Palestine: For Gaza Students, No Graduation Without Hijab · Global Voices
Ayesha Saldanha

As in the rest of the Arab world, fewer women in the Gaza Strip wore the hijab 20 or 30 years ago. The “Islamic revival” over the last few decades has resulted in an increase in the wearing of headscarves and other forms of “Islamic” dress, a phenomenon which in Gaza grew with the rise of Hamas. Today the majority of women in Gaza wear the hijab; however those who do not frequently face social pressure to do so. Sometimes the pressure is institutional; there have even been cases of Christian schoolgirls being pushed to wear the hijab. In this post we hear from Asmaa Al-Ghoul, a journalist and blogger who was arrested last year for not wearing a headscarf; she is furious that a friend who refuses to wear the hijab has not been allowed to graduate from university.
Palestinian university students. Photo courtesy of PalFest under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Asmaa writes:
Asmaa is referring to the fact that Al-Azhar University has a strong association with Fatah, which would normally indicate a less religiously conservative environment than that of the Islamic University of Gaza which is affiliated with Hamas. She continues:
Asmaa is angry:
Younger girls are also affected:
And Gaza's Christian minority is not exempt:
Asmaa ends: