This paper examines widely held views about Middle East and North Africa (MENA) activists with a focus on Muslim women’s activism in Egypt and their mobilizations through their acts of refusal. Employing Carole McGranahan’s concept of refusal, this paper illustrates how Muslim women activists in Egypt give citizenship meaning through their collective organization, and in particular how non-movements of Muslim women leading deliberate action can be politically salient without needing to possess an expressly political design in their agency. Through this work, it challenges widely held beliefs about Egyptian women’s agency, firstly that activists mobilized by Islamic principles and their pursuit of political change necessarily makes them “Islamists,” and thus, invariably they seek to contest and/or (re)appropriate the state. Secondly, by studying their acts of refusal, this paper sheds light on the view that activists’ positioning in states of authoritarian rule invariably reduces the status of such actors to ‘subjects’, when they are actually citizens. In the first instance, Islam is thought to produce particular forms of political agency and, in the second, authoritarianism is seen to deny other forms of political agency, and as such renders these women as subjects without political subjectivity. McGranahan argues that refusals are the politics of hope. In studying their politics of hope, this paper shows, rather, that these Egyptian women’s refusals illustrate change leadership of dialogism, reciprocity, a re-direction of levels of engagement, generative participation, and a stronger propensity for collaboration, rather than competition with secular forces. Different to studies that frame these women as oppositional and in resistance, this paper shows how they seek to lead change through a different kind of power (‘power from within’, ‘power with’, ‘power to’ and ‘power for’ rather than merely ‘power over’). Their forms of mobilization provide evidence of a diversification within activism that is Islamically motivated, and in fact demonstrative of innovative expressions of leadership and vision.