They Will Lose Nothing but Their Veils

It has become a duty, or a necessity, to acknowledge that the Muslim woman in all the countries of the Near East has kept pace with her Western sister in progress. She has entered the schools and graduated from them bearing her higher degrees in medicine, in letters, in law, and in other branches. For this reason we consider that the difference between the two has become slight, and that time itself will suffice to remove it. And now that the Arab countries have become members of the world organization, it is incumbent upon us to study with understanding the potentialities of the Eastern woman, and especially the Muslim woman.

The Eastern woman — and I mean by that the Near East — is a gracious woman in the full sense of the word: she cares more about hospitality than she cares, for example, about the bill. She is, without doubt, individualistic and emotional; she has all the mental potentialities, and she knows how to work with diligence and energy. Nothing now separates her from her Western sister but barriers that will not be long in falling with time. She wears American and Parisian hats and uses Western cosmetics; and those Westerners who describe her as backward and degraded only prove their insufficient acquaintance with the condition of women in the Arab world. The reason for that goes back to the lack of adequate means of publicity. Everything that has been written about the East has aimed at a single purpose: to display all that is ugly and bad. But now that tourists and visitors have multiplied and the means of publicity have improved, the name of the Eastern woman will rise high in the West, and the West will learn that the East is not inferior to it in worth and consequence.

The Arab woman has felt the pressing need for a new kind of life suited to the time in which she lives. Therefore she has not held back, but has advanced with a firm step to cut a path for herself. She has understood that this demands of her a great effort, of which she never felt the need before. The Arab woman has felt that the twentieth century has requirements that must be fulfilled where she is concerned. She has understood that it is impossible for her to take part in political and economic progress unless she herself rises out of the mire into which she fell in the Middle Ages. And can woman take part in building a new and better world while she is shackled with the chains of ignorance, humiliation, and servitude? Woman has felt this; and every conscious citizen has felt it too, and all have risen to defend her rights, demanding that she be raised to the position befitting the girl of the twentieth century.

Our proof that this development has entered into the very substance of the Arab woman's life, and especially the Muslim woman's, is the spread of unveiling — that is, the lifting of the veil. This, in my view, is the first step toward progress. The degree of unveiling varies among the Arab countries. In Lebanon the proportion of unveiled women has reached a high level, and the American University of Beirut has become the principal university of the Arabic-speaking countries. In Lebanon there is a women's magazine, "The Woman's Voice," whose publication is supervised by an association of cultivated women, and in its monthly issues it treats general subjects that testify to a high intellectual level.

As for the percentage of unveiled women in Syria, it ranges between fifty and sixty percent. It is lower than that in Iraq. In Egypt we may say that unveiling has become general. Nor need we be afraid of the proportion of veiled women in the countries of the Near East, for most of them — if I do not say all — long for liberation and freedom; and the credit for that goes to the spread of the spirit of liberty and learning among the classes. In Egypt, for example, we see that elementary education is compulsory for both sexes; in Syria and Lebanon there are several government schools, but the successive governments have not yet decided to make elementary education compulsory. Yet that measure has had no effect, for fathers have understood the value of learning, especially in a century such as this one, and you see them racing to the schools to register their children.

And if we turn our gaze toward the Arabian Peninsula, we see that the women of Saudi Arabia are veiled, except for the Bedouin women among them. But that will not last long, especially now that the American oil companies have created new towns in the barren deserts. Modern civilization will not be slow to seep into the Hejaz, and thereby spread over the whole Arab world.

Thus we see that the Muslim woman has today become a Western woman in the full sense of the word; nothing distinguishes her from her Western Christian sister but the veil, which is no longer in any way binding, now that the Muslim woman has understood the meaning of her immortal mission: to build a new and better world.