FINLAND & PALESTINE Proceedings of a Joint Workshop

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Sylvia Ak4r
struggle against discrimination. 11 Now, female Hamas candidates
say they have inherited the mantle of women's rights. lilt
is your role to fight corruption, make reform, and avenge humiliation,
like the women who took revenge on the streets of
Tel Aviv, Netanya, and Jerusalem/' University Professor Mariam
Saleh, a Hamas candidate, exhorted at an all-women Hamas
rally in Nablus, a week before the Palestinian vote. 12 Some
moderate women speak in calmer words, but the fundamental
principle for Muslim feminists seems to be IIIlslam is the solution
to all our problems in life/' as Mariam Saleh has put it. 13
In its election agenda, Hamas addressed women's rights in education,
work, inheritance and the right to take up decisionmaking
positions. It emphasized women's roles in society as
equal to men's roles.
The majority of Palestinians are Muslims, and many will be content
with talk of enhancing the influence of Islam. These trends,
however, affect secular feminists, as well as Christian Palestinian
women, and their struggle to achieve women's rights.
There seems to be an active struggle between secular feminists
and Islamic feminists in Palestine. Secular feminists seem to be
frustrated because they have worked in politics for decades
and now find many young women turning to a starkly different
Islamic vision of empowerment and equality. Some feminists
are of the opinion that the promotion of secularism is, therefore,
an important vehicle to protect society from religion's
intervention in people's lives. They fear that women's rights
will be trampled under a new form of patriarchal Islamic fundamentalism
that has swept through the nation.
II Allabadi 2008: 194.
12 Cambanis 2006.
I3 Cambanis 2006.
113