Over the last two decades, faith-based charitable community groups have gone through a significant transformation in the Muslim world. Previously informal Islamist communities have been reestablishing themselves as formal NGOs at unprecedented rates while forming transnational networks and coalitions. On the one hand, the charitable practices and ideational frames of these reestablished Islamist humanitarian and social aid NGOs remain the same: The project descriptions and mission statements are derived from Islamic teachings, they only work in Muslim majority areas, and they state their overarching goal as “helping Islam’s revival, well-being, and future” by consolidating global religious solidarity among Muslim populations. On the other hand, they drastically diverge from previous religious by positioning themselves as “civil society initiatives” rather than religious solidarity projects. They adopt the organizational models of World Bank/UN/USAID endorsed non-governmental organizations and frame the organizational identities and messages within the contours of the neoliberal civil society discourse. In this project, I examine this seeming contradiction and ask: Why are the previously informal Islamist networks transforming into formal NGOs and framing themselves as transnational civil society initiatives? What kinds of benefits does the neoliberal civil society frame provide to such religious solidarity alliances? I take one of the largest Muslim NGO coalitions to date – the Union of the NGOs of the Islamic World (UNIW). With its 206 member NGOs from 46 countries, UNIW aims to consolidate faith-based Muslim NGOs and to coordinate member activities for the welfare of all Muslim communities around the world. The data for the study comes from my fieldwork in Turkey, Germany, US, Malaysia, and Cambodia. Between June 2008 and May 2011, I conducted a total of 52 interviews with respondents including the UNIW’s secretary general, executive council members, and representatives of member NGOs from 22 different countries. The empirical findings point to non-liberal networks’ instrumental use of liberal norms. While UNIW is a religious network that promotes conservative norms, it draws from the ideational resources of the civil society toolbox and employs liberal norms in order to obtain resonance with the claims of more powerful and secular transnational non-state actors. In that sense, framing religious solidarity projects as transnational civil society networks provides Islamist groups additional channels of power. Previously informal communities find opportunities to claim legitimacy as global political actors, engage in mutually profitable relationships with states, and increase their social and organizational capital by collaborating with more established transnational advocacy networks.