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Comment by Myrmornis | Hacker News Reader

Excellent write-up and well done for doing this!

Were there any female instructors? If there had been some could they have led a female-only session in the evening?

Context:

    On the first day of the 48 hour hackathon, all female participants had to
    leave by 6:30 PM. This is because, under Sharia law, women cannot hang out
    with men they are not related or married to late into the evening.

(For people like me who glance at the comment thread before reading the article, or who merely skimmed the article.)

Seeing "Sharia law" referred to as a definite entity is a little strange. It's like someone saying "under common law...". It's cromulent, but only on general principals not many specific statutes. There are several countries that follow Sharia, just like many countries follow civil law or common law.

Relevant here because there are countries that follow Sharia that don't enforce such a curfew.

Does anyone have a definite idea which school of Sharia jurisprudence Hamas even follows?

The article mentioned that the ruling government follows some part of Sharia law.

And I'm sure the rest would take a lawyer to interpret, just like everywhere else, because the commoner interpretation of "why" is different than the legal or religious interpretation of "why"

Three of the mentors were female. Many of the staff and local volunteers were female.

That's a good idea. I don't know to be honest.

Here's an idea: the next time someone asks women to leave because they're not allowed to hang out with men, respectfully suggest that all men leave instead.

Instead of being sexist and asking people to leave based on their gender, ask those who believe in Sharia to leave. Demand that anyone who enters the hackathon makes a public deceleration that they are not followers of any religious belief that treat women and men different.

Sounds like a great idea if you want to visit a war-torn area to make a protest about sexism and Sharia, not to mention risk getting mixed up in an international incident or worse. Not so much if you want to run a hackathon which actually improves the lives of those that took part.

You seem to have misunderstood what I said. This wasn't at all me being sexist or asking others to be sexist. It was meant to get people to question those rules and motivate men to practice solidarity with women without directly violating the rules and immediately being punished by Hamas. Hamas kills people for the kind of tactics you proposed. If you want to fight Hamas directly, better make sure you have lots of people behind you or at least a good number of trained people with guns.

So by indirectly violating the rules and send a political message by asking all the men to leave, how do you think hamas will react? Do you think they will appreciate that you get people (and media) to question the religious rules? It doesn't sound like people who enforces their religious beliefs with guns aren't going to be happy with political activism, be that indirect or direct.

Maybe the best way to combine a hackathon and political activism is to hold them in places where people do not shot political activists. Its not the best choice, but what is the alternative?

It wouldn't violate the rules at all, that's the trick... at least according to my layman interpretation of the rule.

Of course, Hamas is run by crazy people; who knows if and how they'd react. I didn't mean to say that my imagined response would be without any risks either. It certainly takes courage to do anything against Hamas from within Gaza.

Did the female instructors also have to leave in the evening, despite them not being Gazan?

No, they did not. Though in practice, they did. Only males did the overnight grind.

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