The Islamic extremism that fuelled last week's suicide bombings in Casablanca poses particular problems for Muslim women who find themselves increasingly under pressure and at risk of attack over their modern lifestyle.
Already expected to conform to strict rules governing their dress and behaviour, women living and working in Morocco's economic capital fear the attacks could be a warning sign of a rising fundamentalist tide.
Twenty-year-old Jamila is a student from Sidi Moumen, a shantytown neighbourhood that was also home to the majority of the bombers who launched the May 16 suicide attacks, leaving 41 people dead including 12 attackers in a series of synchronised blasts across the city.
For more than a year she has faced regular harassment, insults and threats on the way from her family apartment to the college where she is training as a secretary.
"It started with people spitting when I walked past, insulting me and my family. Then, one day in March, I was threatened in broad daylight by a man with a knife," said Jamila, who asked for her real name to remain secret.
"He told me over and over: 'You are going to die because you are a sinner'," said the young woman, who has since abandoned her jeans and tee-shirt and taken to wearing a headscarf.
Across Casablanca there are frequent reports of women being insulted and harrassed because of their dress style.
"Recently in the centre of town, a group of men crowded around me calling me a prostitute because I was wearing a short tee-short and skirt," said Nadia Ziane, a young maths teacher.
"Such humiliations are becoming more and more frequent, in this city once thought of as liberal."
"Women need to fight to put an end to this madness," she said.
"In recent years, women here have been under terrible pressure to wear a headscarf and traditional Muslim dress covering their whole body, to observe prayers and give up studying and devote themselves instead to the home," agreed Yasmina Ramid, a volunteer in a local literacy centre.
"Methods range from 'advice' to physical aggression," she said, adding that the pressure sometimes came from within the women's own families.
"Coming from a brother or a husband, such pressure can be a way of taking out their frustration over a lack of money or work on their wives and sisters," she explained.
But in the majority of cases, it is "local hardboys turned preachers" who exert the most pressure on women, Ramid said.
The men themselves often have only a superficial knowledge of Islam but are using religion as a means to exert power, she explained.
And a neighbourhood such as Sidi Moumen, where extreme poverty and promiscuity combine with a lack of education, can become a breeding ground for fundamentalism.
Some observers, including Ramid, see the Casablanca bombings as the sign that Islamic extremism is on the increase, raising fears of more violence against women who fail to meet the extremists' standards.
"There are men here who no longer hesitate to kill in the name of religion," said Zeinab, a mother of four daughters who herself wears a traditional white headscarf.
"As far as I am concerned, religion is a personal matter, and a woman should only wear a scarf if she chooses to," she said.
Across the country, rights groups continue to campaign for better access to education and work for Morocco's women, 70 percent of whom are illiterate, and for the age of marital consent to be raised from 15 to 20.
Some Islamic fundamentalists consider these aspirations to be a violation of Islamic doctrine.