Although coverage of the Zan, Zindagi, Azadi movement in Iran has faded from the media spotlight in the United States, protesters continue to advocate for the expansion of women’s rights in the Islamic Republic. Unfolding in parallel with this activism are theological discourses among Iranian religious intellectuals (rawshanfikran-i dini) who have composed systematic critiques of the Islamic Republic’s patriarchal construction of Islamic thought. This paper contends that despite significant points of substantive coalescence among religious intellectuals on the content of women’s rights, irreconcilable methodological divergences persist on how a critique of patriarchy ought to proceed. The enduring question dividing Iranian thinkers has been: does a persuasive critique of patriarchy require a revision of widely held beliefs about divine revelation (wahy) and the nature of the Qur’an? This question was posed by the Muslim philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush in his controversial text Bast-i Tajrubih-i Nabavi (Expansion of Prophetic Experience) published in 1999. As scholars Ali Akbar, Abdullah Saeed, and Forough Jahanbakhsh note in their respective studies, Soroush argues that the conventional view that God dictated the words of the Qur’an to Muhammad would logically entail divine approval of certain patriarchal themes and passages of the Qur’an. Thus, a robust conception gender justice in Islam must, Soroush contends, be rooted in an alternative framing wherein the Qur’an was “divinely inspired” but not literally dictated by God. In Soroush’s view, the verses frequently cited by patriarchal thinkers are “incidental” (‘aradi) to the Qur’anic message and are trivial consequences of Muhammad’s historical context. While Soroush’s framework has attracted significant attention and support, other reformists such as Mohsen Kadivar argue that Soroush’s radical view of revelation (and the Qur’an) is ultimately unnecessary for a critique of patriarchy. Kadivar argues that the rational tools developed by Muslim jurists (fuqaha’) are sufficient to defend egalitarian gender justice and to undermine entrenched patriarchal interpretations of Islam. As Adis Duderija describes, Kadivar proceeds by drawing a distinction between the historical expression of Qur’anic values (during Muhammad’s era) and an egalitarian vision of gender justice derived from the objectives (maqasid) and spirit of Islamic law—all of this, he contends, without the necessity of rethinking divine revelation. This paper introduces and analytically contrasts the starting points, assumptions, and methodological choices illuminating how Soroush and Kadivar’s “compatible” critiques of patriarchy are in fact rooted in radically divergent methodologies that will animate and influence Muslim reformist debates in the years to come.