No laws were declared. No presidential decrees. It didn't happen that way. A few words were gently spoken at the opening of a municipal laundry. Some jocular remarks about the pleasure of listening to Western music.
Already women had been deprived of the shelter of the veil. The fez could no longer be worn. Now the beautiful script that not even scholars completely understood was to be taken from them. Not that there were orders, but if one had dealings on any level with the government, then one must read and write the Latin characters.
The prize was literacy for all. A new start on a level field. In the streets and parks and buses men and women and children pored over papers and posters. Crowded at poster covered walls. And the people found the new alphabet so easy. No longer could literacy be the barrier to success. Now beggar children wrote the language - phonetically its true, but comprehensibly.
The scribes on the porch of Yeni Djami were mostly old. Their brains were hardened in the knowledge of the traditional script. They had survived on the inability of officials and even ministers to write and communicate in their own language. And now all that was gone. They were not stupid men, they too found the new characters seductively easy - but who would want their services in this new world?
``Not all will learn,'' the old scribes said, ``there will be those who cannot.''
The schools remained closed until all books were available in the Latin script and little girls with white socks and pretty dresses flocked with the boys to school and a new world seemed open to them. Even in far off Afghanistan the king saw what was happening and said this is good and made moves to revolutionize his own country and the mullahs and devout ones said not a word in public but a fear gripped them and they spoke among themselves. ``This cannot last,'' they said, ``our leaders are fools. This will not last.'' And they turned to their God for guidance.
And Zade the seal maker sat on the steps he had sat on for all but the first eight years of his long life and hunger chewed his entrails and there were no orders for his seals. He could not, could not defile his work by attempting to create beauty from the round and pointed ugliness of the Latin characters.
A week without food does strange things to an old man's mind. One morning as the first buses passed in the fading dark he took up a carving tool and a stone already prepared in better days. He saw something in his mind's eye. A beautiful design. The Latin characters well hidden in graceful scrolls.
Yes, he thought. This can be done.