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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.