Women, secret Hamas strength, win votes at polls and new role

“We are going to lead factories, we are going to lead farmers,” said Jamila al-Shanty, 48, a professor at the Islamic University here who won a seat in Parliament. “We are going to show the world that the practice of Islam in regards to women is not well known.”

If Shanty’s prediction is true, the role of women will certainly not be along the secular Western lines followed largely, and with real strides for women, under decades of leadership by Yasser Arafat’s now defeated Fatah faction.

The model will be Islam: Hamas women wear head scarves and are strict about social segregation from men.

One of their role models has a pedigree particularly troubling to many in Israel. She is Mariam Farhat, the mother of three Hamas supporters killed by Israelis. She bade one son goodbye in a homemade videotape before he stormed an Israeli settlement, killing five people, then being shot dead. She said later that she wished she had 100 sons to sacrifice that way. Known as the “mother of martyrs,” she was seen in a campaign video toting a gun.

Now she is one of the six women who are Hamas legislators, elected on the party list. The election rules had quotas for women for all parties. She was swamped this week at a Hamas victory rally at the women’s campus at the Islamic University by young, outspoken, educated women who see no contradiction between religious militancy and modernity. Farhat, 56, who had not been active in politics, said her role should not be the only one for Hamas’ women. “It is not only sacrificing sons,” she said after the rally. “There are different kinds of sacrifice, by money, by education. Everybody, according to their ability, should sacrifice.”

The Islamic University shows the conflicting images of Hamas in relation to the women who strongly support it. A stronghold for Hamas, the university is split into two by sex. Hamas encourages education of these women. Sabrin al Barawi, 21, a chemistry student, said she had grown up with Hamas programmes for women: social groups, leadership courses, Koran classes. “It’s not only religious,” said Ahlan Shameli, 21, who is studying computers. “Before Hamas, women were not aware of the political situation,” she said.

In nearly two decades, the top tier of Hamas’s leadership has seemed very much reserved for men. But studies and results from municipal elections show women support the group in higher numbers than men. If the men’s most visible role has been fighting Israel, Hamas’s social programmes have attracted the loyalty of women.

Women “are the ones who take kids to clinics,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, professor of political science at Al Azhar University here. And during the elections, he said, Hamas mobilised these same women as if it had been “building up for this occasion for 30 years,” adding,“in Palestinian society, our values do not accept women to go out and campaign in the street. It’s really a new phenomenon, especially for Hamas.”

Reem Abu Athra, who directs women’s affairs in the Fatah youth wing, said that her party did not seem to understand how mobilised Hamas’s women were generally. She said that Fatah seemed to think it would naturally win the women’s vote, as the more secular party that has been in some ways a leader in the Arab world in rights for women. “Fatah took women for granted, and this is one reason it lost,” she said.

The questions now seem to be what role Hamas’s women will play, and exactly how that will be expressed in the rules of Islam.

—The New York Times