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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.