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SIWA, Egypt, April 8 (Reuters) The young village girl flicked back her braided hair as she looked up at the approaching tourists in the remote Egyptian oasis of Siwa.

No more than 10 years old, the girl gazed confidently at the the visitors and silently gestured to them to enter the handicraft shop neighbouring her family's mud-brick home. But in a few years, when she marries, which can be around the age of 16 in Siwa, visitors will no longer see her face or even her deep-brown eyes.

After her wedding night, when she takes a black veil with distinctive embroidered red and orange stripes, a Siwan woman only goes outside with her face completely covered. Many women choose to wear the veil in Egypt, which in most parts of the predominantly Muslim country involves a headscarf that leaves the face showing.

In this desert oasis, 800 kilometres (500 miles) west of the densely populated Nile valley, the tradition is stricter. But veiling and other traditions among the Berber tribe at the oasis do not push women to the sidelines of society, experts say.

Nevertheless, in this highly traditional community women lead a very private life, even more so as modern utilities such as piped water provide services they would otherwise go outside to collect. The women also do not speak to outsiders.

Experts say that in Siwa women play an active role in village society and have practised some divorce rights long before their female compatriots in Egypt's bustling cities.

Abdullah Baghi, a social worker in the oasis, said Siwan women had the right to practice 'khula' - the Islamic precept of divorce at a woman's instigation - long before women in Cairo or elsewhere in Egypt enjoyed the same privilege.

DIVORCE RIGHTS

"It's enough that a woman says she does not want to live with her husband any longer to get divorced, sometimes in the same day taking all rights according to Islamic rules," he said.

Two years ago, Egypt's parliament passed a law based on 'khula' making it easier for women to obtain a divorce within months if they return their dowry and other gifts from their husbands and waive their right to alimony. Until then, women sometimes spent years in court without success.

Egyptian men, however, can get a divorce simply by filing a paper with the marriage registrar. He does not need to inform his wife.

Baghi said oasis traditions have long forbidden forcing a woman to live with a man she has decided to leave, and she need not even give a reason. "It's a matter of dignity," he said.

He said a woman needed to go to an elder from her own family to inform him of her decision, and the elder would then approach the husband's family who would tell the husband to divorce her.

"This Siwan tradition however was not always benign," said Ali Mearef, an English language teacher from the oasis, where the people speak the Berber Amazig language among themselves and Arabic with outsiders.

He said the divorce rate had once been high because girls were subject to arranged marriages at a very young age, and often found their husbands incompatible as they got older.

But Mearef said women were now marrying older, sometimes around the age of 20, because they were working themselves. This had helped to reduce the divorce rate, he said.

Women also remain a key part of the workforce in Siwa, an area of natural springs and palm trees surrounded by shifting desert dunes.

HOME CRAFT TO HANDICRAFTS

The women have turned their traditional skills of making their clothes and other domestic goods into a thriving handicraft trade for tourists, a key revenue earner in Egypt.

"Women trade, organise the farm work, make handicrafts plus take care of the children and take almost all the decisions concerning everyday life," said Aza Bashir, researcher at the social sciences centre in the American University in Cairo.

Bashir, who helps the women promote and sell their products, said increasing demand for their work has helped improve the women's status.

"Women are more active than men in the oasis. They direct small handicraft projects. They buy and sell and bargain and decide the wages of girl workers...There is a handicraft shop on almost every corner in the oasis," Bashir said.

Social worker Baghi said this status was not a new development. Unlike women in other tribal communities, he said Siwan women had inheritance rights like their city compatriots.

In other tribes, the woman's father, brother or uncle inherits her family's money and provides the woman with her daily essentials. "A wealthy (Siwan) woman can do whatever she wants with her money," Baghi said.

In the family councils, which settle family disputes, a woman's rights are also upheld, Baghi said. However, such family councils remain male affairs, as do larger tribal councils of elders, because elderly Siwan women tend to stay at home.

Baghi tells the story of one of his female relatives who complained to the family council after her husband beat her. The council ruled in the woman's favour and ordered the husband to pay compensation.

Once the quarrel was over, she returned the compensation to her husband. But when he again hit her, the council ordered him to hand over part of his olive garden to her. The settlement in her favour helped bring the couple back together, Baghi said.

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