Beyond the Veil

(See Cover)

And tell the believing women to lower their gaze and be modest, and display of their adornment only that which is apparent, and to draw their veils over their bosoms, and not to reveal their adornment save to their own husbands . . . or their slaves or male attendants who lack vigor, or children who know naught of women's nakedness . . .

Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other.

--The Koran

In the Moroccan coastal city of Tangier, frenzied crowds cheered hoarsely as a majestically robed figure on a white horse rode past to receive their homage. From housetops and behind latticed windows, veiled women shrilled their "ayee, ayee" of adulation. The man on horseback was His Majesty Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef, and the purpose of his visit that hot, sunny April day in 1947 was to give sustenance to a dream that has since become reality: freedom and independence for his country.

The next night, in the patio of Tangier's casbah, a lissome girl in a shimmering blue silk Lanvin gown, milk-white turban and evening slippers gracefully ascended a dais piled high with priceless Oriental carpets, and turned to face her audience. Younger men in the audience eyed appreciatively the girl's dark eyes, her rich red-brown hair and cafe au lait complexion. But many orthodox Moslem traditionalists just stared wide-eyed, stunned and aghast at the appearance in public of Her Royal Highness Princess Lalla Aisha, eldest daughter of His Majesty the Sultan--17 years old, unveiled and unashamed.

Root Out & Reject. To Westerners, the words she spoke sounded less than incendiary. "I know how many bad customs are attached to our society," she said, "how many prejudices are fastened on us. We must root out and reject them, and in that ambiance of modern culture to which present-day life leads and calls us irresistibly, it is essential that the women of Morocco participate ardently and usefully in the life of the nation, imitating in this respect their sisters of the East and West, whose great activity contributes to the welfare of their countries."

But Morocco's women recognized these words for what they were--a call to shake off an age-old bondage fastened on them in the name of Mohammed and perpetuated by generations of mullahs (teachers). Taking courage from this display of feminist leadership and example from the royal family itself, thousands of women all over the country forthwith cast aside their veils and began talking briskly of emancipation.

In the decade since, the rising surge of nationalism has brought freedom to some 230 million of the world's estimated 400 million Moslems, establishing new nations across half the world's girth. From Morocco to Indonesia, the drive of Islam's women toward emancipation has kept pace with the drive of their countries toward independence. In Pakistan, where ten years ago cars were heavily curtained to protect women from the vulgar gaze of men, hundreds of still devout women now drive themselves, unveiled, to work or on their social rounds. In Tunisia, where in 1947 polygamy was accepted practice, a husband landed in jail last April for having defied the law and taken a second wife. In Egypt and Lebanon, Turkey and Syria--where for centuries the life of a woman was described proverbially as "from the womb of her mother to the house of her father, from there to the house of her husband, from there to the tomb"--women shop veilless in the markets, dance in nightclubs, train as nurses, drive cars unescorted, even vote. In the last ten years, Islam's women have achieved a greater change in status than in the preceding ten hundred.

Jasmine & Satin. In the Moroccan capital of Rabat last week, a strapping black African sentry, resplendent in scarlet uniform, white puttees and black-tasseled bicorn, paced slowly back and forth in front of the brass-studded door that leads into Princess Lalla (Lady) Aisha's green-tiled villa. In the courtyard, a slender fountain tinkled in a garden dominated by four dome-shaped hibiscus bushes; from delicately wrought arbors came the sweet, heavy-bodied scent of flowering blue jasmine.

Inside, Princess Aisha sprawled on a yellow satin divan and recalled the Tangier speech. "I was not nervous," she said. "I was simply unknowing. I didn't realize the import of what I was saying. His Majesty had asked me to speak. It was only after I spoke that I realized, I who lived so freely, what things were really like in Morocco, and what would happen because I had spoken."

What happened immediately was characteristic of the troubled journey of Islam's women into the Moslem world. As soon as Aisha and her father left the city, wizened old Sidi Mohammed Tazi, the mendub of Tangier, ordered all women in Western dress arrested. Those who resisted had their clothes torn from them publicly by Tazi's police. "What is good for princesses," said the mendub, "is not good for other women. If our womenfolk put on Occidental clothes, they will try to become completely Occidental. They will drink, wear bathing suits and dance, and they will go to the beach by night and sleep with men on the sand."

But the drive toward emancipation that Aisha had launched was not to be denied. Letters from Moroccan and other Moslem feminists poured in on her; so did delegations of well-wishers and counsel seekers. She larded her speeches and pronouncements with action--some of it high, heady and maverick for a royal princess. She drove her own car, rode horses, bareheaded and astride, showed up frequently at the public beach in Rabat for a plunge in the surf. Aisha became a national heroine just by existing.

The French forthwith forbade her to speak in public, correctly identifying her as one of those dangerously progressive forces encouraging nationalism. So did feudal old El Glaoui of Marrakech, who barnstormed the country flourishing a news picture of Aisha in a bathing suit, lolling on a beach with her brother, Prince Moulay Hassan. This was the kind of outrage that Sultan ben Youssef was bringing upon them, he cried. El Glaoui did not rest until he got the French to send the Sultan, Aisha, and the rest of the royal family (two wives, two other daughters, two sons, a gaggle of concubines and attendants) into exile.

Shame & Triumph. Aisha hated her two years in exile (in Corsica, and later, Madagascar). But while she was away, her star waxed ever brighter in the Moroccan firmament. Moroccan women pinned pictures of the Sultan and Aisha on their walls, slipped back and forth between French and Moroccan lines smuggling arms and revolutionary tracts beneath their flowing djellabahs. Thirteen-year-old girls signed up in clandestine cells of the Istiqlal Party. And in a Moroccan version of Lysistrata, thousands of Moroccan women denied themselves to their husbands for two years for fear of bringing into the world children born under the shameful reign of the Sultan's French-appointed successor, Ben Moulay Arafa.

When at last the French were forced to bring the family back from exile, Aisha's return was celebrated with almost as much jubilation as that of the Sultan himself. As a shrewd and progressive monarch, her father (who will visit the U.S. later this month) had planned Aisha's role from the start as a complement to his ,own political struggle. The Sultan placed his children's education in the hands of capable private French teachers. "I want you to treat my children like other children," the Sultan said. "Call the girls by their title (i.e., Lalla), but punish them if their work is bad." The teachers took the Sultan at his word. If marks were low, the Sultan took away privileges such as attendance at palace movies, sometimes administered deserved slaps to the royal bottoms. Like her brothers and sisters, Aisha was haughty, impish and possessed with enormous--if sometimes disoriented--drive and energy. The children used to drive their father's councilors to distraction on the phone, imperiously summoning them to listen to their latest phonograph records.

Black Skirts, Pink Toenails. Today, at 27, Princess Aisha is a deep-breasted, wide-hipped, volatile young woman who can look one moment as serene and majestic as Nefertiti, and the next as disorganized and disheveled as a college girl at exam time. Her villa regularly swarms with visiting girls and women; when Aisha entertains, its marble walls ring with female giggles and pop tunes (some Aisha favorites: Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong) like a U.S. girls' dormitory. Aisha has abandoned the slacks and blue jeans which once raised orthodox eyebrows in pre-independence Morocco, but still favors slim-cut black skirts with sport blouses or wool cardigans. She uses pink lipstick, paints her fingernails and toenails to match, wears her thick hair usually in a chignon. Her voice is full, throaty and resonant. She speaks fluent French, is less sure of her English, chain-smokes Kool cigarettes in a long, gold holder.

Most mornings in Rabat she rises well before 9, enjoys a set of tennis, or a prebreakfast ride on one of the 15 horses in her father's stable. Lately she has been cutting down on exercise. "When I exercise I get hungry," she says, "and when I get hungry I eat, and when I eat I get fat."

Five mornings a week she drives out to her office in outlying Rabat, where she directs Morocco's Entraide Nationale, the administrative headquarters of all Moroccan welfare agencies, and fountainhead of Morocco's drive against illiteracy. Says Aisha: "This position lets me touch the lowest levels of society--the fellahin, widows and orphans alike. I work here not just to supervise, but to participate in the lives of the people. By touching evil at close quarters, I can learn how to cure it."

In addition to her job with Entraide Nationale, she jams in a tight schedule of public appearances with her father in his tireless drive to fashion a modern nation out of Morocco. Paradoxically, Aisha has old-fashioned ideas about marriage. She says: "I will marry the man His Majesty chooses for me. I have complete confidence in him. Love will come after marriage." An unusual statement for a leading feminist, but then Aisha is no ordinary woman: she is a royal princess and, in the last analysis, no more free to choose her own mate than Britain's Princess Margaret.

Living Creed. As symbol and leader of Moslem woman's struggle for freedom, Princess Aisha has a special authority that derives from the fact that her father, King Mohammed V (the title he assumed this year), is spiritual leader of Morocco's 9,000,000 Moslems as well as their temporal ruler. For that struggle has also meant a head-on clash with the mullahs of Islam, who insist that the Koran, as the literal word of the Prophet, is subject to no modification or review whatever. The King has dedicated both himself and his daughter to the proposition that the Koran is a living creed, that if Mohammed were alive today, he would be shocked at the uses to which his words are being put by rigid Moslem reactionaries.

Mohammed was a reformer as well as a moral philosopher. By the standards of his times, he was in fact an emancipator of women. He actually outlawed some of the excesses that existed before his time, e.g., unlimited polygamy, the infanticide of girl babies,* and there is evidence that he would have pressed for further freedoms for women, had the social and political climate of his time permitted it. One reason for his permitting men to take four wives was probably the fact that since his legions put their male enemies to the sword, Mohammed felt responsible for the surviving women (he commanded his followers to spare women, children and trees).

"Over the centuries," says Morocco's Minister of Justice, "false interpretations of Islamic law have loaded society with social abuses of many varieties. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the situation of Moslem women. Islam makes woman equal with man, with the same rights and the same duties. It gives her the right to choose her husband, and if it allows polygamy, it submits it to severe restrictive conditions which are difficult to fulfill."

Sword in the Sun. But in the 1,300 years since the sword of the Prophet first flashed in the hot desert sun of Arabia, most advances in the freedom of Moslem women have been painful and inchmeal. Qasim Amin, whose tracts (circa 1900) were one of the first attempts to promote the emancipation of Moslem women through mass circulation of printed material, was threatened with assassination. In Turkey in 1906 Sultan Abdul Hamid II surprised his Circassian odalisque as she was examining his jeweled pistol. She asked what it was. He showed her by pumping three bullets into her breast. In 1911 famed Iraqi Poet Jamil Khawy was convicted of sedition for favoring female emancipation. In the 1920s, a daring Beirut woman had sulphuric acid hurled in her face for wearing a transparent veil.

But the old barriers are crumbling, and Morocco's Princess Aisha is not alone in the assault; beside her are women such as Pakistan's handsome Begum Liaquat Ali Khan, widow of the nation's first Prime Minister; Lebanon's doughty Ibtihage Kaddourah, head of the 500,000-strong Pan-Arab Women's Federation; Iran's darkly lovely Queen Soraya; and dedicated Dr. Saniyya Habbub, first Moslem woman physician in Lebanon. Others in the van--however unintentionally--include Egyptian Pop Singer Om Kalthoum and Belly Dancer Samia Gamal (who recently was photographed, clothed, undulating through a barbed-wire entanglement on behalf of Gamal Nasser's propaganda section).

Pakistan today has two women ambassadors (to Brazil and The Netherlands,). Egypt has two women Members of Parliament. In Lebanon, a Moslem woman is a candidate for a judicial post. "The young Tunisian woman of today,'' declared the weekly L'Action recently, "dyes her hair several shades of blonde, wears it in a pony tail, knows how to type, drives a car and wears slacks. She is interested in politics, follows a diet and admires the late James Dean. She lives among her family, rubbing shoulders with prehistory. Her mother belongs to the Veil Age, her grandmother to the Stone Age." Moslem women in tropical Asian nations have, with a few exceptions, never been as cribbed and confined as their Middle Eastern sisters. In Malaya there are still a few isolated villages where the women are kept as heavily veiled as Ku Klux Klansmen. But in Singapore, Malay Movie Star Maria Menando lolls around her house listening to the latest jazz records, clad in shorts that would arch eyebrows in Miami.

No Life Without Wife. In India an estimated 50% of some 20 million Moslem women still cling to some form of the veil (sometimes just a bit of cotton draped over the head), but their numbers are dwindling fast. Says slim, bespectacled Mrs. Bilquis Ghuffran, a social worker who discarded her veil two years ago: "Everything will be all right in a generation." Her husband agrees: "Life is not complete if one is to leave one's wife behind in a veil." In Malaya the Sultan of Pahang was ruled out of the running to be the new nation's first Paramount Ruler because of his marital didoes (TIME. Aug. 12), and across the Strait of Malacca, when Indonesia's President Sukarno took a third wife, he touched off vehement, widely publicized feminist demonstrations. In the more cosmopolitan Moslem cities such as Rabat, Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul and Karachi, unveiled women have long since ceased to be a novelty. In Turkey the veil was lifted some 30 years ago under the late great Dictator Kemal Ataturk, and in Iran under the late Reza Shah.

Why Write? Of all emancipation problems, education is the most pressing. Millions of Moslem women are illiterate, and see no need to be otherwise. "Why should my daughter go to school?" demanded one traditionalist Indian mother. "She need not learn to read and write. Her husband will always be by her side. Then to whom should she write a letter?" But such objections are fast yielding to the demand of the young for knowledge, and the determination of the emancipators that they should have it. In Morocco the government has reduced illiteracy an impressive 10% in the two years since independence. In Tunisia's two years as a nation, the number of girls attending schools has increased tenfold. Ten years ago there were only five women's colleges in Pakistan; now there are 25, including medical and law schools. This drive for education has sharply divided generations. Observed one Moroccan educator: "If a girl is 15 and living in the city, chances are she's literate and unveiled; if she's 35, chances are she's veiled and illiterate."

The evolution has not proceeded evenly, and in places like Saudi Arabia and Yemen it has yet to start. King Saud's wives and concubines are transported in air-conditioned Cadillacs with special one-way glass to guard them from prying eyes.

Chains & Max Factor. One of the most striking victories in the emotional tug of war between the past and the future has taken place in Pakistan, which ten years ago was one of the most feudalistic Moslem areas in the world.

In the first days of independence, extremist Moslem traditionalists in Lahore and surrounding areas grabbed unveiled women, shaved their heads and spat upon them. Shocked by these indignities, a group of progressive army officers began using their own unveiled wives and daughters as decoys to catch the fanatics. Begum Khatidja G.A. Khan is Deputy Minister for Social Services in West Pakistan. Says she: "The mullahs cannot make time stand still. We must be affected by the changing world." Said a Karachi newspaperman last week. "The Pakistani male has had it--from all four wives." When in 1954 then Prime Minister Mohammed Ali took a second wife, irate women stoned his car. Throughout the country, women are stepping out into a bright new world of universities and industry, of monthly paychecks and partnership in the home, of planned parenthood and Max Factor makeup. In the red-light districts of some larger cities the veil, instead of being the hallmark of respectability, is now worn chiefly by harlots as protective coloration.

Veils & Cadillacs. In other areas, there is uncomfortable compromise. Along the blazing coast of the Persian Gulf, in the oil-rich sheikdoms of Kuwait, Bahrein and Oman, are some of the most splendid private homes that imported U.S. and European architects can provide. Air conditioners purr in every room, doors slide open at the touch of a button. But the voice of the Prophet is still heard and obeyed throughout the land. When all the girls in a school in Kuwait rebelliously burned their shroudlike abas, the Sheik of Kuwait was shocked, made it a crime to appear in public without them.

In Kuwait rich husbands and wives may arrive at parties together in their air-conditioned Cadillac, but they separate promptly. The women repair to the haramlik, remove their abas, and spend the evening chatting and sipping soft drinks clad in the latest New York or Paris fashions. The men go off to the salamlik to dine, exchange stories and fret about the price of oil. When the party is over, a servant notifies a woman guest that her husband is ready. She dons her veil and shroud, thanks her hostess and departs without ever seeing her host. But next day she may slip out in her car, doff her aba as soon as she is beyond sight of the town and take the wheel herself for a drive to the beach.

Through a Lattice. Among the least emancipated are the uncounted millions of Africa's "Black Moslems." By no coincidence, they are also the least developed politically. In Nigeria most Moslems are so strict they regard the rest of their co-religionists except the Saudi Arabians as backsliding apostates. Women are not even allowed in the presence of a judge; they must speak through a lattice in the wall to a court attendant, who relays their statements to the court.

"Our religion," says one of the Emir's former concubines, "says that a married woman should not go out." There are women on the streets of Kano in northern Nigeria but, as the saying goes, they are the young, the old, the poor, and the harlots. Most educated Nigerian men have no interest in emancipating their wives. "If you marry an educated woman, she wants to go out and work." explained a librarian working for the British Council. "If you let her, people talk against you. If you stop her, you have to buy her more things to keep her at home."

One Nigerian girl who has broken with tradition is 21-year-old Zeinab Wali, a slim, golden-skinned girl of Tripolitanian Arab stock. Zeinab married a young government official when she was 17. Normally, she would have gone into kulle, the Nigerian equivalent of purdah. Instead, she returned to school (something few if any Nigerian women in Kano had ever done before), took her teacher's certificate and now spends her time demonstrating her conviction that a woman can be a good Moslem without vegetating in purdah.

An indefatigable worker, Zeinab Wali organized Nigerian Girl Guide and Brownie units, preached subtle emancipation propaganda on a weekly radio program called "Women's Chapter," and actively encouraged other women to be less timid and go for drives in her blue-black Vauxhall sedan. To women friends walled up in purdah in their compounds, she slips secret messages about the beauties of the world outside. Her description of birds and flowers so fascinated one friend, the wife of a Cabinet minister in Kaduna, that the wife screwed up her courage, presented Zeinab's letter to her husband and demanded to be allowed to go outside and see for herself. The result: a compromise. The minister allowed his wife to go outside--but not until five in the evening, when it was still light enough for her to see, but well past the sinfully glaring brilliance of midday.

Zeinab Wali has been ably aided by her progressive husband. "Polygamy," Isa Wali declared in a newspaper article, "was never meant to be a permanent feature of society ... In the 20th century there is no justification for it."

Equal Time. As the industrial revolution finally reaches Moslem underdeveloped lands, polygamy is dying out by sheer force of economic circumstances. For it is the Prophet's admonition that a man must provide equal economic benefits for each of his wives. A young Malayan wife explained how she kept her husband from acquiring a second wife. Said she, giggling: "I just demand more of him, in every respect. Then I remind him that the Koran requires him to treat each wife equally."

In those families where polygamy is still practiced--particularly among the rich--the women often take a sophisticated view. In Manhattan, a slim, exquisitely gowned wife of an Eastern diplomat argued that taking a second wife was no different from the Western practice of taking a mistress. "The problem of the man who wants more than one woman is as old as humanity. We don't think the Western nations have found a really better solution."*

Even in the most advanced areas, Moslem woman's emancipation is not yet complete. Moslem husbands are still reluctant to send their wives to male doctors, and Moslem women are reluctant to go. Though girls have increasing voice in their choice of husbands, most defer to their father's wishes. Even the most progressive Moslem men seldom invite even close friends to meet their wives, particularly non-Moslem friends. At the American University of Beirut and Beirut College for Women, modern young Moslem girl students wear blue jeans, go water skiing, do the rock 'n' roll, and behave just like U.S. coeds. But the past is still with them. Their fellow male students complain that they cannot get dates. "I just want somebody to take to the movies," said one student last week. "Would you marry a woman who had been to the movies with someone else?" asked a friend. The boy thought for a moment, and then replied: "Well, no. I guess I wouldn't."

By Consent. "After Morocco became independent," said one Western diplomat, "the enthusiasm of the women was almost frightening. They tore off their veils, shouted themselves hoarse, whenever Laila Aisha appeared. Now they seem to be nearing the middle way."

Princess Aisha prefers the middle way. Like most of her counterparts in other Moslem nations, she preaches and practices evolution, not revolution. In a recent, speech Aisha said: "To emancipate herself, woman must first of all know herself well. Her evolution, however rapid one might want it to be, must not be a brutal surgical operation, a rupture with the past. The emancipation of woman must be done by her consent, not by her submission." Aiming for that middle way, Aisha and her co-feminists are pushing adult education. "We fear the development of conflict between mother and daughter if the daughter faces West and the mother faces toward the old way of life," explains one, citing the Arab proverb: "Educate a man, and you educate a single individual. Educate a woman, and you educate a family."

Morocco's Ministry of Justice is working on the draft of a new divorce law that will strip Moroccan men of the right to shed their spouses simply by repeating "I divorce thee" three times, and bring the law more nearly into accord with Western-type procedures. Polygamy, a delicate subject since the King himself has two wives, will probably be so ringed with further restrictions that it will become for all practical purposes impossible.

Four Women, Two Veils. In the office of Radio Morocco, the country's government-run station, four young Moslem women sat at their desks one day last week. All wore skirts, high heels and jangly jewelry. When the office closed at 6:30 p.m., two of them powdered their noses and left for home without more ado. But the two others swathed themselves dutifully in djellabah and veil; they were bound for families which did not object to their leaving the house, but demanded adherence at home to the customs of old. Says Princess Aisha: "The veil itself is not important. What is important is that a woman has the right to wear it or not, as she chooses."

In their journey beyond the veil, the women of Islam have traveled far; they have perhaps still farther to go, and to some the pull of the past is still stronger than the push into the future. But the doffing of the veil is more than a simple feminine gesture. It signalizes, and is almost necessary to, Islam's emergence into the fuller economic life of the 20th century. "That old life," says Lebanon's Dr. Saniyya Habbub, "was without responsibilities. Women had no liberties. Liberty entails responsibility. But it is its own compensation."

* An early convert to Islam, Othman ben Affan (A.D. 574-656) has chronicled his own practice of this custom before Mohammed outlawed it. Ben Affan was burying his own daughter alive. As he was covering the child with earth, some dust was thrown up on his beard. The daughter, her arms still free, reached up to wipe the dust from her father's face; he proceeded with the grisly burial. Later, in describing the incident," he said: "It was the only time in my life that I ever shed a tear."

* The storied seragli of Scheherazade and The Arabian Nights are gone. In Algeria's fabled city of Ouled Nail, source of the erotic danse du ventre that is known in a pallid version to the West as the belly dance, the Ouled Nail girls are taking to Coca-Cola and French frocks, demanding that their traditionally lazy men get out and work for themselves.

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