Iraqi women struggle for rights

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The yellowing photo shows a woman in a knee-length, sleeveless dress. Her short hair blows in the breeze. She wears glamorous dark glasses against the summer glare.

The time is the early 1960s. She could be in John F. Kennedy’s America, but she’s in Iraq at a time when it was ruled by one in a string of military strongmen.

Today, few Iraqi women would dare to wear such an outfit. Most cover their arms to the wrist. Only wisps of hair stray out of their head scarves. Skirts often are nearly ankle-length.

Jinan Mubarak looked down at the photograph and shook her head. “I can’t wear what my mother was wearing at that time. It’s really sad,” she said. “Women had better conditions then. Now, they are challenged every day.”

Like many women’s rights activists in Iraq, Mubarak has plunged into the fight of her life to ensure that the new Iraqi Constitution, due to be completed by Aug. 15, at least preserves the rights women now have. It is far from clear that she and her sisters will succeed.

Shiite Islamic parties in the country, with the tacit acceptance of millions of devout women, are pushing hard to substitute religious law, or Sharia, for the civil law that now governs intimate aspects of life such as marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance.

A draft of the constitution published Saturday in the newspaper of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Republic in Iraq, one of the two leading Shiite parties, calls for men and women to be equal “in accordance with provisions of Islamic Sharia.” Legal scholars as well as women’s rights activists see that provision as a way to substitute clerics for secular judges and religious rules for civil law.

Although most fights over the constitution divide Iraqis along sectarian and ethnic lines, the question of women’s rights unmasks the other major fault line in the country’s politics.

“There is a conflict between secularism and religion in drafting the new constitution,” said Najla al Ubeidi, a lawyer and a member of the Iraqi Women’s League, one of the oldest women’s groups in the country. Ubeidi, like many others, sees the constitution as a struggle for Iraq’s soul, a test of whether it will become a forward-looking society that uses the talents of all of its citizens or one that shuts out more than half its population.

“During the 1960s, there was a real belief in improving women’s conditions,” Ubeidi said. “We could wear what we liked, go out when we liked, return home when we liked, and people would judge us by the way we behaved.”

The Iraqi government’s treatment of women modernized sharply in 1959 with the passage of its “personal status” law, which melded principles of Sharia with Western legal approaches to family issues. When the Baath Party and later Saddam Hussein came to power, they left the law intact, and despite the atrocities of his regime, Saddam backed strong roles for women in government and embraced a secular state. By the 1990s, Saddam had begun to reduce women’s roles and rely more on religious rhetoric, but women still retained their civil rights.

Since the U.S. invasion nearly two and a half years ago, Iraq has become far more overtly religious. Long one of the most secular Middle Eastern countries, the toppling of Saddam unleashed a tide of religious feeling, particularly in the Shiite community, that Saddam had brutally suppressed. In some conservative areas, women were attacked if they failed to wear the long black “abbaya” and complete head covering that is standard dress among religious Muslims.

Although few women would sanction such attacks, many would accept the primacy of religious over secular law. Iraqi women’s views on Sharia are complicated and diverse, with many educated, religious Shiite women supporting the primacy of Sharia over secular law. If women work in Islamic organizations or are involved in politics through Islamic parties, their loyalty is first to Islamic politics, long suppressed by Saddam, and then to women.

Even women’s rights activists concede that the vast majority of Iraqi women, especially those living outside Baghdad, the capital, know little about the constitutional debate and say that if asked, they probably would have few objections to the substitution of Sharia for civil law. Especially in the Shiite south, women have tended to look to their faith, their clerics and their tribes for comfort and protection in the face of Saddam’s cruelties and the loss of their men during the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s.

For them, Sharia offered certainty in an uncertain time.

“I much prefer the Sharia for personal issues,” said Salama al Khafaji, a member of the new National Assembly. “I am very afraid of language saying men and women are equal: What would that mean when it came to the custody of children? A woman wants to bring up her own children even if her husband divorces her.”

For secular women, and there are many of them, the idea of being governed by clerics is unimaginable. “We seek a civil constitution that separates the role of law from religion and one that doesn’t interfere in the private affairs of the people,” said Hanna Edward, head of the Iraqi Al Amal Association, a human rights and women’s rights group.

The activists believe they almost certainly could win concessions if they had more time to mobilize women, but they fear that deep suspicion of politics dating from the Saddam days makes it difficult to get people involved quickly. “The women of Iraq are really awakening, but raising consciousness does take time,” said Edwards, who lived in Syria and Kurdistan during Hussein’s regime.

Working against them are conservative customs, which if anything have become more entrenched since the U.S. invasion.

Girls, even from secular families, rarely spend even a night outside their home until they marry, and they rarely marry without their family’s explicit blessing. Girls are very conscious of maintaining the family’s reputation, and even for educated women the trajectory is regimented: By the time a woman graduates from college, she probably is engaged or will be soon thereafter.

“Now the hijab is a uniform, not because women want it, but because they are scared not to wear it,” said Edwards, a petite, intense woman who goes without a head scarf and dashes around her downtown office, a cell phone glued to one ear and often a land-line phone to the other.

She and other women want the constitution drafters to focus on three clauses in one of the draft versions of the constitution.

“ The substitution of Sharia for the current civil law on “personal status” matters – that is, marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance. The language in one draft version of the constitution would allow each person to choose which law to follow – Shiite, Sunni or Christian. It is unclear whether there would even be a civil law option. On inheritance, religious law is particularly punitive to women, awarding a woman at most half the amount that her brothers would get.

“ The mandate that the state develop the status of the tribes “and benefit from their values and … traditions that do not go against religious principals.” The vast majority of families in Iraq have tribal connections, which can either protect or completely subjugate them.

Tribal justice can include the use of women as payment to settle scores between tribes. The tribal chief has absolute power; he can order a woman accused of adultery to be killed and require or forbid a marriage. Even women who support the substitution of Sharia for civil law express alarm at any language in the constitution that would accord authority to the tribes.

“ The elimination of the 25 percent quota for the number of females in the National Assembly. The transitional administrative law now governing Iraq requires that not less than 25 percent of the representatives in the assembly be women. An early version of the constitution would have eliminated that quota after two terms, all but guaranteeing that women would hold fewer seats, because it is unlikely political parties would include that many women on their slates of candidates.