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Hamas, Women and Islam. Again?
By Islah Jad
Nurturing democracy, especially in the Middle East, is essential to halting terrorism…but when democracy fails we have to be prepared to use force.” (Dick Cheney, American Vice President, BBC, 24/04/05).
“The Bush administration believes the time is ripe for democratic progress in the Arab world, and the State Department ’s invitation to Arab women from a dozen countries and the Palestinian territories is the first of a series of initiatives designed to smooth the way.” (Elizabeth Cheney
www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63902-2002Nov3).
The above excerpts might fully represent the actual dilemma of Palestine in the wake of the coming to power of the ‘unwanted terrorists’ that American democracy is meant to fight. The power shift to the Islamic movement Hamas comes amid the ever growing literature on the region in Western books and journals and in speeches by Western politicians that can be summed up by the proposition that the source of terrorist violence lies in the intrinsic culture and religion of Arab-Muslim society. Accordingly, ‘surgery’ is needed and a forced and designed democracy and regime change become the driving notions for the actual American foreign policy in the region. Islam, Islamists and women occupy centre stage in this policy. This policy comes as an outcome of an ever growing bulk of knowledge the late Edward Said called “Orientalism,” that might explain the sudden interest of so many Western journalists in the fate of Palestinian women under Hamas. In this discourse, Hamas is portrayed as the ‘other,’ ‘traditional,’ ‘backward’ and the ‘out of touch’ with the modern world. This portrait of Hamas is not politically innocent and is value laded by old and new forms of “Orientalism,” if not outright racism that should not blind us from understanding the growing power of Islamists in the Middle East in general and in Palestine in particular.
Israeli Occupation, the Islamist Resurgence, and Hamas
The growing influence of Islamic movements in the Middle East is usually examined in the context of the state’s withdrawal from providing vital social and economic services to its citizens. This frame does not fit in the case of Palestine, where a sovereign nation-state never existed. However, the socioeconomic and political transformations produced by the Israeli occupation were important in undermining the secular PLO and accommodating the Palestinian Islamists. Hamas thus shifted from an exclusionary religious movement (mid seventies to late eighties) to a powerful rival and alternative to the secular Palestinian national movement represented by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA). The Islamic movement’s ability to shift to a nationalist position and broaden itself to exist nationwide was crucial for Hamas to reach wider constituencies, gain legitimacy, and expand its popular support. The conflation between Islam and nationalism was used deliberately by Hamas. Islam was “nationalized” and confined to the territorial context of Palestine; and Palestinian nationalism was “Islamisized.”
By emulating the secular and leftist political groups--and by competing with them--the Islamists learned how to adjust their appeal to attract a wider constituency. The Islamists in Palestine managed to build an impressive infrastructure of cultural, social, economic, and political institutions, which proved crucial in sustaining the Islamic movement.
The move from accommodating the occupation to full-fledged resistance through spectacular military actions (which gained wide popularity) was a turning point in the history of the Islamists in Palestine. Once established as a broad, popular national movement, the Islamic movement altered part of its structure to act as a legal political party beside its military underground organisation. The National Islamic Salvation Party (Khalas, 1995), and many other social and cultural organisations were an important medium for the Islamists to seek a more sustained and organized constituency and the eventuality of power sharing (and now control) through democratic means (such as elections).
Thus, the transformation of Hamas into a militant national resistance movement brought the old national ethos, which fused struggle, sacrifice and suffering invested with sacredness and inviolability back into the very core of the Palestinian national identity. Within this formation, any act detracting from the struggle is considered sacrilege, if not treason. This reconstruction of the Palestinian national identity goes against the PA’s attempts to establish a political identity around narrow interpretations of loyalty and gains that was lately plagued by corruption. Through struggle, women’s purity once again becomes a keystone of the ethos of suffering, sacrifice, and noble conflict: women’s immodesty dishonours the memory of the martyrs; women’s preoccupation with trivia and fashion at a time of sacrifice and struggle is an insult to the fighters for liberation; and women’s immodest dress and conduct unwittingly aids the enemy in its designs to corrupt the nation. Islamists also rail against the ethos spread by the work of women NGOs, which entails extravagant advertisements, conferences, high salaries, and donor funds (that is, profits) instead of sacrifice and suffering, while the occupation rages on unabated.
The growing popularity of the Islamists was crucial in compelling them to pay more systematic attention to recruiting and organizing women. In competition with the secularists and as a reaction to their stand on recruiting and integrating women to their organizations, the Islamists focused on women--particularly the highly educated--and integrated them by the thousands into their party’s (Khalas) structure at all levels.1
Thus, the rigid, formal division of labour, confining women to the domestic sphere as the reproducers of a “moral” nation (as was mentioned in Hamas’s Mythaq [Charter] of 1988), gave way to more open-ended interpretations of texts, enabling women to occupy a wider space in the public arena. This shift was not haphazard; it was the outcome of the work of Islamist women within the movement, against the background of women’s achievements, which were irreversible by the Islamists. It was also the outcome of pressure exercised by secular feminists who critiqued the Islamists’ fixing of the gender order by instituting the immutable rules of shari’a law.
While Hamas’s gender ideology rests on religious idioms, it is nonetheless possible to demonstrate that it is in continuous flux. This is due to ordinary socioeconomic factors and, as I proposed, a reaction to the challenge presented by the discourse with feminist nationalist and secular women, as well as Islamist women’s activism within the movement. In order to understand the gender agenda of Hamas, factors that link gender and nationalism must be taken into consideration. Hamas’s gender ideology cannot be separated from the Western and colonial use of gender and its rivalry with the other nationalist groups and, to a lesser extent, scriptural texts.
Islah Jad is Assistant Professor of gender and political science at Birzeit University. She is one of the founders of the Women’s Studies Institute at the University and one of the founders of the Women’s Affairs Technical Committee, a national coalition for women. She published many works on Palestinian and Arab women’s political participation. She is currently co-editor for the forthcoming Arab Human Development Report.
1 From 1997, Hamas used to hold an annual women’s conference in which a variety of issues were put on the agenda. These conferences were given great importance by Hamas leaders in which they participated whether by their physical presence or by presenting analytical papers. In the Islamist women’s conference of 2003, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin announced the formulation of an Islamist women’s movement that put under its umbrella and pooled together all sorts of Islamist women’s activism. This movement put some efforts to unify all women’s activism, including that of secularist nationalism, but did not succeed so far. The Khalas party itself was later dissolved and its members were publicly acting as part of Hamas. | |
