On Sunday, a senior Gaza judge ordered all female lawyers to wear headscarves (the hijab) and long, dark colored cloaks when in court. As one female lawyer stated, the order is a “clear violation of the law, it is taking away our personal freedoms.”
In 2004, French authorities banned the hijab from schools, in part because Muslim girls felt cultural pressure to wear them. Last year, Turkey’s parliament voted to relax a decades-long ban on hijab, even as tens of thousands of Turkish secularists protested the move.
Scholar Daniel Pipes notes that the strict application of Islamic law is spreading rapidly across the globe. The Hamas conquest of Gaza, marked now by the imposition of the hijab and other Islamist customs, has aided that expansion.
