A Quiet Revolution (7 page)

In these last decades of the nineteenth century and in the opening years of the twentieth, the political ideas of Europe—democracy, equal- ity, meritocracy—were proving to be as seductive and winning as were the dazzling products of technology. To people living in societies where autocracy, class stratification, and gender and ethnic and racial privilege (of Turks over Egyptians, as well as of British over Egyptians) had been the fixed rules of existence, the very ideas of democracy, equality, and meritocracy were tremendously exciting, exhilaratingly opening up new horizons and possibilities. The desire that Egypt become a society in which democracy, equality, and meritocracy were realities was intense and wide- spread, as memoirs from the era, such as Salama Musa’s, make clear.

The liberals who were on cordial terms with Cromer were already busy, as we saw earlier, devising a program that they hoped would lead Egypt to independence as a democracy free of both colonialism and au- tocratic government—whether of the local khedive or of the more dis- tant Turkish sultan. Egypt, their hope was, would be a democracy that, while not perhaps granting women equal status with men, nevertheless would encourage and nurture women’s capacities—both for their own sake and so that they might produce and raise better men.

That was the dream. This dream, encapsulating the desires for com- prehensive social and political change on multiple levels—in matters of governance, class and gender, ethnicity and race, and opportunity— came to be epitomized for many by the act of unveiling.

By the last years of the nineteenth and the opening years of the twen- tieth centuries, the sight of unveiled Western women going about their business—tourists traveling up the Nile to the temples of Luxor, European wives residing in Cairo, independent Western women earning their living as teachers and governesses—were becoming familiar sights in Egypt.

Cities, too, were changing. Department stores opened in Cairo and Alexandria in the
1890
s, and women of the upper classes now went out to shop instead of having goods sent to their homes to select from. The presence of European women in the streets also changed the possibilities

for local women. In earlier decades only poor women peddling food or vegetables would be commonly seen in the streets, and men would shop for their female relatives. At the turn of the century an American visitor

reported that groups of women were now commonly seen shopping in the bazaars, in contrast to what she had observed on a visit in the
1860
s.
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Egyptian women increasingly appeared in the streets with ever lighter veils, and soon with no veils at all. Upper-class women traveling

to Europe frequently chose not to wear veils while in Europe, and soon they were casting them off as soon as they boarded ship. One visitor in the early
1900
s described how women “shrouded up to the eyes” would

arrive at the Cairo railway station and, at Alexandria, would board the steamer in such dress. Then they would appear the next morning “un- veiled, bareheaded, clad in the latest Parisian traveling fashion.”

Tramways had begun running by the late
1890
s, and schoolgirls,

sometimes without veils, could be seen waiting at tram stops to board the “women only” compartments on their way to or from school. There was a growing number of schools for girls, including missionary schools, and some forbade veiling. One teacher at the American missionary girls’ school in Luxor, which initially had mostly Christian students, recalled that the end-of-year exam, which required girls to appear in public with- out veils, had at first been an ordeal for the (presumably Christian) girls, who found themselves having to appear in public “for the first time in their lives with their faces uncovered.”

Whether to veil or not became a burning subject among women

—Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. They wrote to the many women’s jour- nals that began appearing in this era, asking for advice. One woman wrote to say that she had a “dear friend” who “thinks as I do that the veil has no meaning in this age and she wants to unveil as I have, but timid- ity and respect for custom prevents her from doing this.” The writer had “tried very hard,” she explained, “to help her overcome her feelings,” but was unsuccessful. She was now writing for advice on how to persuade her friend. Women were thus experimenting with dress and fashion for their own reasons, deciding for themselves what meaning the veil held, and whether, indeed, the veil had “no meaning in this age.”

Unveiling would become ever more clearly the emblem of an era of new hopes and desires, and of aspirations for modernity: of the possi- bility of education and the right to work for both women and men, and of equal opportunity and advancement based on effort and merit instead of inherited privileges be it of class or race.

Increasingly, too, unveiling became a metaphor for all of these hopes, on both the public and personal levels. A newspaper founded in
1914
, for example, took the name
al-Sufur
(Unveiling), because, ex- plained its editor, “women are not the only ones who are veiled in Egypt

. . . we are a veiled nation.” By taking the name
al-Sufur,
he continued, the newspaper was declaring its endorsement of “complete unveiling, progress and reform in all domains.” As the nation moved in
1919
to-

ward hoped-for independence from the British, a young Egyptian artist produced a sculpture that he entitled
The Awakening of Egypt.
It showed Egypt as a young peasant woman lifting her veil. The sculpture would subsequently be reproduced and prominently installed as a monument in front of the Cairo rail station.
36

The hopes and longings of the young women of the day who boldly took the step of setting aside their veils are encapsulated in the story of one young woman of that era, Nabawiya Musa.

Musa, born in
1886
, was the daughter of an Egyptian army captain

who died before she was born. Musa’s mother, surviving on her hus- band’s military pension, chose not to remarry in order to devote herself to her two children. Musa had to battle her mother (which she did with her brother’s assistance) to continue her education beyond primary

school. She graduated in
1906
from the Teacher Training Program at the Saniyah School and began teaching at the girls section of the Abbas School. Here she discovered that male teachers received almost twice the pay as females. She asked why and was told that it was because they had secondary school certificates in addition to teaching diplomas.
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Musa therefore decided to sit for the secondary school certificate exam. Since no schools were available to train women for this exam, she had to prepare for it on her own. This she did even though she learned that the Ministry of Education (controlled, as were all government de- partments, by the British) did not allow women to sit for this exam. Nev- ertheless, and in defiance of Douglas Dunlop, the British advisor on education, she presented herself for the exam and passed with flying col- ors. Her success was widely reported in the press, which was jubilant that an Egyptian woman had acquitted herself well in the exam and had tri- umphed in the face of unjust British rules.
38

Musa would receive a salary raise, thereby becoming the first “woman teacher to receive a salary equal to male teachers.” She would go on to become a prominent educator, activist, and writer, taking on throughout her life issues relating to women, education, and work. She continued to take political stands against British and local government injustices, including stands that would land her in prison.

Musa, who was twenty-one when she sat for the exam, stopped wearing the veil two years later. She described a spirited exchange she had one day on the tram with a woman who criticized her for not wear- ing the veil. Musa’s own garb, she pointed out in her response to the woman, was discreet, modest, and unrevealing, whereas the “ornaments” and attributes of the woman criticizing her were entirely in plain view, even though she wore an evidently flimsy veil.
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All of Musa’s stances and actions would not have been possible in the premodern and precolonial eras. Standing up for her rights, chal- lenging the government, taking exams that placed her on a par with men, and demanding equal pay became possible only with the coming of modernity. And all of these issues are part of the meaning of unveiling in this era. For men as well as for women, unveiling—as the editor of
al-Sufur
suggested—was emblematic of the desire and hope for a new social and political order, for the promise of modernity. It was emblem-

atic of the will to stand up to injustice in all its forms—British colonial- ism and racism, autocratic rule, a rigid class system, a restrictive gender system. It was emblematic, too, of the will and commitment to work for a new political and social order: for a world remade.

Anbara Khalidi, a young Palestinian woman who would become a prominent activist, traveled to Egypt in
1910
and was exhilarated to see how many women were unveiled. She was “delighted” she wrote, at the appearance of Egyptian women, who were “more emancipated than us”

and saw the world “with unveiled eyes.”
40

But women themselves were divided on the question of veiling. One woman, for example—Fatima Rashid, the wife of Muhammad Farid Wajdi, owner of a noted nationalist newspaper—supported women’s education but opposed unveiling. She wrote in
1908
, “This veil is not a disease that holds us back. Rather it is the cause of our happiness ... and we shall guard it carefully.... [It] is our symbol and the symbol of our Muslim grandmothers.”
41

Another woman, a journalist writing in
1910
, noted with surprise the ever-increasing numbers of women who were now to be seen in the streets without veils. Where had all these women come from, she asked. “Did they fall from the sky?” This rapidly spreading phenomenon of un- veiling was evidently as astonishing and alarming to her as the appear- ance of women in veils here in America would be for some of us more than eighty years later.
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Members of the ulama—the class of religious scholars—were em- phatically not pleased with the unveiling trend. In
1914
they published a recommendation that the government discourage the trend by imposing a prison sentence or at least a fine on women who appeared without veils.

But the desire for unveiling and all that unveiling stood for was already sweeping onward.

At the start of World War I, the British deposed the Khedive Abbas Hilmi because of his pro-Ottoman sympathies, installing Khedive Hussein Kamel in his place. Using Egypt as a base during the war, the British req- uisitioned food and farm animals for their armies and compelled the peasantry into forced labor—digging ditches in Palestine, for example. It was a time of great hardship for many Egyptians, and a time during

which resentment against the British presence intensified. “Whatever friendly feelings the fallahin [peasantry] might have harbored for the British presence in Egypt,” wrote al-Sayyid Marsot in her history of Egypt, those feelings now had “totally evaporated.”
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Nationalist fervor and calls for an end to the British Occupation continued to grow throughout the early twentieth century. The British now implied that Egypt’s cooperation during the war would result in in- dependence at the end of it. But when the war ended, independence was not granted. Riots and demonstrations then broke out across the coun- try, and the British agreed to abolish the Protectorate and declare Egypt independent. However, that independence was hedged with conditions that would allow the British to continue to exercise control over key areas of the country’s government, conditions that in effect rendered Egypt’s independence essentially “well nigh void.”

Still, political parties were formed and the apparatus of electoral democracy put in place; elections were held, and the Umma Party, led by Saad Zaghloul—who had been part of Cromer’s Egyptian circle—won, and Zaghloul became prime minister. A constitution was drawn up guar- anteeing freedom of speech. The new government of this newly “inde- pendent” country had “all the trappings,” as al-Sayyid Marsot put it, of a “modern, democratic, representative government.”

The ensuing decades would be times of tremendous turbulence in the Middle East. Following World War I, the European Powers drew new maps of the region, essentially creating a new Middle East comprising several new states out of the Ottoman Empire’s former territories in the region: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia. In addition,

the British government laid the groundwork, with the Balfour Declara- tion of
1917
, for the establishment of Israel.

With the installation of the new “democratic” government of Egypt, the surviving members of the circle of modernizing politicians and intel- lectuals and their supporters and protégés held positions of great social and political power—much as they had under the British, especially when compared with their pan-Islamist opponents. The ideas they had em- braced and promoted as to the proper (and Westernizing) direction in which the country should move, including with respect to unveiling, were now unambiguously the ideas of the government and ruling elite.

In reality, unveiling was by now steadily becoming the norm, par- ticularly among the younger generation of urban middle- and upper-class women. By
1928
women had begun attending the country’s main uni- versity in Cairo after a government decree issued in
1927
permitted them to do so. Thus the ideas that had been daring and innovative at the end of the nineteenth century were rapidly becoming the reigning norms and assumptions of the middle classes.

All of the baggage that had come in with these ideas—as to the “backwardness” of veiling, and of unveiling as sign of advancement— was by the time of my own childhood, the
1940
s, simply part of the nor- mal assumptions and self-evident “truths” of the day. Pious as well less