Tunisia’s largest Islamist movement, Ennahdha, is careful to frame its own historical narrative to emphasise a seamless, progressive evolution from its preaching origins to political activism. This, it says, has culminated in the form of a modern, national, conservative but pragmatic party that accepts the democratic political process and seeks to build consensus. A tendency by scholars to focus on the elite-level politics of transition in the capital Tunis has served to reinforce this narrative. However, at the local level there is an acute debate among Ennahdha members about what their movement stands for, how best to achieve their goal of Islamising society, and how much political compromise has jeopardised the movement’s historic proselytizing mission. This paper draws on 14 months of fieldwork among Ennahdha activists in one Tunisian city, Sousse, including interviews, observation, and analysis of newspapers as well as internal party documents and written histories. I argue that at the local level the movement remains heavily shaped by its social and religious activities and the moral code that underpins them. The daily, lived practice of religious belief and of correct ethical comportment remained key to sustaining the many individual Ennahdha members who remained inside Tunisia during the repression of the 1990s and 2000s, and continues to shape their convictions today. In the years after the fall of the Ben Ali regime, the movement has fragmented internally as it struggles to regain the youthful vitality and cohesion it enjoyed in the 1980s. Ennahdha’s efforts to recruit a new generation of supporters have proved harder than expected because of the perceived ambiguity of its message. Its early electoral success has ironically disappointed many of its grassroots members, who sense a loss of religious legitimacy and the dilution of their historic, proselytizing origins. The debate about whether to divide Ennahdha into a separate political party and a religious movement has become increasingly urgent, but many fear such division may weaken the organisation. There are still unresolved debates about what it means to adopt religious values as a political reference within a civil, not Islamic, state. The result is that local movement leaders are trying to manage an array of internal debates and self-criticisms that belie the elite-level assertion of pragmatic, political coherence.