Which Way for Hamas?

Amid the wreckage of Gaza, Hamas's officials struggle to sound upbeat. The burly interior minister, Fathi Hamad, whose predecessor was killed by an Israeli bomb, defiantly shuns security precautions at his makeshift office in Gaza City's main police station. "Claims that we are trying to establish an Islamic state are false," says the minister, who says his preference would be pursuing a degree in media studies. "Hamas is not the Taliban. It is not al-Qaeda. It is an enlightened, moderate Islamic movement."

Such talk is not the only effort to return to normality. Parasols and beach cabins sprouted this summer along Gaza's twenty-eight miles of sandy shore, the crowded strip's principal public park. Two buildings of the Islamic University, Hamas's most prominent educational institution, had been bombed but the university put on a graduation ceremony with festive lights, a cascade of multicolored balloons, and heart-shaped posters wishing future success to its students, most of whom happen to be women and some of whom flashed jeans and high heels beneath their black gowns. In a theater next to the Palestinian parliament, also shattered by bombs, actresses danced and writhed in the government-sponsored premiere of Gaza's Girls and the Patience of Job.

Such events reflect one side of the ongoing conflict inside Hamas between the pragmatists who put Gazans' needs first, and have sought to lighten their lives after years of punishing blockade and intermittent war, and the ideologues who give priority to "the rule of the sharia of God on earth." Advocates of the latter have tried to apply Islamic law in full, appealing to the Gaza-based and Hamas-controlled Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) to replace the British Mandate–era penal code with a sharia law that provides execution for apostasy, stoning and lashing for adultery, and the payment of blood money counted in camels. So far, the pragmatists have largely frustrated their efforts. "You can't Islamize the law when the political system is not fully Islamic," says the PLC's general director, Nafiz al-Madhoun, who completed a doctorate in law at the University of Minnesota, and once lectured there. "You need to have an Islamic government, judiciary, and political system. And we don't."

In response, the ideologues have resorted to other means, introducing sharia by the back door. With the help of Hamas mosques, the Religious Endowments Ministry has commissioned a morality police to "Propagate Virtue and Prevent Vice," not least by patrolling the beaches for such signs of debauchery as unveiled female bathers and shirtless men. The police have set up arbitration committees in their stations, offering detainees a fast-track resolution by fatwas, or legal opinion, which sometimes comes from the Muslim Scholars League. "The law of God or the law of a judge?" the police have asked petitioners. The Education Ministry insists it has issued no requirement that schoolgirls wear the jilbab, the shapeless body-wrap, but at the start of the school year, some principals did.

Much more at:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23313

Which may be why they are so against the idea.

hamas is not a democratic movement whos basis is civil rights, etc...its a religious movement based on the word of god.....one who has gods ear does not give up governing. Hamas may or may not moderate itself, that will obviously depend on the pragmatism of its politicians and the need to stay in power. i.e avoid public demonstrations that might introduce an intifada III against them.

but elections? and lose the power to govern?.....hard to imagine, especially after the way they took control.

Elections without Hamas? No elections at all? A last-minute deal between Fatah and Hamas? A new party emerging? Another internal conflict among Palestinian factions?

I can't see Hamas risking an election.....they are after all the party of god, where democracy is not a part of it. Fatah for all its corruption is secular (reminds me of the shah of iran to a certain degree) and needs the facade of elections for the west. I have little doubt that those running will be from the ruling elite.

it appears to be two societies with little in common outside of israel. And even that is weak with gaza isolated (i really really wish egypt would open up it border) and the westbank heavily involved with israel.

it doesn't look good from any angle. I go back to my fantasy that a third party emerges in the westbank, fights the ruling PA party, gets some civil rights from the PA, freedom of the press, and starts on the real path to democracy first from within and then faces off with israel...and then the gazans get to look at the westbank and pull off their own version....but until something like that occurs, i think its going to continue as it is for a while.

fractured societies with internal/external conflicts and influences that stifle them.

and they got 2.4% of the popular vote in the last election leg. election.

ruled by Fatah again. They certainly don't want Fatah to do to them what they did to Fatah 2 years ago. They'll fight before allowing for that possibility.

They burned their bridges with Fatah....now it's rule or be ruled....dominate or be dominated.

Same shit non-democratic societies have been through for thousands of years.