El Moursli was born in Salé in 1954. She obtained her first degree in mathematics at Lycée Descartes, Rabat. She had to argue the case then with her father to be a girl who would leave conservative Morocco to study further. She says that Neil Armstrong 's achievements and a high school teacher inspired her. She went to study in Grenoble in France where she obtained her doctorate in physics at the Laboratoire de Physique subatomique et cosmologie which was part of the Joseph Fourier University. In 1982, she returned to Rabat.