Religious authority in Islam, grounded in foundational Islamic values and principles, but devoid of a globally recognized, permanent regulatory structure, has been locally constructed (Kr?mer and Schmidtke 2006; Berkey 2001), and periodically reconfigured to create opportunities for women's access to that authority in different contexts at various moments in history. The recently institutionalized role of murshida (sing.), the title assigned to women preachers and spiritual guides, trained and certified to offer spiritual counseling and instruction in Islamic doctrine and practice to women in mosques and other institutions, is the most recent manifestation of this reconfiguration in Morocco. This new religious authority position for women constitutes one facet of a broader ongoing religious educational and administrative institutional reform program, which has also encompassed the appointment of women to advisory positions in the High Council of 'Ulama'. Both of these new positions comprise wielding religious authority based on a high level of knowledge of and a great capacity to interpret and apply the foundational Islamic sources, the Qur'an and the sunna of the Prophet, albeit under widely differing circumstances. Furthermore, both, unlike many of their historical and contemporary female counterparts in Morocco and elsewhere, entail official state recognition and remuneration equivalent to that of their male counterparts. Murshidat (pl.), in contrast to the women council members whose rank is superior, enjoy wider visibility and greater proximity to the general population, in particular to those groups benefitting from their services and upon whose recognition and acquiescence their authority ultimately rests. This visibility and proximity expand their potential for reshaping interpretations of Islam and understandings of women's right to exercise religious authority among Moroccans from a variety of backgrounds, but also increase the need, as well as the number of occasions and locations for staking their claim to that right. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Morocco in 2009, this paper investigates the logistics, parameters and contexts of murshidat's service and their techniques for negotiating their right to exercise religious authority in these contexts. It foregrounds the investigation with the contextualization of the murshida role within the wider framework of women's historical and contemporary access to religious authority in Morocco, followed by an examination of the incentive for and logistics of the murshida role and training module as one component of the larger religious institutional reform program, which includes a comparison with the role and training module of the murshid, the murshida's male counterpart.