I was talking solely about the schools in my community, where the mixed ones have consistently outperformed the segregated ones.

As for the rest of your post, I don’t understand what you mean.

I’m curious , what do you have to support your argument that mixed schools perform better than segregated schools? And regarding the point being made in the post we are commenting on, since you disagree with your community leader’s call on the issue, would you solicit the local Jehovah Witness chapter if they agreed to come in and offer influence? Maybe offer your children seats in their classrooms because you all (Muslims) are so backward? Remember from your own religion which states clearly that a Muslim does not take a non Muslim as an intimate friend nor accept their help because they offer help only to rob you of your treasure which is your religion. There is a reason why Muslims stay within their own community. Take a closer look at the post. Read deeper, it carries an important message for you.

I am sure you will get flamed for this one way or another, but a couple of things:

1. Women DO drive in Egypt, even if you didn’t see them.

2. While Gaza has always been more conservative than other parts of Palestine (the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood had a strong influence there), you wouldn’t have until pretty recently seen such a site as a woman in full niqab even covering her hands with gloves. I know I didn’t when I was there in the late 1980s. What the Palestinian psychologist said is true. However, Israel also contributed mightily to the rise of socially and politically conservative, fundamentalist forces through its deliberate (and widely known) policies of supporting those forces as a counterweight to secular and leftist parties and movements, particularly in the 1970s. Now it is coming back to bite them in the ass. (Not that those movements didn’t have massive problems, too, that contributed to their own undermining, but that’s another post.)

I always told people many years ago that while you may not like the PLO, Fatah, PFLP, DFLP, etc., you were going to get a much more radical, religious-based movement coming to the fore, so keep ignoring and dismissing the Palestinian leadership (at that time) at your own peril. Those of us closely observing changes in Israeli and Palestinian society for many years saw this coming from a mile away, but nobody would listen. I would say the rise of socially and politically conservative, religious, anti-women’s rights forces in Palestine more or less mirrors what is happening in Israeli politics and society, and that is no coincidence at all.

Of course, it is up to the Palestinians and particularly Palestinian women to determine their own fate and place in society, and not for Westerners to dictate to them (criticize, yes, everyone has that right), especially when we are the ones actively aiding and abetting an occupation that has ruined their lives and undermined their position as much as any awful oppressive Hamas diktat, and in fact feeds into their oppression even more, as Hamas will use this as a cudgel against them, or an excuse to pass misogynist laws, or condone “honor” killings (nothing honorable about these), because they are “protecting Palestinian culture and Islam” from albeit real enemies.

Mainly, though, I would like to point out that if you saw no women driving in Egypt, it is, to put it bluntly, your own damn fault. I’ve lived in Cairo for over a decade and just about every woman I know who has a car (or whose family has a car) drives, and if they don’t, it isn’t because they aren’t allowed to. If you had been stuck in rush hour on the October Bridge and looked around you, you would have seen lots of women driving. They do it every day. And some of them–gasp!–are even veiled.

May seem like a small point, but to me it is indicative of a broader problem with discussions like yours: things that are prevalent or characteristic in one Arab society (say Saudi Arabia, where women cannot drive) are generalized to the entire Arab or even Islamic world, where they are not prevalent at all, and then equally broad conclusions are drawn based on what are essentially falsehoods or unfounded assumptions. And then all of a sudden you’re talking about what “Muslim society” is like or what are the problems with “Islamic society”–as if gender dynamics (or anything else) across a geographic area that stretches from Morocco to Indonesia can be summed up in a couple of paragraphs.

This seems to me decidedly unhelpful in countering neo-con critiques, since it employs precisely the same rhetoric and sleight-of-hand shifts from the particular to the general that neo-con arguments about Islam and the so-called trouble with it often use.