Tunisia: Shudder at the Knees

Tunisia’s Habib Bourguiba has long been the Arab world’s loudest cham pion of women’s rights. In 1956, when Tunisia won its independence, Bourguiba abolished polygamy, made it harder for men to get divorces, and gave women their first, real legal rights. He looked on approvingly as the Moslem veil began to vanish, and he has shown no objection to the new garb of girls who parade gracefully through the narrow streets of Tunis in brief, airy frocks. But one has to draw the line somewhere, and last week Bourguiba did—just below the knee—by banning the thigh-high miniskirt.

“How many times,” he shuddered in a nationwide television address, “have I had to seat women whom I received at audiences next to me, rather than facing me, in order to avoid general embarrassment? Nothing should compel us to suffer such trials. It puts the nerves of men and the modesty of women to a severe test.”

He may also have had the modesty of women in mind when he deplored the conversion of the old Bey’s Palace in nearby Carthage into a swinging, open-air nightclub called the Zéro de Conduite (Zero for Conduct), a favorite of Tunisia’s go-go set; on opening night several ministers of state showed up, including Habib Bourguiba Jr., Tunisia’s Foreign Minister. Now, according to Bourguiba Sr., it is only a bohemian den of iniquity where youngsters “practice a shameful exhibitionism in morbid and degrading dances.” With that, Bourguiba ordered the Zéro closed.