The study traces variation in the electoral platforms, campaign rhetoric, internal discourse and policies pertaining to women’s representation pursued by religious parties across three quota contexts: a. candidate quotas; b. reserved seats and; c. no quotas. The first is the case of Hamas during the 2006 Palestinian national election. The 2006 election included a 20% women candidate quota for national party lists. The second case is the Egyptian Muslim Brothers in the 2010 election, in which 64 seats were reserved for women, and the 2011 election in which this reservation had been removed. The third case examines both Islamic and Jewish religious movements (the Islamic Movement and Shas) in the no-quota context of Israel. The paper shows that in the absence of quotas (Israel) socially conservative religious parties can ignore the question of women's representation, devalue it or, when pressed, justify non-inclusion. Reserved seats (Egypt) lead to tokenism, rationalization of non-inclusion and, worse, the tainting of the agenda for women's representation by its association with authoritarian practices. Legislated candidate quotas (Palestine) which guarantee a significant percent of women's representation on candidate lists lead to a noticeable transformation in the discourse and practices of religious parties. In the Palestinian case, Hamas had to not only justify and defend its inclusion of women candidates, it also had to convince its supporters and potential voters that this inclusion was grounded in authentic religious doctrine and was not simply a concession to secular and liberal women’s advocacy efforts. The large number of Hamas women candidate also contributed to a “critical mass” in terms of the public attention the movement had to devote to the issue of women's representation.