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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.