Iraq women press 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 President 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 are often 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.

A major fault line

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.

"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.

Turning toward religion

"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, but women still retained their civil rights.

Since the U.S. invasion nearly 2 ½ years ago, Iraq has become far more overtly religious. Iraq long was one of the most secular Middle Eastern countries, but 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 among religious Muslims.

Sharia still supported

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, 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. ... A woman wants to bring up her own children even if her husband divorces her."

Khafaji added that if a women wanted to be sure of her rights in marriage and divorce, she should make her demands part of the marriage contract — a practice permitted in Sharia law. But not all families or all clerics necessarily would accede to a woman's demands.

Customs hard to break

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- 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.

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.

Three key clauses

Edward and other women want the constitution drafters to focus on three clauses in a draft 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.

• 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 and can order a woman accused of adultery to be killed, or require or forbid a marriage. Even women who support the substitution of Sharia for civil law express alarm at language in the constitution that would give 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 that political parties would slate that many women.

Lobbying till the deadline

Despite their bleak prospects initially, the women's lobbying appears to be having an effect. Under pressure from women, the constitutional commission has restored the 25 percent quota and has put no time limit on its duration.

Safiya al Souhail, one of several determined organizers, recently won permission to go into the cafeteria area where members of the National Assembly eat lunch. She and several other women now walk the area daily, buttonholing lawmakers.

If the constitution draft presented to the National Assembly slights women, she thinks she can count on Kurds, who are mostly secular, to vote for changes, as well as members of the party of former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, whom she met with a few days ago. That is still not enough votes to win, but she and her colleagues plan to work right up to the deadline.