Iraq’s Other War

By: Sabah Salih

August 5, 2005

Eclipsed by daily spectacles of made-for-television brutality, Iraq’s other war has gone largely unnoticed, the indifference, no doubt, also having to do with the fact that this war is being waged against a people long at society’s receiving end—women.

The men waging this war are Islamists, some Shiites, some Sunnis, the first taking their cues from Iran’s Khomeinism, the latter from Saudi fundamentalism.  Both find justification for their beliefs and actions in such overtly sexist passages from the Koran as this one: “Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them” (4: 34), and from such absurd Islamic rules as the following: Stoning to death for prostitution, mutilation for thieving, giving a son twice a sister’s share of an inheritance, and only a meager eighth of a share for a widow; and making a woman’s testimony at a court of law worth only half that of a man.

From its very inception, modern Iraq as a state rightly decided that these religious impositions were too backward, too discriminatory, and too archaic to have any role to play in a society organized around egalitarian principles.  On this even the nastiest dictators that followed the 1958 Revolution were in agreement.   The Kurds in particular have been pioneers in supporting women’s rights.

Today, however, America’s somewhat sloppy effort at regime change has opened the way for the enemies of equality from the country, the region, and beyond to join forces in an organized campaign to push the clock back for women.  Through their proxies, Iranian mullahs have already succeeded in turning much of Shiite Iraq into an extension of their oppressive theocracy.  As one Basra resident bitterly puts it, the city “has slipped under the sway of shia Islamist parties and their militias,” with Iran practically calling the shots (Timesonline, 29 Jul. 2005).  The situation in the Sunni triangle is much the same, except here money and inspiration pour in from West of the border.  For their part, Euro-Islamists (Tamimi and al-Bakri and al-Masri and their ilk), finding themselves to be intellectually bankrupt in a Europe long committed to individual freedoms and rigorous thinking, continue to bombard the airwaves with a steady stream of anti-Western propaganda, viewing everything from the narrow prism of Islam, and stubbornly portraying women’s rights as part of an effort by the West to undermine the Islamic faith.  The aim here is, of course, to deny women a voice of their own and provide justification for their continued subservient position to men like themselves.  So who is really in conspiracy against whom here?

This is the ideological side of this war.  The war is also being fought on two other fronts.  At the street level, women who dare to question male power or who refuse to subjugate their bodies to the dictates of crude and brainless men find themselves verbally abused, harassed, spat at, and even killed; and, in an ultimate act of savagery against the female body, some even have had acid thrown at their faces and legs.

At the political level, Islamists are actively trying to put Iraq through an Islamic makeover, despite the fact that the country has always been multi-religious, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural, and deeply secular.  For women, as well as for the secular Kurds, this is nothing short of a calculated effort at hijacking democracy and paving the way for the eventual creation of a theocracy, Iranian-style. 

One line from the proposed draft constitution reads, “Islam is the official religion of the state and is the main source of legislation.”  Another line reads, “No law that contradicts with its rules can be promulgated.”  In a democracy, religion cannot be the main source of legislation because all religions are patently undemocratic. Democracy provides religion with an environment in which it can be practiced freely or not practiced at all, but democracy cannot allow any one religion to become a society’s absolute authority.  This is because in a democracy matters of faith cannot be state imposed.  The draft constitution does talk about equality of all under the law; it also promises equal rights for women but with a sinister catch—only if those rights do not “violate Shariah,” or Koranic law. 

Iraqi women have taken to the streets because they know exactly what this is all about:  in filtering everything through Islam, in continually carping about Western conspiracies against Islam, in insisting that every choice one makes has to be purely Islamic no matter how impossible or ridiculous that may be, today’s Islamists want to preserve and solidify power in the hands of men. 

This campaign against women, however, is much bigger than what it appears: it is the harbinger of worst things to come—especially for the Kurds.  It is not just women that the Islamists want to control; it is also Kurdistan.  Virtually everything the Kurds stand for—federalism, control over natural resources, women’s rights, separation of religion and state, the Kurds’ right of self-determination—Islamists tend to be overwhelmingly against.  While the Kurds call for a loose federation, the country’s prime minister and his spokesman and the mullahs in Najaf and elsewhere call for a strong centralized government.  While the Kurds rightly refuse to fly the racist and undemocratic Saddam-era flag, the Islamists embrace it.  And while the Kurds have taken important steps towards the creation of a civil society, the Islamists continue to push their region into the fold of theocracy.

And theocracy is exactly what they have in mind for the entire country. Contrary to how they try to market it, the Islamist position is not based on some universal truth: it is just a viewpoint—a very bad one, too, because it is made possible and sustained by prejudice, ignorance, superstition, and prohibition against thinking.  It is a position that cannot even be defended in cultural terms, for in a male-privileging culture, like the one represented and advocated by the Islamists, injustice against women is already built in and sanitized as cultural norms.