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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."