In post-invasion Iraq, the mobilization around gender issues has been central for the various actors of the political scene. On the one hand, women’s rights issues have been used by the US administration as a showcase of “their mission of liberation in Iraq,” justifying their imperialist project. As an example, Laura Bush emphasized “liberating Iraqi women” from the oppression of the Ba’ath regime. On the other hand, gender issues have also been used by the conservative Islamist political leadership (which arrived in power alongside the US administration) in response, which insists on the Islamic identity of this so-called “New Iraq.” In this context, the de-Ba’athification process and the institutionalization of a community based political quota system by the US-led occupation administration had dramatic consequences. The resulting vacuum of leadership was rapidly filled by sectarian players, including politico-religious groups supported by their own armed groups, as well as by tribal leaders.
One of my first observations when I started my fieldwork in Iraq in 2010 was that the sectarian, weak, and corrupted nature of the Iraqi State institutions, and their failure to guarantee basic public services to the majority of the population, have had a structural impact on women’s political groups. Most Iraqi women’s rights groups and organizations have to rely on international funds even for dealing with very basic issues, such as helping families access running water and electricity. I was surprised to discover that even members of Parliament and the Provincial Council of Baghdad deliberately rely on NGO funds rather than on public funds because of the issues of endemic corruption they have faced in the new regime’s
various institutions, and because of its sectarian functioning. Because of this dependency, the types of programs, campaigns, activities, and even the vocabulary chosen by many women activists have been deeply influenced and shaped by the network of funds and financial support that they receive, mostly from the US and sympathetic international organizations such as USAID, UN programs like UN Women, and NGOs. The ‘NGOization’ of women’s rights activism in Iraq reveals the fact that women’s rights groups act as a substitute for the weak post-2003 State.
The militarization of Iraqi society and the issue of violence, since both the authoritarian decades of the Ba’ath regime and the beginning of military conflicts in the 1980s, has had a great impact on gender representations and relations. The US-led coalition war of 1991, with its six weeks of dramatic bombings and the severe UN sanctions that followed, destroyed the infrastructure, weakened the education system and public services, and plunged the country into a humanitarian crisis. The overall impoverishment of this society impacted deeply its social and cultural fabric and created new forms of patriarchy, involving marriage at a young age or the rising practice of polygamy in order to secure the survival of a household. It is clear that the violence experienced by Iraqis today really began in 1991. Moreover, the militarization of Iraqi public spaces since 2003, and even more so after the explosion of sectarian violence in 2006, has turned Baghdad to a “city of men”: checkpoints, T-walls, soldiers in the streets everywhere. Many places are now inaccessible to women, and some places like coffee shops or restaurants are forbidden to women travelling alone after five o’clock in the afternoon. This is an important dimension that has an impact on gender representations and practices, and thus on the concrete reality of women’s lives and activism. This aspect is central to understanding the rise of social and religious conservatisms, and the way in which both sectarianism and tribalism have evolved within Iraqi society in recent years. In the context of exacerbated violence, when the state cannot provide security, or is partly the producer of violence, society relies on alternative means of protection.
The Personal Status Code and Women’s Rights Activists ///
Since the invasion of Iraq, the Personal Status Code (PSC) has been a central subject of debate. Established in 1959 by the newly-formed Iraqi Republic, the PSC is a legal framework regarding personal matters: marriage, divorce, inheritance etc., and thus gathers up most of women’s legal rights. The period of its drafting and adoption corresponded to a time when, at a political level, leftist and secular ideologies were very strong, and at a social level, an urban middle class was beginning to emerge. Importantly, the link between a somehow unified sense of Iraqi nationalism and gender issues was revealed through its adoption. Firstly, it gathered together Sunni and Shi’a Muslim jurisprudence, thus creating a sense of cultural unity. Secondly, the resulting code was one of the most progressive of the Arab region. Many feminist activists participated in its drafting, such as Nazihay al-Dulaymi, a gynecologist, well-known communist, and the first female Iraqi (and Arab) minister.
The mobilizations around the PSC since 2003 illustrate well the link between the fragmentation of Iraq and the questioning of the basis of women’s legal rights. Several propositions have been made by conservative Shi’a Islamist parties since 2003 (decree 137 and article 41 of the Constitution) which question the unified PSC, and would set up in its place a new law based on communal identities. As a result, the Code of 1959 would be transformed into a set of sectarian-based codes modeled on Lebanese family law. Concretely, this would amount to going back to the situation that characterized the monarchic period, when there was no set of unified laws for the private matters of all Iraqis. These propositions are a way for conservative Shi’a Islamist parties to symbolically question the legacy of the revolutionary period in Iraq, when the political culture was dominated by a secular left.
The issue of replacing the PSC has been the main subject of Iraqi feminist mobilizations since the fall of the Ba’ath regime. Many feminist activists gravitate around Shabakat al-Nisa’ al-Iraqyat (the Iraqi Women’s Network), the main feminist organization in Iraq, and most independent women’s rights groups firmly oppose these propositions. According to them, such legal reforms coming from conservative Shi’a Islamist political parties oppose the PSC on a purely religious and sectarian basis, undermining a code that is quite progressive and universally applicable to all Iraqis. In 2013, a draft law was proposed by Justice Minister Hassan al-Shimari, a member of the Shi’a Islamist Fazila party, which would add to preexisting law a code based on the main source of Shi’a jurisprudence, the Ja’fari mazhab, to which only the Iraqi Shi’a population would be subject. When the proposition was approved for consideration by the cabinet in February of 2014, a campaign was launched by women and civil society local groups titled “Campaign Against the Sectarian Personal Status Code.” This law, if adopted, will legally allow the marriage of girls as young as nine years old, considered sin al-balagha (the age of maturity) in the Ja’fari mazhab, half the legal age of marriage for either gender in the PSC.
Ongoing Fragmentation ///
To conclude, in addition to being a humanitarian disaster, the occupation of parts of Northern and Western Iraq by the Islamic State since June 2014 has reinforced the central government’s discourse about Shiite Iraq as a threatened identity. It has worsened sectarian divisions and has brought the country back to the nightmare of the 2006-2007 civil war. In this context, activism around women’s rights and gender issues is clearly imbricated with issues of nationhood, state ideologies, and religion. Today in Iraq, it is through women’s rights and their visibility in public space that the struggle around Iraq’s identity is played out, in a culture where gender norms and relations are structured by growing militarization and, since 1991, social and religious conservatisms.