When Ben Ali cracked down on the Islamist movement in the 1990s, many Ennahdha members and leaders went into exile, primarily to European countries. Some argue that this experience drove the organization to adopt a more pro-democratic stance, and to learn the value of compromise and collaboration. In the case of Egypt, on the other hand, many Ikhwanis suggest that the wave of emigration to the Gulf in the 1960s and 1970s also led to a new ethos of activism, albeit one centered around much more conservative social values. While some scholars have proposed that at the individual level, experience in a secular democracy can lead to ideological moderation via the mechanisms of socialization, inter-group contact and political learning, such an argument can lend itself to Orientalist tropes, while also overlooking the fact that exile experiences are far from uniform. This begs the question: How does exile impact organizational dynamics, and does exile in democratic versus non-democratic countries effect the trajectory of an Islamist organization? The growing literature on migration and Islamist politics has focused either on the impact of exile on the grassroots versus the leadership of Islamist groups (Wolfe 2017), on ideological changes at the individual level (Grewal forthcoming), or on diasporic mobilization and political participation more broadly (Aboussi 2018). In contrast, this paper draws on contentious politics and organizational theory to focus on how the nature of immigration policies and the political opportunity structures in different countries impact organizational dynamics and ideological changes in Islamist organization. The empirical discussion investigates how the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Ennahdha reconstituted the organization in exile in the 1960s/1970s and 1990s/2000s respectively. The analysis draws on a variety of primary and secondary sources, including interviews conducted by the author with Ennahdha and Muslim Brotherhood members. The article suggests that at the organizational level, the impact of exile has less to do with the level of democracy and secularism of the destination country, and more to do with the ability of the organization to mobilize, the type of inclusion in civil society and political life that it experiences, and the cohesion or fragmentation of the leadership. The paper concludes with a discussion of policy implications for Western countries, and a reflection on what trajectory we can expect for the Muslim Brotherhood in the near future, based on its current developments in exile.