The idea of deducing legal rulings in Islamic law, or ijtihād, as well as the qualifications of the person who practices ijtihād, known as the mujtahid, has been a complex issue among Muslim ‘ulamā’ for centuries. Many Muslim ‘ulamā’ and Western scholars have maintained that the gate of ijtihād was closed after the formation of the Islamic schools of law (madhāhib). The title of mujtahid was therefore impossible to attain. Moroccan intellectual Al-Khamlīshī maintains that the strenuous conditions put forth by some of the Sunni jurists to qualify an individual to become a mujtahid actually contributed to the demise of ijtihād. Al-Khamlīshī singles out the famous Sunni jurist Muhammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfī‘ī for his work al-Risāla, in which he outlines several conditions that must be met for an individual to qualify as a mujtahid. These qualifications, according to al-Khamlīshī, were proven to be unachievable and stood as myriad obstacles in creating new generations to reform the old Islamic fiqh. This essay shows that, despite the extremely strenuous set of qualifications set in place for an individual to become a mujtahid, through the writings of al-Khamlīshī, Moroccan women penetrated men’s domain in Islamic family law, breaking the long-standing monopoly men held therein. Most importantly, for the first time Moroccan women were publicly practicing ijtihād—a legal process that was once not only considered the realm of men exclusively, but was also seen as impossible to attain by anyone after the establishment of the Sunni Islamic schools of law in the tenth century.