Our task is the identification of the reluctivity $\nu\,{=}\,\nu(B)$ in $\vec{H}\,{=}\,\nu(B) \vec{B}$, ($B\,{=}\,|\vec{B}|$) from measurements of the magnetic flux for different excitation currents in a driving coil, in the context of a nonuniform magnetic field distribution. This is a nonlinear inverse problem and ill-posed in the sense of unstable data dependence, whose solution is done numerically by a Newton type iterative scheme, regularized by an appropriate stopping criterion. The computational complexity of this method is determined by the number of necessary forward evaluations, i.e. the number of numerical solutions to the three-dimensional magnetic field problem. We keep the effort minimal by applying a special discretization strategy to the inverse problem, based on multigrid methods for ill-posed problems. Numerical results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.