veiled4allah: the women of Hamas

The Guardian has an interesting article about the new women MPs from Hamas and their concerns:

Ask Huda Naeem how she intends to use her influence as a newly elected MP for Hamas and she ticks off a list of wrongs done to women in the name of religion. Forced marriage, honour killings, low pay and girls being kept out of school are her priorities for change in the Palestinian parliament. That is when she is not preparing her 13-year-old son to die in the fight against Israel.

"A lot of things need to change," she said. "Women in Gaza and the West Bank should be given complete rights. Some women and girls are made to marry someone they don't want to marry. This is not in our religion, it's our tradition. In our religion, a woman has a right to choose.

"As a woman and an MP, there are areas I want to concentrate on but that does not mean we have forgotten our struggle for our homeland, and preparing our children to die when the homeland calls for it."

Mrs Naeem, a 37-year-old social worker at the Islamic University in Gaza City and a mother of four, is one of six women elected to parliament on the Hamas ticket in the Islamist party's landslide victory last month. They will be sworn in when the new parliament opens today.

If they can achieve these goals, they will have done something worthwhile for ordinary Palestinian women, and I wish them luck in that endeavor.

However, it should be kept in mind that this is still Hamas:

Then there is an issue unlike any other. The most controversial of the newly elected Hamas women is Miriam Farhat, known as the "Mother of Martyrs" after losing three sons fighting Israel. Her campaign video included a scene of her bidding a son goodbye before he died killing five people in a Jewish settlement. Mrs Farhat said later that she wished she had 100 sons to sacrifice as "shaheeds" - Muslims who die in a holy war. Mrs Naeem, who named her youngest child after a Hamas leader assassinated by Israel, says there is nothing illegitimate about suicide bombers. "[The Israelis] bomb our neighbourhoods with high explosive. What kind of weapons do we have against F16s?" she asked. But would she encourage her own 16-year-old son to die killing Israelis? "Yes, as soon as his homeland calls for it. I am preparing him to be a shaheed," she said.

Earlier, Lenin's Tomb pointed to another woman allied with Hamas:

Janette Khuri, a 62-year-old Christian, became the first woman mayor of a major West Bank municipality when she was elected by a majority of her 15 fellow councillors. Khuri, a member of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), triumphed over the ruling Fatah faction’s candidate Ghazi Hanania when the three Hamas members voted for her.

Lenin comments:

A secular Marxist woman of Christian background? Now, wouldn't you have expected her to be stuffed into a burqa and told to wash the dishes? A thought occurs: perhaps the first thing that Palestinian movements are concerned about, religious or otherwise, is obtaining their freedom from this brutal and suffocating occupation.

In unrelated news, another British newspaper, the Telegraph, profiles Afghanistan's only female warlord.

My point in posting this? Just that people don't always fit neatly into the boxes we would like to put them into. Muslim women fully committed to Hamas's aims and tactics can still want to work to improve women's rights in their society. Christian Marxist women may choose to work with Hamas - and Hamas with them. Few groups or people are entirely evil. We can condemn where they go wrong (as I do) and also recognize when they do good things and encourage them to give up on the wrong and work to increase the right.