Simply put, Islamist women have taken center stage in Tunisian politics. Of the 49 women who won seats in last year’s constituent assembly elections, a remarkable 42 of them belong to the center-right Islamist party Hizb An-Nahdha. How will these women govern? How did they become involved with the party? Where do they stand on women’s rights, and why are so many young, highly educated women joining the Islamists? Sadly, few researchers and journalists have bothered to ask. In a polarized ideological narrative pitting secular feminist activists against regressive, bearded Islamists, Islamist women are rarely seen as actors. This paper analyzes the history and implications of Islamist women’s involvement in Tunisian politics through an ethnographic lens. Interviews conducted with fifty-one An-Nahdha women activists—rural and urban, married and unmarried, students and working professionals—form the bulk of this paper. Special emphasis is placed on ethnographic work conducted with young women in university contexts, who— despite nearly four decades of activism in the Tunisian Islamist movement— have been written off as irrelevant anomalies by the vast majority of observers. This paper sheds important light on their participation and recruitment strategies, arguing that the ongoing presence of educated and vocal young Islamist women has posed a central challenge to ‘secularist’ notions of state-imposed modernity in Tunisia. After tracing the nature of women’s involvement in An-Nahdha, I turn my focus towards Tunisian Islamism and women’s rights developments in a comparative context. Why haven’t Tunisia’s egalitarian “lessons” (such as quotas for women on party lists) diffused to Libya and Egypt? How have state-imposed secularism and the top-down instrumentalization of women’s rights shaped Islamist women’s participation across the three countries? This section of my paper pulls from first-hand field interviews conducted with rank and file women and Islamist party leaders in Libya and Egypt. I focus mainly on three centrist Islamist groups: Tunisia’s An-Nahdha Party, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood. Interviews with Salafi women in Tunisia and Egypt will be discussed for comparative purposes as well. By engaging Islamist women as actors, this paper challenges the assertion that Islamist women somehow lack political agency. It argues that Tunisia, while seemingly an irrelevant outlier, is actually a critical case study for developments concerning Islamist mobilization and women’s political participation throughout the MENA region.