I first met Ms. Lamrabet last fall, in her office at the Mohammedan League of Scholars, a stately building decorated with traditional stucco molding, tiles and wooden latticework. The league is Morocco’s pre-eminent official institution of religious scholarship, and Ms. Lamrabet’s presence within it was in and of itself remarkable.

In her many books and public speeches, Ms. Lamrabet argues for a progressive, contextual reading of the Quran. She doesn’t claim, as Islamists do, that Islam already gives women all their rights. She argues that it could, if it was stripped of centuries of misogynist interpretation by male scholars.

When Ms. Lamrabet rejects practices such as polygamy, unequal access to divorce or a husband’s authority over his wife, she either shows there is no textual basis at all in the Quran for these practices, or she argues that the historical context needs to be taken into account when interpreting what the text says.

With regard to inheritance, Ms. Lamrabet and others note that women were allotted a smaller share on the assumption that male relatives would provide for all their material needs. That is no longer the case; many households in Morocco today depend largely on a woman’s income. So Ms. Lamrabet argues that the law should be re-evaluated on the basis of the Quran’s original spirit of justice and fairness.

But apparently making this argument, repeatedly and publicly, was too much for the religious establishment in Morocco.

Ms. Lamrabet says her goal is the “deconstruction of religious patriarchy.” She argues from a religious basis because, she told me, religion is the No. 1 weapon used against women in her country today. She wants to furnish women with arguments with which to reclaim their religion, and to reject inequality and discrimination in the name of Islam.

But she is also critical of the way women’s rights have been deployed by Western powers to justify colonialism, military intervention and attacks on her religion. Her arguments will displease both Muslim conservatives who see feminism as an immoral, unnecessary foreign import and those who believe women’s subjugation is a unique and unchangeable feature of Islam.