Throughout the history of Shiʿism, women have served an important symbolic as well as literal role in the life of the community. Muḥammad’s wife Umm Salamah was a noted transmitter of ḥadīth which are integral to Twelver collections, and of course Fāṭimah has a far-reaching presence from popular piety to theological literature – indeed, she is arguably understood as the perfect woman. Despite this, theological and metaphysical literature is typically articulated through a primarily masculine lens – it does not help that Arabic grammar has lent its own gendering to the very words themselves, since masculine is typically default and feminine marked. Abstract entities, or intellects, in Ismāʿīlī hierarchies are rarely described in anthropomorphic terms. But does this very lack of definition assume a gendering of the spiritual as intertextually masculine and the feminine as a feature of base materiality? Or is the picture more complex? In this paper, I will explore if and how the medieval Ismāʿīlī conception of the spiritual world is gendered. Drawing on early doctrines such as those of the cosmogenesis of Kūnī and Qadar or the fall of the primordial shadows as well as the more systematic output of Fatimid and Ṭayyibī theologies, I will outline specific attitudes towards femininity, from a primordial principle to a tainted result of materiality. I argue that while the rhetoric language of the time presupposes a masculine characterization of spiritual hierarchies, it has more to do with linguistic conventions and conservatism than Ismāʿīlī philosophers understanding gender as an absolute. I will consider whether a docetic interpretation, where gender is merely a temporary feature of the body, may be a strategy for legitimizing the religious devotion to female personages such as Fāṭimah or Arwā al-Ṣulayḥī, who are subject to both female as well as male gendering in Ismāʿīlī discourse. I will also interrogate whether we should understand a deficit of gender as being itself a kind of gendering discourse. These narratives present us with a tension that their writers were obviously aware of: how to reconcile an abstract religious ta’wīl of “the feminine” with the real women who existed as pivotal figures in Islamic history.