Word: moslem
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...reasons for Charles de Gaulle's electoral triumph in Algeria last November was his giving Algerian women the vote. The woman who took most advantage of the offer was Néfissa Sid Cara, a schoolmarm who is the sister of a well-known pro-French Moslem politician. Running for the French National Assembly, she allowed no men to attend her meetings, and she had but one plank to her platform. "We want French law," one weeping woman told her. "My husband left me." "My husband took away my sons," said a veiled woman. "You must give them back...
Despite more than a century of French rule, the Moslem women of Algeria had few privileges and fewer rights. Having promised to respect Moslem customs, the French blinked at the practice of marrying off twelve-year-old girls (the right of djebr), often to men they had never seen. In classic Koranic fashion, husbands could get rid of a wife simply by saying, "I divorce you. I divorce you. I divorce you," or by tearing up the marriage papers ("breaking the cards," in Algerian slang). A woman had no legal rights over her children and could be cut off without...
...women; she consulted religious authorities and legal experts; she agitated in Paris. Last week Néfissa's reforms, having been approved as one of the last of 300 decrees issued before the De Gaulle government's four-month emergency powers expired, became law. Only the Moslem Mozabite sect, whose 40,000 members are not quite ready to be yanked out of the Middle Ages, was exempted from it. For the rest of Algeria, compulsory child marriages will be forbidden, and courts will rule on divorce, custody over children and alimony. Though Néfissa's bill...
...countryside the struggle between Communists and their opponents has not been resolved. Matters came to a head in the holy city of Najaf when party militants tried to turn a Soviet embassy official's courtesy call on a Shia Moslem leader into a Communist rally. Outraged, Moslem monks and youths, holding aloft copies of the Koran, fought a pitched battle against them. Scores were hurt...
...Western Region of Nigeria who began as a barrister, has gradually emerged as a statesman of integrity in a land where charges of corruption are the political order of the day. His fellow Prime Minister to the more populous but primitive north, the Sardauna of Sokoto, is a haughty Moslem nobleman out of another century. Nigeria's other regional Prime Minister, the demagogic, U.S.-educated Nnamdi ["Zik"] Azikiwe of the Ibo tribe to the east, lives under a cloud as a result of a financial scandal in his administration. So rent by divisions (250 tribes speaking 400 languages), Nigeria...