Fears for women after Hamas victory

JERUSALEM - Naila Ayesh, a secular married woman who frequently goes about Gaza in Western clothes, has already noticed a subtle change since Hamas' election victory last week.

"You hear kids saying to you, 'Your head isn't covered now but it will be. You can drive now but you won't be able to later'."

She relates, too, how one woman friend described how she told a neighbour that her child attended Gaza City's American school. "What, you send her to the crusader school?" the shocked neighbour replied. "Why don't you send her to the Sheikh Ahmed Yassin school [named after the Hamas founder, killed by the Israelis last year], where she can learn languages as well as the Koran?"

Ayesh, a staunch Palestinian nationalist, added: "All this happened before but it's been happening more since the election."

Ayesh and her husband have served severe terms in Israeli prisons for their politics. But her worries about the rippling internal effects of Hamas' victory go further than these relatively trivial omens.

For Ayesh runs the Women's Affairs Centre - a brave oasis of progressive feminism in fiercely conservative Gaza.

In its heartland, the Islamic faction and its allies in the mosques do not warm to many of the centre's causes; it has so far campaigned in vain for a shelter for battered women here because of fears it will encourage women to leave their husbands.

Its work ranges from an experimental programme introducing Islamic University women students to the law, human rights and job opportunities, to campaigning for a family law which will protect women from abuse and custody rights after divorce, and which it fears will not be a priority for Hamas.

"I am not worried about the laws already in place because that requires a two-thirds majority," said Ayesh.

"But I am worried about the legislation which has not yet gone through.

Hamas is very far from being the Taleban. It strongly supports women's education, is generally opposed to "honour killings", and some of its candidates in the recent elections supported women's shelters.

Its spokesmen have also been at pains to stress that they do not intend in the foreseeable future to impose its religious ideology, including its long-term commitment to sharia law - on the Palestinian Parliament.

But Ayesh is concerned that the more congenial public message sometimes conflicts with the deeply-held belief of its new parliamentary members.

For example, she notes that Mariam Farhat, the well-known "Mother of Martyrs", is a new Hamas PLC member.

Her election video showed her helping her own 17-year-old son to prepare for an attack which ended in his death and that of five Israelies and she said in an interview that her first parliamentary campaign would be for a law requiring all Palestinian women to wear the traditional hajib garment.

To Ayesh, Farhat's later disavowal of the interview was unconvincing. But, in any case, she expects the change to be cultural and gradual rather than legislative.

"Hamas will not do this directly but they will use other respected figures, for example in the mosques."

Ayesh is the first to acknowledge that the huge vote for Hamas reflected a deep desire to "punish" Fatah for its deep failures over the past decade.

And while she has heard accusations that Hamas deployed cash enticements to more ill-informed voters to back their candidates in what was in fact an admirably secret ballot, she says there are at least as many reports of Fatah doing the same.

But she also said women she encounters through her work reported another potent message on the doorsteps from Hamas campaigners, often themselves women.

"The women said they were told,'If you do not vote Hamas, God will punish you at the end."

- INDEPENDENT