Veiled Universe

To find the prettiest girl in a nation whose succulent peaches and sour lemons are often wrapped alike in the veils and Mother Hubbards of Islamic modesty is no easy matter. But the founders of Pakistan's Beauty Pageant Association, whose mission was to find a Miss Pakistan shapely enough to carry away the crown of Miss Universe at Long Beach, Calif., are a hardy lot. A group of 15 Westward-looking businessmen and emancipated society women (twelve of them Moslems), they devised what seemed at first to be a prejudice-proof set of rules for the conduct of a proper Islamic beauty contest. Only a panel of female judges would see each contestant in a bathing suit; the girls could appear before male judges only when properly clad in veil and head-to-toe burka. The beauty sponsors even promised that when Miss Pakistan reached California, she would be in a good position to say a few words in favor of Pakistan's claim to Kashmir.

Then the bomb burst. Whatever the rules in Pakistan called for, it was learned that in California the contestants would have to appear, clad only in bathing suits, before men, women and a TV audience of millions, "to have their physical appearances assessed and judged as in a cattle market," as the Times of Karachi put it. "A disgrace to the Eastern social order and conventions," proclaimed the head of the powerful Brotherhood of Mullahs. In the face of the uproar, the contest promoters gave up. "We are back in Victorian error," sighed one.

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