Arab women face entrenched discrimination, which is clearest in personal status laws that give men more rights than women in marriage and divorce, and in practices endangering women’s safety, from “honor killings” in Jordan to female genital mutilation (FGM) in Egypt. Our paper seeks to explain the reasons for the widely varying outcomes of attempts to pass women’s rights legislation in Egypt, Jordan, Yemen and Morocco. Our most successful cases are Morocco, where the 2003 moudawana abolished women’s duty to obey husbands and restricted polygamy, and Egypt, where the 2008 Child Law criminalized FGM. Jordan is an intermediate case; in 2003 King Abdallah’s campaign to increase honor killings punishments failed, and while a new honor crimes tribunal has handed down longer sentences, lenient punishment laws remain unchanged. In our least successful case, Yemen, a 2009 bill to raise girls’ marriage age has not been passed. Indicators that usually affect levels of women’s rights do not predict these outcomes. Strong tribal organization and low female literacy are argued to decrease women’s empowerment, but Morocco has both, while Jordan has the highest female literacy rate in our sample. Levels of wealth also seem irrelevant, as Egypt, the richest of our countries, has passed important legislation, but so has much poorer Morocco. Our paper focuses on three questions to develop a model outlining conditions favoring female-friendly legislation. What strategies did women’s rights groups use to support reform, and did they matter? Jordanian and Moroccan women organized massive signature campaigns, which helped in Morocco and don’t seem to have worked in Jordan, while Egyptian women did not mount major public efforts in favor of the Child Law. Which reforms prompted the deepest opposition from Islamists? In the Child Law Muslim Brotherhood parliamentarians did not strongly protest criminalizing FGM, but vehemently opposed letting mothers obtain birth certificates for children of unknown paternity. Do the number of Islamists relative to other parties in the parliament matter? Information for Egypt will come from interviews with government officials and leaders of women’s rights organizations in the summer of 2010 and from transcripts of the parliamentary debates.. Information on the other cases will be obtained from parliamentary transcripts where available, Arabic-language press coverage of the bills, including for Jordan coverage by as-Sabeel, which represents the Islamic Action Front, and analyses from women’s activists, including the book by Rana Husseini analyzing the honor crimes campaign she helped to organize.