In 1933, Muḥammad al-Ḥajwī (1874-1956), the minister of education in the French Protectorate and an avid reformer of Islam and Moroccan society, wrote a very long essay entitled “Girls’ Education does not Promote Unveiling.” In it, al-Ḥajwī encouraged schooling for girls, but insisted on women’s very limited access to the public sphere, arguing that a division of gender roles is needed for the progress and strengthening of the Muslim community even if it compromised equality. In this presentation, I analyze al-Ḥajwī’s text, while paying close attention to the changes he proposed in female education and the claims he made in order to justify the restriction of women’s rights and public visibility. I argue that in navigating his new world, al-Ḥajwī was conscious of Moroccan predicaments and European achievements, but also, wanted to conceive Morocco in national and Islamic terms. For him, the moral survival of his community was at stake and his reform project had to engage colonial policy and discourse, Islamic tradition and legal thought, and Moroccan custom and politics in order to fashion his vision for Morocco. Within the world he occupied, al-Ḥajwī’s modestly reformist vocabulary was decisive, even transgressive. In conceptualizing the colonial encounter, this paper seeks to offer an analytical framework that transcends the colonizer/colonized binary, typically framed in terms of cultural domination. By exploring relations of power within colonial Moroccan society and interactions between Moroccan society and the colonial state, my analysis demonstrates that Moroccan modernists did not merely emulate French ideas and standards. Instead, they articulated a complex and nuanced discourse intended to empower Moroccan society in the face of an invasive secular government, older forms of authority, and corrupt religious practices.