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How does a conservative Muslim population come to endorse the establishment of a secular state? This is one of the most intriguing and pertinent questions raised by the emergence of the Muslim nation-state in the twentieth century. If Islamic law has traditionally informed the politics of the Muslim world, we should expect Muslims of various cultures to be particularly resistant to the classically secular notion of the nation-state. Empirical reality, however, does not support this theoretical expectation: the twentieth century witnessed the articulation of a distinctively Muslim nationalism in the Middle East and South Asia. To explore this irony, I apply the concepts of political opportunity and framing from social movement theory to the cases of Turkey and Pakistan. The two countries have individually received significant attention for two very different brands of Muslim nationalism. In 1923, Mustafa Kemal established the explicitly secular republic of Turkey for the dominant community of collapsed Islamic empire. A quarter of a century later, Muhammad Ali Jinnah argued for a distinctively Muslim national identity in order to carve out a secular state for Indian Muslims. Where Kemal had constrained Islam, the Pakistan movement championed it. If an analysis of the political circumstances and choices of these individuals yields significant similarities in the dynamic of state formation, however, we have a richer account of secular politics can thrive on religious grounds. I set as our primary questions in each case: a) how did the contender gain access to power, and b) how did he successfully advance a secular agenda? In answering these questions, I argue that a specific configuration of changing institutional structures and political relationships opened a new window of opportunity to the contender, and that he then propped open this window by reframing a secular political vision in terms that resonated with his religious constituents. I then explore broad commonalities between the two cases (i.e., the West as both model and anti-model, political options discussed in the national discourse, opportunism, and legitimacy) in order to suggest a broader typology for Muslim nation-state formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]