Debates about and laws related to women’s rights in Tunisia have long been a key site for the production of the binary between the secular and the religious. In this paper, I examine the polemic around equal inheritance to shed light on the way conceptions of women’s rights and gender equality have been transformed through their articulation with the legacy of the revolution and a long history of socio-legal reforms. Although the question of equal inheritance speaks to the issue of socioeconomic inequality by calling for a more egalitarian distribution of patrimony and wealth, it has been enfolded into debates about modernity, secularity, and religious reform. I look at the way feminist religious scholars understand religious reform in relation to the question of inheritance and their efforts to align a divine text revealed in the premodern times with modern global human rights. Excavating an essence (al-jawhar), they reconcile two seemingly conflicting value systems through an act of re-interpretation and moral, ethical, political, and sociological engagement with the text as a living body of knowledge rather than as a rigid ossified remnant of the past, which is the view that both staunch secularists and Islamists on either size of the polarized divide take. This paper ultimately calls for a rethinking of the facile distinction between the secular and the religious that has for long framed analysis of the Tunisian revolution.