THE MOSLEM WORLD: Beyond the Veil

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"Our religion," says one of the Emir's former concubines, "says that a married woman should not go out." There are women on the streets of Kano in northern Nigeria but, as the saying goes, they are the young, the old, the poor, and the harlots. Most educated Nigerian men have no interest in emancipating their wives. "If you marry an educated woman, she wants to go out and work." explained a librarian working for the British Council. "If you let her, people talk against you. If you stop her, you have to buy her more things to keep her at home."

One Nigerian girl who has broken with tradition is 21-year-old Zeinab Wali, a slim, golden-skinned girl of Tripolitanian Arab stock. Zeinab married a young government official when she was 17. Normally, she would have gone into kulle, the Nigerian equivalent of purdah. Instead, she returned to school (something few if any Nigerian women in Kano had ever done before), took her teacher's certificate and now spends her time demonstrating her conviction that a woman can be a good Moslem without vegetating in purdah.

An indefatigable worker, Zeinab Wali organized Nigerian Girl Guide and Brownie units, preached subtle emancipation propaganda on a weekly radio program called "Women's Chapter," and actively encouraged other women to be less timid and go for drives in her blue-black Vauxhall sedan. To women friends walled up in purdah in their compounds, she slips secret messages about the beauties of the world outside. Her description of birds and flowers so fascinated one friend, the wife of a Cabinet minister in Kaduna, that the wife screwed up her courage, presented Zeinab's letter to her husband and demanded to be allowed to go outside and see for herself. The result: a compromise. The minister allowed his wife to go outside—but not until five in the evening, when it was still light enough for her to see, but well past the sinfully glaring brilliance of midday.

Zeinab Wali has been ably aided by her progressive husband. "Polygamy," Isa Wali declared in a newspaper article, "was never meant to be a permanent feature of society ... In the 20th century there is no justification for it."

Equal Time. As the industrial revolution finally reaches Moslem underdeveloped lands, polygamy is dying out by sheer force of economic circumstances. For it is the Prophet's admonition that a man must provide equal economic benefits for each of his wives. A young Malayan wife explained how she kept her husband from acquiring a second wife. Said she, giggling: "I just demand more of him, in every respect. Then I remind him that the Koran requires him to treat each wife equally."

In those families where polygamy is still practiced—particularly among the rich—the women often take a sophisticated view. In Manhattan, a slim, exquisitely gowned wife of an Eastern diplomat argued that taking a second wife was no different from the Western practice of taking a mistress. "The problem of the man who wants more than one woman is as old as humanity. We don't think the Western nations have found a really better solution."*