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Sufi women blazing new trail in Nablus

A unique group of some 40 women come together each week at a religious school in Nablus to practice Sufi rituals and study the faith.
Palestinians attend class in the Islamic Centre for Sufism in the West Bank city of Nablus October 20, 2007. The green bulletin board outside one Nablus mosque was once plastered with notices promoting Hamas's fiery brand of Islam. Now it stands tattered and empty. The empty board is a fitting symbol of the religious power struggle in the West Bank, where the secular Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority is cracking down on preachers sympathetic to Islamist group Hamas but struggling to fill mosques with im
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NABLUS, West Bank — The classes in Sufism that Jamila Haroun al-Debai took more than a decade ago changed her life. As a member of the General Union of Palestinian Women, Debai used to attend every funeral and demonstration in Nablus, but today she devotes most of her time to Sufism, describing her devotion as “worth all the work she has done in the past.”

Debai leads a group of 40 women who gather every Monday at the Sheikh Muslim Zawiya, a Sufi religious school, in the heart of the old town in Nablus, to attend the hadra, a collective ritual performed by Sufi orders.

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