In 2004 Morocco reformed its old Personal Status Code, which regulates marital relationships, child custody, and inheritance. The king placed the reformed Family Code firmly within the development discourse, with a clear aim and commitment to further reforms heeding societal evolution and preparedness. As such, the king asserted that the new Code is not “flawless” but “an ijtihad effort, which is suitable for Morocco at this point in time.” The notion of gradualism is perhaps the most salient guiding principle when analysing the Code or else the reforms may be dismissed as falling short of the feminist expectations and the international praise much the same as the 1993 reforms. Conflicting ideas as to what it means to liberate women based on the utilisation of not necessarily compatible legal frameworks––those of the Islamic legal sources and international human rights conventions, specifically CEDAW, UDHR, and UNCRC––by the activist communities resulted in the law to reflect this somewhat schizo backdrop. If anything, the current Code demonstrates the pragmatism of the king to placate the conservatives, while at the same time recognising the legitimacy of feminist demands. This paper will analyse the ‘unwritten,’ the implicit character of the Code’s stated goals–– “doing justice to women, protecting children’s rights, and preserving men’s dignity”––because it is these, rather than the stipulations per se, which undermine the overall result of the reform. Moreover, one of the less researched questions about this reform is whether reformed laws and accompanying women’s rights discourse have affected social reality and if they had in what ways. I shall discuss people’s attitudes towards two overarching development topics, those of women’s rights and gender equality, based on my own ethnographic data and that of various national and other surveys conducted in recent years. The aim of this paper is to challenge the dominant discourse on the failure of the Code as being one of lack of education, ignorance about the law, and general disempowerment of women, to argue that it is the law itself, non-existent welfare infrastructure, patriarchal bargains, and the issue of poverty, which need to be taken into account when discussing the status of women’s issues in Morocco.