Under the personal law system in the British Raj, the state’s use of religious jurisprudence when dealing with family law subjects like the age of consent and alimony tended to create tensions between advocates for religious freedom and advocates for women’s rights. Authors like Narendra Subramanian and Gail Minault have written extensively on the conflicts that emerged when the colonial government attempted to intervene in Islamic personal law. Members of the ulama, the class of Muslim religious scholars, often found themselves at odds with feminist organizations like the All-India Muslim Ladies’ Conference, as shown by the fierce public debates leading up to the Child Marriage Restraint Act in 1929. However, the issues where the nascent feminist movement in South Asia collaborated with Muslim religious elites has received less scholarly attention, a gap my paper hopes to address. I have identified two cases which problematize the relationship between early Muslim feminists and the ulama: the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act of 1937, which limited the role of local custom in Muslim family law cases, and the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act of 1939, which incorporated Maliki grounds for women-initiated divorce into all Muslim divorce cases across British India. Debates around both of these Acts occurred as Muslim elites grappled with the idea of an independent Pakistan and their published discourses indicate that, despite their differences, feminists and jurists alike were preoccupied with the idea of preserving their group identity. Through collecting and analyzing editorials, letters to the editor, and speeches by both women active in the Muslim feminist movements and religious scholars about the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act of 1937 and the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act of 1939, I demonstrate that rather than being wholly ideologically opposed as they have previously been portrayed, Muslim feminists and ulama worked in tenuous and constantly shifting coalitions in order to advance what they perceived as shared Muslim interests in the increasingly sectarian environment of 1930’s British India.