Educated women in towns who usually work in offices or as teachers are
more exposed to Western influence. At the same time, religious leaders call
on them to respect the principles of their religion. With growing Islamiza-
tion, most Egyptian women started about thirty years ago to don Islamic
dress, either through social pressure or in order to demonstrate an inner
attitude, or a combination of both. In 1994, the government forbade the
wearing of the Islamic headscarf by young girls in public primary schools,
but in all other schools and the country’s universities Islamic dress is worn
by the great majority of girls, especially so in Upper Egypt, where hardly any
Muslim woman not wearing Islamic dress and head cover can be found. More
than eighty years after Hoda Sha’rawi led the protest march in the course of
which the early feminists threw their veils into the Nile, her granddaughter
complained that the whole of the Arab world today accepts the socio-religious
order established on the Arabian Peninsula and tries to imitate it. Women in
Saudi Arabia, with its theocracy of orthodox Islam, are denied basic human
rights, but they are mostly rich and have the chance of a life of luxury, while
Egyptian women are often dependent on husbands who can hardly feed their
families (see Höber-Kamel 1995: 57). In terms of the challenges of modernity
and the high educational standard many Egyptian women have attained, and
for the sake of the complex development of the country,