In the East it is the male who is dignified and even ceremonial.
Possibly that is why he wears skirts. I pointed out long ago
that petticoats, which some regard as a garb of humiliation for women
are really regarded as the only garb of magnificence for men,
when they wish to be something more than men. They are worn by kings,
by priests, and by judges. The male Moslem, especially in his
own family, is the king and the priest and the judge. I do not mean
merely that he is the master, as many would say of the male in many
Western societies, especially simple and self-governing societies.
I mean something more; I mean that he has not only the kingdom
and the power but the glory, and even as it were the glamour.
I mean he has not only the rough leadership that we often give
to the man, but the special sort of social beauty and stateliness
that we generally expect only of the woman. What we mean when we
say that an ambitious man wants to have a fine woman at the head
of the dinner-table, that the Moslem world really means when it expects
to see a fine man at the head of the house. Even in the street
he is the peacock, coloured much more splendidly than the peahen.
Even when clad in comparatively sober and partly European costume,
as outside the cafes of Cairo and the great cities, he exhibits
this indefinable character not merely of dignity but of pomp.
It can be traced even in the tarbouch, the minimum of Turkish
attire worn by all the commercial classes; the thing more commonly
called in England a fez. The fez is not a sort of smoking cap.
It is a tower of scarlet often tall enough to be the head-dress
of a priest. And it is a hat one cannot take off to a lady.

This fact is familiar enough in talk about Moslem and oriental
life generally; but I only repeat it in order to refer it back