An important part of different MENA governments’ responses to the Arab uprisings of 2011, and similar mobilization in Iran and Turkey, was constitutional change. Whether to centralize power (Turkey), establish a new more democratic polity (Tunisia), or increase some civil rights to stave off pressure for broad political reform (Morocco), constitutions were a region-wide frame and focus for broader sociopolitical contestation in recent years. While MENA constitutions receive some general (e.g., Nathan Brown’s work) and recent (e.g., the two edited volumes of Rainer Grote and Tilmann J. Röder from 2012 and 2016) attention, transnational elements of constitutional promulgation remain under-theorized in general and in the MENA. Yet, constitutional drafters often look to foreign constitutional models, ideas, and texts for inspiration; many are explicit about their foreign borrowing. When implemented domestically, the meaning of such borrowed elements often seems to change. Scholars have theorized the transnational movement of ideas and norms, but the political processes through which the meaning of foreign constitutional provisions is refashioned lack broad study. Drawing on an examination of borrowed constitutional elements pertaining to religion-state relations in the MENA, and particularly recent constitutional changes in Morocco and Turkey, this paper builds on research in comparative constitutional law, socio-legal studies, and the politics of ideas to offer a more empirically-grounded account of MENA leaders’ deliberate efforts to refashion the meaning of borrowed provisions. Our main argument is that foreign constitutional elements are often embraced by politically embedded actors who, at the same time, treat those elements as “empty signifiers” in ways that allow their meaning to be politically transformed. Tracing the motivations that lead actors to engage foreign constitutional elements (even if they have no intention of transplanting their prior meaning), we highlight a need for more detailed general research by socio-legal area-studies experts on the MENA and other areas to make sense of both the international and the national dynamics that have shaped constitutionalism in the region, and may complicate pressures and efforts at countering the post-2011 renewed authoritarian tendencies prevalent in the region.