Word: purdah
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Young men in Moslem Pakistan have a thin time of it. In many parts of the country, women are still kept in purdah, and before marriage Pakistani boys seldom meet a female who is not a close relative. With rare exceptions there is no teen-age dating, there are no mixed parties, and the sexes are segregated through grade and high school. But at Karachi University, nearly 5,000 of the 16,000 students are girls-emancipated girls who no longer hide beneath the traditional sack-like burka that shrouds devout Moslem women from head...
...responding to President Gamal Abdel Nasser's program for the economic emancipation of Egyptian women. Within six months most of the girl conductors had married either drivers or passengers. Today only three are left on the job. Though Cairo's Moslem women have not been kept in purdah in modern times, the new chance for Arabs coming from stricter regions to meet respectable women casually is apparently an overpowering experience...
...There are only 93,000 Maldivians-nut-brown, peaceable folk who have been under the wing of the British Empire since 1802. The world has largely passed the Maldives by. But six years ago, after 800 years of Sultanate rule, the Maldives became a republic. Their first President abolished purdah, designed a Mother Hubbard national costume for Maldivian women, and pushed a road-building program for the island's three cars-which all happened to be his. The Maldivians soon...
...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...
...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...