Over the past decade, Islamic political movements have been increasingly recruiting women to decision-making positions despite the fact that the ideology they espouse often opposes women from assuming positions of public leadership. My ethnographic work on religious women’s activism in Iran and Turkey helps explain this unexpected trend by shedding light onto Islamic women’s organizing as they mobilize public support and strategically interact with male elites in their demands to increase women’s access to political decision-making. In particular, I highlight the role that a number of high-ranking Islamic women with close ties to the ruling elites played in pressuring their male party leaders to address women’s political underrepresentation. Women’s close ties to the ruling elites consist of both familial ties, such as being wives or daughters of key political and religious figures, as well as more formal ties that have evolved due to women’s long-term devotion to the Islamic movement or religious learning. I demonstrate that close ties to the leaders enable Islamic women to leverage a form of ‘internal criticism’ as a strategy to enhance women’s political rights and status from within the Islamic movements. Through in-depth interviews with influential Islamic women’s rights groups in Iran and Turkey—namely members of Iran’s Zeinab Society (Jameh Zeinab) and the Islamic Women’s Coalition (etelaf-e Islami-e zanan), and Turkey’s women activists of the pro-religious Justice and Development Party (JDP)—this paper sheds light onto the factors that have led to Islamic women’s increasing outspokenness against discriminatory attitudes of their male leaders. It argues that despite women’s religious tendencies, many Islamic women activists deem public challenges against patriarchal attitudes of their male leaders more effective than continued emphasis on egalitarian interpretations of religious discourses. For instance, in Iran, a coalition of key Islamic party women across the political spectrum denounced the discriminatory words of high-ranking clerics who oppose women’s access to leadership positions. In recent elections, this coalition succeeded in the appointment of the first ever-female minister in 2009, and lobbied key elites to increase the percentage of female parliamentary candidates. Similarly, in Turkey, high-ranking JDP women activists publicly threatened to resign from the party to protest the party leaders’ unwillingness to increase headscarved women’s access to the parliament. This paper demonstrates that ‘internal criticism,’ in which women from within the Islamic movement challenge the gender discriminatory practices of male leaders was an effective approach to enhance women’s political status.