To date, scholars exploring Islamist women’s activism assert that women have been active participants in the construction of subcultures of piety in their respective societies. In addition, scholars note the manner in which Islamist women’s public work has challenged traditional-patriarchal gender practices in their communities, as well as stereotypes held about Muslim women (domestically and in the West). There is, I argue, another dimension to Islamist women’s activism that is of critical importance: an intellectual discourse that calls into question the conversion of Muslim women into a field of academic research. Questioning the grounds and terms of exchange between Muslims and their interlocutors, specifically the intermediary role of the researcher, Islamist women intellectuals present a critical theory of knowledge production that is of significance to the scholarly discussion of standpoint epistemology and self-reflexive ethnography. This paper will focus on the writings of Islamist women intellectuals in Turkey (including Nazife Sisman, Fatma Barbarosoglu and Cihan Aktas) whose writings collectively emphasize a dissonance between their self-perceptions and their representations in scholarly accounts. These activists trace this dissonance to the inequality that exists between researchers and themselves, particularly the manner in which scholars impose sociological categories that do not fully grasp the nature of Islamist women’s lived experience. Specifically, they cite the failure of scholars to properly portray the nature of the connection between Muslim women and God. This ontological connection, at the heart of public acts of piety including veiling and participation in Islamist movements, is lost in translation when converted into sociological language. In analyzing their critical theorizing of the unequal relation between the researcher and researched woman, I aim to contribute to the scholarly debate about the conditions of possibility of representing and interpreting the ‘other’ woman.