In recent years, the role of religion in shaping women’s lives has been interrogated in complex ways by feminist scholarship. Drawing on this literature, this seminar explores the discursive construction of ideal Islamic womanhood and its associated gendered subjectivities in the South Indian state of Kerala. It outlines the articulation of ideal womanhood in and through intra-community debates between the principal Muslim groups (‘traditionalists’ and ‘reformists’) in Kerala regarding the status of women in Islam. It traces the making of a discourse on the cultivation of ‘pious’ and ‘modern’ female selfhood and situates it in the context of wider socio-political changes among Kerala’s Muslims such as those wrought by Gulf migration and nationwide debates on the prospect of personal law reform since the mid-1980s. It shows how the ‘traditionalist’ and ‘reformist’ interventions in the field of Muslim women’s education, in particular, have converged in recent times with respect to propagating idealized conceptions of ‘pious modern’ female subjecthood. It notes that these interventions have, in turn, opened up the institutional spaces that allow Muslim women in Kerala to access higher education opportunities. In conclusion, the paper contextualizes ideal Islamic womanhood with respect to the making of modern Malayali identities and a dominant ‘gender order’ that spans religious groups, castes and communities in Kerala.