Bicycling a Condition of Marriage

“Listen, girls, there’s nothing left in my orchard except firewood,” Ms. Suleiman said, using a Palestinian saying for being a spinster. “But you are young. I want you, when you get married, to make riding your bikes a condition of marriage.”

Atef Abu Saif, a Gaza-based writer, said that until the mid-1980s, “it used to be normal” to see women riding bikes in Gaza. “They did it for pleasure and fun, by the sea,” he said.

That was before Ms. Suleiman moved to Gaza, as a teenager in the 1990s, but she had cycled as a child in Damascus, Syria.

Her riding revival began with a bet: She and two girlfriends created a competition to see who could lose the most weight in two weeks. Ms. Suleiman, who also swims and plays the keyboard, shed 11 pounds by cutting out bread, rice and pasta, and collected $75.

“It was like ‘The Biggest Loser,’ but the Amna version,” she said.

She decided to buy a bicycle, figuring it would help her keep losing weight. And, she said, “I wanted to remind myself of my childhood, which was without problems,” recalling that she would sneak off with her neighbor’s bicycle for forays around their Damascus enclave.

At first she rode in Gaza only around her own neighborhood at dawn, when few would see her. She encouraged her friend Sara Salibi, 24, whose teenage brother taught her how to ride, also at dawn. The women shared a similar defiance against Gaza’s limited expectations of women, although they are otherwise quite different.

Ms. Salibi smokes, though only in private; reads Milan Kundera, the Czech author; and hums tunes from Jimmy Fallon’s television show. “I like to dance, but I don’t know how to dance,” she said. “I want to learn how to dance.”

“The role of our women is to obey their husbands and prepare food for them inside the house, not to imitate men and ride bikes in the streets,” said the man, 33, who refused to give his name but echoed the view of many Gaza men interviewed, and of multiple comments on social networks, after news of the cycling group reached the Palestinian news media.

A distinct minority approved, including Abdul Salam Hussein, 53, who was sitting near a cement factory. “So what if a woman rides a bike?” he exclaimed. “People have reached the moon already!”

“Riding a bike makes you feel like you are flying,” Ms. Suleiman said. Ms. Salibi echoed that sentiment, saying, “I feel free.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/world/middleeast/gaza-women-on-bikes-face-a-long-road-to-acceptance.html