Despite the growing presence and strength of Islamist parties in many Muslim-majority countries, their influence on the emergence of female politicians remains ambiguous. Islamist parties often employ patriarchal gender ideology that can discourage women from seeking political office. Yet, many Islamist parties have also successfully mobilized women in their cadres. In this paper, we argue that the influence of Islamist parties on women’s political rep- resentation is not uniform but differs for secular and pious women. While the incumbency of Islamist political parties can discourage secular women from seeking political office, it does not necessarily have the same effect on pious women. Thus, Islamist parties negatively influence emergence of secular female political candidates but do not pious female political candidates. To illustrate this dynamic, we examine how local level incumbency of an Islamist political party influences gender composition of candidates running for office in local elec- tions in Turkey. Between 2009-2014 the pro-Islamist AKP gained electoral victories in many municipal districts. We exploit sub-national level variation in AKP’s local incumbency to examine its impact on emergence of female municipal council candidates. Using a regression discontinuity design we show that AKP incumbency leads to fewer women running for polit- ical office. However, this effect is largely evident for women running for office under secular political parties. AKP incumbency does not negatively influence emergence of women running for office under religiously conservative parties.