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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.