Playboy has a report on how the Islamist surge in North Africa has affected sexual mores.
It provides a few insights into the underground club scene in Tunisia and elsewhere, but it ends in Gaza:
1.7 million people live under the rugged rule of Hamas, the Islamist movement that won power through a combination of ballots and bullets in 2006 and 2007. It has clung to power religiously ever since, and despite being pummeled by Israeli sieges, incursions and most recently a bombardment waged from land, sea and air, Hamas succeeded in forming and preserving the first Islamist government on the Mediterranean. Initially, God squads scoured the beaches, searching for female skin. Vigilantes interrupted lovers and hauled them into court. “When a man and a woman are together, their first thoughts are of fornication, so we have to take care,” explains a guard outside rows of beach chalets where, he claims, Hamas’s corrupt secular predecessors—Yasir Arafat’s security guards—had swapped wives by locking them in their chalets, dropping the keys in a bucket and playing lucky dip.
And yet once ensconced, the Islamists slowly relaxed. Despite the frowns of the religious affairs minister, Gaza clothes shops fill their windows with scarlet dresses and heart-shaped cushions to celebrate Valentine’s Day, or as Palestinians call it, the Love Fest. Gazans call Hamas women “two jays” because they wear jeans beneath their jilbabs. Long bereft of cinemas and bars, Gaza at night bubbles with the honks of wedding parties touring the streets; the beaches where a few Gaza girls once dared to wear bikinis are now lined with resorts that celebrate mass weddings. Most curious of all, I discovered that what claims to be the Mediterranean’s largest polygamous dating agency is government-subsidized—it sports a photograph on its walls of Gaza’s Islamist prime minister, Ismail Haniya, handing over a $100,000 check. The agency’s owner, Fahmi al-Atiri, cites Hamas’s stocky interior minister, who was reputed to have found at least one of his six wives through the agency (to keep within Islam’s statutory limits, he divorced two). Having put me in a sufficiently sympathetic frame of mind, al-Atiri gives me a guided tour of his “marriage-facilitation charity,” proudly plying me with albums of the women on offer. He suggests I assuage my wife’s doubts by letting her choose the second, in the name of equal opportunity. It had worked for him, he says, noting with relief that his wife had selected a pretty divorcée 12 years his junior.