Re-thinking Islam and Islamism: Hamas women between religion, secularism and neo-liberalism

In the 2016 Bir Zeit University elections Hamas’ women launched two videos in which un-veiled, western-dressed young girls urged viewers to vote for Hamas. The videos sparked a passionate debate: Religious forces accused the girls of being ‘westernized’ and abandoning the norm of Islamic modesty; while secular forces accused them of promoting a form of women’s empowerment linked to their success in accommodating religious values to secular ones. The debate mirrors scholarly works on Islamist women’s subjectivity that tend to adhere to the dominant liberal analytical frames and lack a clear problematization of the relationship between Islam, gender, and new forms of liberal and secular sensitivity, as Islamic practices, secularization, and neo-liberal projects are seen as opposed. Most of the literature that analyzes women within Islamist movements overlooks the historical and economic trajectories that have operated to shift the relation between gender, sexuality and religion. In 2017, I conducted extensive field research in the Occupied Palestinian Territories among Hamas women with the objective to unwrap the relationship between Islamism and the secular/neo-liberal and nationalist project instituted in the West Bank. By taking distance from the assumption that religion and secularism are opposing poles of a binary, this article provides an understanding of Hamas women’s shifting subjectivities in the encounter with new forms of secular modernity, an encounter that signifies a shifting understanding of the categories of secular and religious, and which I analyze through a new understanding of women’s bodies and sexuality.