Following the successful election in Iraq, opponents of the war have started predicting that the outcome nevertheless will be a worsening of conditions for women. The fact that  over 50% of seats were won by  the  "Sistani ticket"  has been seen as sufficient justification  to raise the spectre of an Islamic government and the introduction of Sharia law.  It's interesting how quickly these new predictions of doom and gloom have  been taken up. 

I think it's partly because many (most?) people just have no idea of the  way in which the  political process now underway in Iraq  has  safeguards designed to  prevent any single group from dictating  the drafting (and acceptance)  of the new Iraqi constitution.  As I mentioned in a previous message, the main task of the 275 member National Assembly that has just been elected  is to draft a constitution on which Iraqis will vote by October 2005. If the constitution is approved, new elections will be held two months later - but if  it is rejected, the assembly will be dissolved and a new one elected to produce another constitution.  And very importantly, the permanent constitution will also fail if two-thirds of the population of three provinces object. This  provision effectively grants a veto to the Kurdish minority, in control of three northern provinces.

In the light of this it's worth reading this article  -about the Kurdish leader  Jamal Talabani - which points out that:

With the Kurds securing a strong second place in elections last month, and the victorious Shia having chosen Ibrahim al-Jaafari for the Prime Minister’s job on Tuesday, Mr Talabani, 71, is the favourite for the presidency. " 

..............................................

(Talabani) is withholding judgment on the nomination for the prime ministership of Mr Jaafari, who has strong Islamic credentials, and said that Kurds will not co-operate with a Shia-led government unless it supports democracy and federalisation.

He is emphatic that the Kurds will insist on secular government. “We will never accept any religious government in Iraq. Never,” he declared, thumping the table. “This is a red line for us. We will never live inside an Islamic Iraq. We respect Islam. Islam is our religion . . . The Islamic identity of Iraqi people must be respected, but not an Islamic government.

Another relevant article is  The Unheralded  Revolution -  can the gains by Iraq's women be echoed elsewehere?"

Look beyond the jockeying for jobs in Iraq's embryonic transitional government. Focus instead on the final results in that Arab country's matrix-breaking election. They reveal a little-publicized result that President Bush, feminist organizations and democracy advocates should be shouting from the rooftops.

Nearly one-third of the 140 winning candidates on the Shiite parliamentary list are women. Moreover, those 45 women from the list supported by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani tend to be more educated, better informed and more committed to change than are their male counterparts, who include a number of political hacks.

Bush has been in Europe this week emphasizing the overall importance of the Jan. 30 elections and his commitment to transforming the autocracies of the Middle East and Central Asia into a zone of peaceful democracies.

But the president's failure thus far to highlight the success of women in the elections -- 31 percent of Iraq's newly elected 275 parliamentarians are women -- suggests that not even he fully appreciates the forces of change that he may have unleashed by toppling dictatorships in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nor do gender liberationists in the West seem eager to publicize this stunning result. Could they not want to accept even implicitly the notion that war can create the conditions needed for a positive social revolution?

That revolution ultimately is even more important to transforming the Middle East than is U.S. military might or European diplomacy. There will be no democracy in the greater Middle East until women break through the crippling restrictions and humiliations imposed on them by Arab cultural chauvinism and widespread, if perverse, interpretations of Islamic faith.

History suggests that social revolutions occur when frustration with the present combines with emergent hope for a better future to form a critical mass that is ignited by a spark of personal resistance. Americans saw this happen when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus and African American students staged sit-ins at Woolworth's lunch counters nearly half a century ago.

Those students, W.E.B. Du Bois told an oral history interviewer then, "put their fingers on something" big by fighting back against the small daily humiliations of segregation and the spiteful shows of domination meant to demonstrate immediate white control. (A tape of this absorbing interview was broadcast this week on C-SPAN Radio.)

Is a movement similar to the American civil rights revolution imaginable for women in the Arab world today? It is a stretch, for obvious reasons of power and gender relationships. But it is certainly more imaginable after the Iraqi election results and after the breaking of the malignant political status quo that has prevailed in the region for at least three decades.

On assignments in the Middle East for The Post throughout that period, I found much to admire in the natural hospitality and intellectual achievements of Arab society. But for someone raised in the segregated American South, there is also much that is familiar -- constant reminders of small daily humiliations and spiteful shows of domination both cultural and sexual.

This was brought back to me recently as I listened to a senior Cabinet minister from an important Arab country criticize Bush's Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative to foster democracy in that Islamic belt. The official spoke candidly in return for not being identified. Other conversations with Arab officials confirm that his views are far from isolated:

Bush dared to lump the Arabs and the more primitive people of Afghanistan together in this initiative. He also brought Turkey's overly "liberal" Islamic society into the picture. The Americans had not understood that Arabs are "conservative people who have their own way of doing things," and who form the core of the Islamic world. And don't compare us to Iraqis, either, please.

All that was missing was a condemnation of Bush and his aides as "outside agitators."

Against this entrenched mind-set, the elections in Iraq -- in which political parties were required to field enough female candidates to ensure that they would make up at least one-quarter of the national assembly -- may seem like a straw in the wind.

But in telephone conversations and e-mail exchanges with Iraqis in Baghdad last weekend, frustration and hope mingled in a combustible mix, as security continued to be precarious and the final results were announced.

"The fact is, the women candidates had to be competent to get on the list. They met higher standards," said Nabil Musawa, a campaign strategist for the Iraqi National Congress. The example they have set, and will continue to provide, cannot be lost on Arab women at large."

You feel it all around you. It begins slowly and almost insidiously. You stop wearing slacks or jeans or skirts that show any leg because you don’t want to be stopped in the street and lectured by someone who doesn’t approve. You stop wearing short sleeves and start preferring wider shirts with a collar that will cover up some of you neck. You stop letting your hair flow because you don’t want to attract attention to it. On the days when you forget to pull it back into a ponytail, you want to kick yourself and you rummage around in your handbag trying to find a hair band… hell, a rubber band to pull back your hair and make sure you attract less attention from *them*.

“Please dress appropriately next time you come here.” The man said to me. I looked down at what I was wearing- black pants, a beige high-necked sweater and a knee-length black coat. Huh? I blushed furiously. He meant my head should be covered and I should be wearing a skirt. I don’t like being told what to wear and what not to wear by strange men. “I don’t work here- I don’t have to follow a dress code.” I answered coldly. The cousin didn’t like where the conversation was going, he angrily interceded, “We’re only here for an hour and it really isn’t your business.”

“It is my business.” Came the answer, “She should have some respect for the people who work here.” And the conversation ended. I looked around for the people I should be respecting. There were three or four women who were apparently ministry employees. Two of them were wearing long skirts, loose sweaters and headscarves and the third had gone all out and was wearing a complete “jubba” or robe-like garb topped with a black head scarf. My cousin and I turned to enter the room the receptionist had indicated and my eyes were stinging. No one could talk that way before the war and if they did, you didn’t have to listen. You could answer back. Now, you only answer back and make it an issue if you have some sort of death wish or just really, really like trouble.

Young females have the option of either just giving in to the pressure and dressing and acting ‘safely’- which means making everything longer and looser and preferably covering some of their head or constantly being defiant to what is becoming endemic in Iraq today. The problem with defiance is that it doesn’t just involve you personally, it involves anyone with you at that moment- usually a male relative. It means that there might be an exchange of ugly words or a fight and probably, after that, a detention in Abu Ghraib.

If it’s like this in Baghdad, I shudder to think what the other cities and provinces must be like. The Allawis and Pachichis of Iraq don’t sense it- their families are safely tucked away in Dubai and Amman, and the Hakeems and Jaffaris of Iraq promote it.

Of far greater impact than the enforced quota of women, is Sistani's fatwa imposing a religious duty on all Shia to vote - which specified that this duty applied to women, even if they had to disobey their husbands in order to vote (since their husbands would be acting contrary to islamic law by ordering them to disobey it).

That seemingly "tactical" move to maximize the Shia turnout is dynamite for conservative religious traditions. Not only are women permitted to disobey their husbands - they now have an obligation to do so on matters concerning their fundamental duties as citizens of a democracy. This won't just affect the outcome of elections and legislative battles but the day to day battles between subordination and liberation.

There will be a fight over women's rights in Iraq precisely because there have been regressive attacks on them, mainly from Shia islamist parties such as Dawa, of the sort described by Riverbend. The situation is likely to vary among provinces with strong "social" (and physical) pressure to conform to backward norms in the more conservative religious areas that are overwhelmingly Shia.

The attempt to adopt Sharia for family law under the IGC, frustrated by a womens mobilization, indicates the fight will also break out in the national legislature. But the more important struggle will be in local enforcement of social mores rather than legislative changes either at national or local level.

Both secular and religious women will defend their rights and expand them - with the religious women now armed with a religious duty to do so.

As Riverbend said "Young females have the option of either just giving in to the pressure... or constantly being defiant". That was the story in the west and that is the story in Iraq. The rights of any oppressed section of society have never been won or lost by decrees from on high - they have always been won by defiance.

Social mores in kurdistan's even more tribal society were just as backward. But it's been difficult to impose a submissive attitude on armed peshmerga women.

Posted by: Arthur Dent at February 25, 2005 12:17 AM