get our your burkas

Women of Gaza fear for their freedoms under new religious regime
By Donald Macintyre
Published: 30 January 2006
Naila Ayesh, a secular married woman who frequently goes about Gaza in Western clothes, has already noticed a subtle change since Hamas's election victory last Wednesday.
"You will hear even 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 a woman friend described telling 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 late Hamas founder] where she can learn languages as well as the Koran?" Ms Ayesh added: "All this happened before but it's been happening more since the election."
Ms Ayesh is a staunch Palestinian nationalist - both she and her husband have served severe terms in Israeli prisons for their politics. But her worries about the rippling internal effects of Hamas's victory go further than these relatively trivial omens.
For Ms Ayesh runs the Women's Affairs Centre, a brave oasis of progressive feminism in fiercely conservative Gaza. The Islamic faction and its allies in the mosques do not warm to many of its causes; the centre has campaigned for a shelter for battered women here, but its campaign has been in vain because of fears that a shelter would encourage women to leave their husbands..........