1 Genesis of the “Woman Question”

The Colonial State against Its Society and the Rise and
Fall of the New Iraqi Republic (1917–1968)

Introduction
Going back to the period of the formation of the Iraqi state is central to
understanding the present. The social, political, and economic dynamics
characterizing colonial times shaped the genesis of what has been com-
monly called the “woman question”: the way in which women and gender
issues were raised and debated by various social and political actors since
the colonial period. In line with Edward Said’s work on Orientalism, Leila
Ahmed’s seminal Women and Gender in Islam (1992) offers an in-depth
look at the ways in which the “woman question” was shaped in the
colonial period in Egypt. She shows how Islam was defined by the
colonizers as representing the essential difference separating the “civi-
lized” West from the “barbaric” Muslim East. Western colonizers’ depic-
tion of Muslim women as oppressed by a “Muslim patriarchal culture,”
particularly through veiling, had an impact on the way women and gender
issues were posed by nationalists and Muslim reformists. Women sym-
bolized the natural, biological bearer of the nation, which was always
depicted through feminine symbolism – for example, as shown in research
about Egypt (Booth 1998, 2001; Baron 2005).
Family, women, and their condition of life and status represented the
bearer of cultural authenticity and were at the core of colonizer/colonized
discourses. In the postcolonial period, at the time of independence,
women and gender issues were central to the discourses and politics of
modernity and nationalism. Yuval-Davis and Anthias (1989) show how
much gender relations and women’s reproductive roles and identities are
at the core of nationalist projects. Gender relations are central in the
development of nationhood and ideas of citizenship.
Even in countries that were not colonized, such as Turkey, women’s
rights, dress code, and identity were considered essential to the process of
modernization and thus an “issue of civilization,” as described by Göle
(1993). The establishment of modern nation-states in the European
model was thus marked by tensions and contradictions: on the one

42

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Introduction 43

hand, the process involved the modernization of societies along Western

lines (i.e., science, technology, social organization); on the other hand,
the process involved the assertion of national identities based on past
histories and in contrast to Western influences. In the context of the
formation of new, independent Arab states, cultural nationalism and
Islam appeared as practically interchangeable. The establishment of the
personal status codes (or family laws) in the framework of shari‘a was
central to debates surrounding the definition and shape of the “new
nation.” Mounira Charrad (2001) proposes to approach state policies
and gender in the Maghrib region in considering the central importance
of tribal kin groupings. Through the ways in which the personal status
codes or family laws were established, it is possible to read the nature of
the relationship state–tribe alliances. She argues that the more state
politics favor kin-based social groups, the more family laws are conserva-
tive, such as in postcolonial Morocco. Conversely, the more the state
evolves in relative autonomy from tribal kin groupings, the more it pro-
mulgates a liberal family law, such as in Tunisia in 1956. Charrad’s
analysis of the very establishment of a legal frame shaping women’s rights
is very relevant to our study in this chapter on gender issues and feminism
in colonial and postcolonial Iraq.
Several pioneering studies elaborated on and added further complexity
to Ahmed’s reflection on the colonial building of the “woman question.”
In her groundbreaking edited volume Women, Islam and the State (1991),
Deniz Kandiyoti proposes to break with Orientalist and simplistic
approaches to women and gender issues in the Middle East; such
approaches consistently take the position of an undifferentiated Islam
representing the essential and radical cultural difference between the
West and the “Muslim world.” Kandiyoti argues that an adequate analy-
sis of the position of women in Muslim majority societies must be
grounded in a detailed examination of the nation-states’ political projects
and historical transformations. Thus, looking at the establishment of
nation-states in the colonial and postcolonial contexts, along with the
different ways in which the notion of citizenship was elaborated and
experienced, is necessary to understanding women and gender issues in
the Middle East. The postindependence trajectories of modern states, the
variation in the use of Islam in different nationalisms, state ideologies
(nationalism, secularism, etc.) and oppositional social movements, and
the varied processes of economic change are of central relevance to
understanding the conditions of women.
Lila Abu-Lughod’s edited volume, Remaking Women: Feminism and
Modernity in the Middle East (1998), brings significant horizons regarding
the ways in which women deemed “bearer of the nation” participated

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 44 Genesis of the “Woman Question” (1917–1968)

in the debates around their social, economic, and political conditions.

Abu-Lughod also explores the different and complex ways in which “the
West and things associated with it, embraced, repudiated and translated,
are implicated in contemporary gender politics” (1998: 3–31).
Approaching the way in which colonial modernity affected discourses
and politics on gender means for the author of Remaking Women looking
at the ways the ideas and practices deemed “modern” brought by
Europe’s colonies and taken up by the emerging local elites introduced
both forms of emancipation and new forms of social control. It also means
looking at the class dimensions of the “woman question” and at what
kinds of identities – class, national, communal – are shaped through
women and gender discourses and politics. Abu-Lughod deepens Deniz
Kandiyoti’s analysis when she argues that colonial constructions of
“Eastern women” that shaped anticolonial nationalisms and feminist
projects in the Middle East cannot be read through the simplistic rejec-
tion/acceptance of Western-dominant ideas. For feminists in the region,
there has been a selectiveness and reappropriation in the translation of
Western ideas and models into local contexts (1998: 3–31). This precise
issue can be explored for the British Mandate and Hashemite periods
explored in this chapter with the support of the work of Orit Bashkin, Sara
Pursley, and Noga Efrati.
Regarding women’s activism during the colonial period in the Middle
East, in her article, “The Other ‘Awakening’: The Emergence of
Women’s Movements in the Middle East, 1900–1940,” Ellen
Fleischmann (1999) identifies three stages in the evolution of women’s
movements that appeared simultaneously or in succession from the
beginning of the twentieth century to 1940. The first stage was character-
ized by the importance given to the “woman question” in public debates
and the emergence of women’s groups advocating for girls’ education, as
well as women’s welfare and charity groups. The second stage related to
the direct connection between nationalism and women’s emancipation:
the formation of more politicized women’s groups that linked the idea of
citizenship to that of gender equality. The third stage was characterized by
the politics of “state feminism” undertaken by new, independent nation-
alist regimes. In fact, Kumari Jayawardena’s Feminism and Nationalism in
the Third World (1986) shows how much feminist movements in the Third
World emerged within nationalist struggles that drew on anticapitalism
and anti-imperialism. She also argues that such an emergence corre-
sponded with a move toward secularism, which was characterized by
the dominance of leftist ideologies and carried by the emerging modern
indigenous middle classes.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Reflecting on Pioneer Research 45

Much has been written about the emergence of the “woman question”
and the development of women’s activism in Muslim majority countries
during the first decades of independence. However, while much attention
has been paid to places such as Egypt and Iran, very few studies were
dedicated to Iraq. This chapter seeks to examine the relationships among
gender, issues of nationhood, citizenship, and women’s activism in the
context of colonial (British Mandate and Hashemite periods) and early
postcolonial Iraq (1958–68) and explores the following questions: How
was the “woman question” posed in colonial and early postcolonial Iraq?
How and in which contexts did women’s activism develop during that
period?
I start with a reflection on pioneer research in order to introduce my
approach to Iraqi society. Then I explore the British Mandate (1917–32)
and the Hashemite (1932–58) periods and analyze how the nature of the
relationship between the colonial state and different groups such as the
‘ulemas, tribal Shaikhs, and the political forces of the emerging urban
middle class shaped gender politics and women’s political activism. I then
analyze the importance of the Revolutionary period (1958–63) in the
codification of women’s legal rights, and I explore the nature of the
divergences between the two competing women’s movements, the com-
munist and the nationalist. Finally, I show how the achievements in terms
of equalitarian notions of citizenship resulting in the dominance of anti-
imperialist political culture will be undermined by the first Ba‘th coup
(1963–68).

Reflecting on Pioneer Research

Ali al-Wardi (1913–95), the founder of sociology in Iraq, is one of the first
to have done exhaustive analysis of Iraqi society, which appears in his two
pioneer and thrilling works, A Study into the Nature of Iraqi Society (1965)
and Lamahat1 (Insights) (1978). Al-Wardi’s research attempts to define
the principles structuring Iraqi society, providing a modern understand-
ing of Ibn Khaldun’s concept of ‘asabiyya (“social bond and solidarity”).
Three principles structured al-Wardi’s depiction of what he called the
“Iraqi personality”: first, the struggle between sedentary lifestyle and
nomadism, Bedouin lifestyle and urbanism; second, the spirit of social
discord lying behind the fragmentation and divisions of Iraqi society; and
third, the sociocultural schizophrenia of the modern Arab individual, who
is torn between attachment to tradition and religious and ideological

1
Lamahat Ijtima‘iyya min Tarikh al-‘Iraq al-Hadith, translated into English under the title
Social Insights of Iraq Modern History.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 46 Genesis of the “Woman Question” (1917–1968)

ideals, on the one hand, and the social and material realities that are
circumstantial and contingent on modern existence, on the other. Even
if al-Wardi’s analysis can be defined as binary and more inclined to
psychoanalysis than to strict sociology, he still provides an in-depth and
very well documented study of Iraqis’ social and political life from
Ottoman times to the first decade of the new Iraqi state. Although the
gender dimensions of the Bedouin/urban and modern/traditional are
absent from his analysis, it still constitutes an interesting starting point
for thinking about the structure of the social and cultural fabric of Iraqi
society, as marked by oppositional and diverging forces. Al-Wardi’s
depiction of the urban/rural opposition has influenced most studies on
modern Iraq, including Hanna Batatu’s study of Iraqi society.
Batatu’s pioneering work, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary
Movements of Iraq (1978), is not the most instructive research as it pertains
to women and gender issues. This study is the result of two decades of in-
depth research on Iraq’s old landed and commercial classes, communists,
Ba‘thists, and Free Officers; it is a men’s social and political Marxist-
oriented social history of Iraq. In addition, Pierre-Jean Luizard provides a
critique of Batatu’s work as a study focused on what the author considered
to be the movements inclined toward “modernity” – i.e., the Communist
Party, the Ba‘thists, and the Free Officers – and thus entirely overlooks
religious movements (Luizard 2002: 10). Luizard asserts that Batatu did
not take the Constitutionalist movement launched by the Shi‘a ‘ulemas
opposed to British imperialism, or the “defeated” in Luizard’s description,
into serious consideration.2 Batatu’s work also completely neglected the
emergence of the women’s movement within nationalist and communist
ranks in the 1920s; he invokes women’s political and legal rights only
through the writings and activism of male nationalists and communists.
In Batatu’s study, women’s life conditions are only referred to once in
a pitiful description of the “women of the peasants” in the 1920s and
1930s. Here women are described as submissive to their authoritarian
fathers and husbands, as well as bought and sold between tribesmen
(Batatu 1978: 144). Apart from this passage, women and gender issues
are addressed only when the author mentions the intellectual dynamic
around the journal al-Sahifa, which was first published in 1924. Batatu
mentions that in this journal Husain al-Rahal wrote about women’s
liberation and the need to reform archaic and oppressive religious and

2
When Batatu speaks of the Shi‘a resistance of Najaf and the south in the 1920s, he presents
it as mainly a revolt of large landowners who wanted to preserve their privileges and
refused the taxes imposed by the British rather than a proper nationalist uprising.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Reflecting on Pioneer Research 47

cultural practice regarding women and suggested that Marxism was

introduced in Iraq under a feminist garment (Batatu 1978: 396).3
Despite its approach and omissions, Hanna Batatu’s study is an essential
reference for understanding the social, political, and economic structure of
Iraqi state and society. Under the monarchy, Iraq was characterized by the
diversity, or “incohesiveness” in Batatu’s words, of its inhabitants (Batatu
1978: 34) and the formation of its state by the colonial British Empire
“against its society” (Luizard 1991), which relied on the Ottoman Sunni
Arab elite’s marginalization of the Shi‘as and rejection of Kurdish autonomy.
According to Batatu, “religion” in Iraq was an “element of division” rather
than cohesion. However, it is clear from his work that the overlapping
relationships and divisions between ethnic (Arab, Kurd, Turkmen,
Aramean, Armenian), sectarian (Muslim Sunni/ Muslim Shi‘a), and reli-
gious (Muslim, Christian, Jew, etc.) belongings within Iraqi society took
different meanings, forms, and articulations throughout time, space (rural,
urban), and social and political contexts. By reading Batatu, one understands
that being an educated, urban Sunni Arab under the monarchy implied
belonging to the urban social and political elite; in the late 1960s, in contrast,
this identity could mean belonging to the political elite only if affiliated with
the regime by family, tribe, regional kinship, or allegiance to the Ba‘th Party.
Being an Iraqi Jew living in Baghdad until the first half of 1940s4 meant
belonging to the wealthy commercial elite privileged by the British and
entirely integrated into Iraqi society and “culture.” After the establishment
of Israel, being an Iraqi Jew meant belonging to a persecuted minority5
suspected of threatening Arab nationalism. Finally, a Shi‘a Arab under the
monarchy would not be part of the urban, educated political elite.6 A Shi‘a

3
Batatu mentioned that Husain al-Rahal succeeded Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi: the first to call
openly for Iraqi women’s liberation. Batatu also mentioned the leftist and secular journal
Jam‘iyyat al-Ahrar, founded by Yusuf Salman, Da’ud Salman, and Ghali al-Zuwayyed,
which dedicated their 1929 declaration of intent to “the liberation of the Arab woman.”
Women linked to the Communist Party are also mentioned in Batatu’s work – such as
Amina al-Rahal (sister of Husain al-Rahal), who was a member of the Communist Party’s
Central Committee from 1941 to 1943 and presented as one of the first women to take off
the veil in Baghdad. The appointment of Naziha al-Dulaimi – a gynecologist and leader of
the League of Defense of Women’s Rights (‫ﺭﺍﺑﻄﺔ ﺍﻟﺪﻓﺎﻉ ﻋﻦ ﺣﻘﻮﻕ ﺍﻟﻤﺮﺃﺓ‬, Rabitat al-Difa‘ ‘an
huquq al-mar’a) – as Minister of Municipalities (first Arab woman to be appointed as
minister) in 1959 is presented by the author as the result of ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim’s
strategy to please the communists, who were the main political force at the time (Batatu
1978: 221).
4
Until 1947, Jews constituted 15 percent of Baghdad’s population (Batatu 1978: 285)
5
From representing 2.6 percent (117,000) of the Iraqi population in 1947, Iraqi Jews
represented only few thousand just several years later.
6
Mainly urban Sunni Arabs, Christians, and Jews accessed education under the monarchy,
forming the political, administrative, and military elite.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 48 Genesis of the “Woman Question” (1917–1968)

Arab could be part of the small, rich, commercial urban class but would more
likely belong to the poor, exploited rural peasants and tribesmen.
In other words, while reading Batatu, an essential theoretical point
can be argued: ethnic, sectarian, and religious belongings have to be
read in relation to social class, location (rural/urban), kinship relations
(tribes and families), and political and symbolic powers (administra-
tive, military, religious, tribal) while also keeping in mind these
belongings’ changing dynamics. In line with postcolonial feminist
analysis, I argue that being a woman is also being positioned within
these groups and that ethnicity, sect, religion, class, location, kinship
relations, and political and symbolic powers are all gendered
in multiple and complex ways.

Under British Rule (1917–1932) and the Monarchy

(1932–1958): State-Society Relations, Women’s
Rights, and Activism under British Domination

The Colonial State and Multiple Senses of Belonging

The Iraqi population was heterogeneous in its ethnic (Arab, Kurd,
Turkmen, Armenian, etc.), sectarian (Sunni, Shi‘a), and religious
(Muslim, Christian, Jews, etc.) composition. The Iraqi state established
under the British Mandate (1920–32), which began as a military occupa-
tion in 1917, was a contested and weak state. It was born in the face of
popular movements repressing the Constitutionalist movement launched
by the Shi‘a ‘ulemas in the first decade of the twentieth century, the
movement against British occupation, and the Kurdish refusal to be
incorporated into an Arab state. This Iraqi state relied on the ancient
elite of the Ottoman Empire; Sunni Arabs exclusively comprised its
leadership, administration, and army. In Baghdad, Sunni Arab religious,
political, and economic figures – whether ‘ulemas, heads of Tariqas (such
as ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Gilani), Sayyid related to the tribal leadership
(such as ‘Abdul Muhsin al-Sa‘dun), Ashraf, land owners, or wealthy
merchants – generally collaborated with and got involved based on the
wishes of the British occupying authorities. Although some Iraqi Shi‘a
families belonged to the wealthy commercial elite, the urban educated
elite was dominated by Sunni Arabs because they benefited from second-
ary and higher education under both Ottoman and British rule, unlike the
Shi‘as. Christians and Jews were also part of the educated urban elite
because they were favored by the British Empire. The power of the new
state was effective only in urban areas; the countryside was managed by

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Under British Rule (1917–1932) and the Monarchy (1932–1958) 49

tribesmen who, at the time, were more heavily armed than the state
army.7
The Ottoman policy in the nineteenth century was to reduce the power
of the tribes by settling the tribes in permanent villages and playing one
tribe against the other. Many tribesmen resisted by refusing to register
their land. While presumably intending to promote the formation of an
integrated nation-state, the governments both under the Mandate and
under the monarchy (1932–58) perpetuated tribal relations through tribal
and land-tenure policies. These policies halted the decline and disintegra-
tion of tribal leaders’ power, which had been occurring toward the end of the
Ottoman period, by providing administrative and fiscal powers, as well as
land grants, to selected Shaykhs. Such policies enabled the Shaykhs to tax
and control those who subsequently became “their” tribesmen; thus British
policy contributed to the transformation of a free cultivating peasantry into
a population of serfs tied to the land of sharecroppers. (Davis 2005; Dodge
2003; Marr 2004; Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett 1991, 1987; Jabar 2003).
Under the monarchy, nation-building relied on traditional status groups –
ethnic and religious – and overlooked the growth of the new, modern middle
and working classes in the cities. The division in Iraqi society between the
urban use of Civil Law and the rural, predominantly Shi‘a8 use of Tribunal
Criminal and Civil Disputes Regulation (TCCDR), more commonly called
the “tribal law,” is the most revealing aspect of this reliance.
For Zubaida (2002), the four main social groups at the head of the
society – the effendiyya or “urban officials,” the ex-Ottoman officers that
came to Iraq with Faysal, the clerics (Shi‘a and Sunni), and the tribal
leadership of the mid-Euphrates as well as Tigris districts – all constituted
the “fragments” that imagined differently the new nation-state. Thus, as
shown by Fattah (2012: 95–103), Davis (2005), Tripp (2000), and
Bashkin (2009), the social process of becoming Iraqi was very complex
and fluid, a constant negotiation between unequal partners by virtue of
the undemocratic and unsystematic nature of the new Iraqi state.
Moreover, it can be argued that at any given moment in the history of
the Iraqi nation, there has not been a single national narrative or a single
memory of the nation but rather competing visions advanced by the state
and opposition forces.
Since 1921, the constitution had been drafted and redrafted; it was
finally adopted in March 1925. Iraq was to function as a Western-style
constitutional monarchy, with a king, cabinet, two legislative chambers,

7
In 1933, tribes possessed more than 115,000 guns, whereas the army had only 15,000.
8
In 1900, according to Luizard (1991), 75 percent of tribes were Shi‘a Arab and 25 percent
Sunni Arab.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 50 Genesis of the “Woman Question” (1917–1968)

and democratic rights for the population. In practice, the constitutional

system allowed Britain, the royal family, and former Ottoman officers
(Sunnis) to effectively control formal politics for decades. The nascent
state divided Iraqis into “original” and “nonoriginal.” Nationality Law
No. 42 of 1924, which was enacted in the 1925 Constitution (al-Qanun
al-Asasi), deemed “original” Iraqis to be those registered as Ottoman
subjects, the Sunnis, and the Kurds. Shi‘as were registered as “Iranian
dependency” (taba‘iyya) and hence second-class citizens because they
were not Ottoman subjects prior to the establishment of the Iraqi nation-
state due to geographic and political reasons.9 The Law for the Election of
the Constituent Assembly went even further in defining Iraqis as “every
Ottoman subject now residing in Iraq and not claiming foreign citizen-
ship” (Luizard 1991, 2006; Nakash 1994; Shaaban 2010), imparting that
any Sunni, even non-Iraqi, had more rights than Iraqi Shi‘as. Most Shi‘as
had to apply for Iraqi citizenship, even when they belonged to well-known
and established Arab families.10
The Constitution also provided a base for the election system in Iraq
that alienated an important segment of the population; the Electoral Law
of 1924 provided a two-tiered electoral system in which primary electors
were to nominate secondary electors, who were, in turn, to vote for
deputies. Only male taxpayers older than twenty could be primary or
secondary electors, and only male taxpayers older than thirty could
become deputies. Thus the Electoral Law excluded the lower class,
men younger than thirty, and women from serving in Parliament, and
the system was mandated in such a way that it was difficult for men of the
opposition to be elected, whereas, in contrast, tribal leaders were well
represented.
With the formation of the Iraqi state, the Shi‘a movement against the
British became a subaltern memory, whereas elite social groups found
their place in the emerging nation-state. At a time when pan-Arab nation-
alism was a growing ideology in the region and fitted very well many
Sunni Arabs, Iraq’s ideologies regarding issues of nationalism and
9
Some Shi‘as lived in areas far from the central administration, and most wanted to avoid
military conscription and excessive taxation. More generally, many Shi‘as did not feel
related to a Sunni empire that marginalized them.
10
Muhammed al-Jawahiri, the greatest Arab Iraqi poet, had a very famous story about this
matter. Because al-Jawahiri belonged to a very famous Arab family from Najaf, he had to
gather an incredible amount of documentation to prove his “Iraqiness.” He was removed
from his teaching position by Sati‘ al Husri, a theoretician of Arab nationalism and head
of higher-education institutions in 1928, who was well known for speaking Arabic with
a Turkish accent. He accused al-Jawahiri of having written a poem that glorified Iran,
which was already considered an act of treason at the time. For more details, see Luizard
(1991) and Zubaida (1989, 2002), as well as al-Musawi (2006) on the role played by al-
Jawahiri in Iraqi political and intellectual culture.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Under British Rule (1917–1932) and the Monarchy (1932–1958) 51

belonging were diverse and competing during the Hashemite period.

As Luizard (1991), Nakash (1994), and Jabar (2003) explore it in their
research on the Shi‘a movement and Haddad (2010) thouches on in his
study of sectarian relations in Arab Iraq, Sunnis and Shi‘as did not share
a unified national narrative, symbolism, or ideology. As pointed out by
Zubaida (1991, 2002) and Davis (2005), neither Sunnis, Shi‘as, nor
Kurds represented homogeneous groups because class, kin-based posi-
tions, regional belongings, and political affiliations (nationalists, commu-
nists, etc.) were also important to their identities and consciousness.
It has often been argued that when nationalism began to spread as a new
political ideology in Iraq, Sunnis, Shi‘as, and Kurds supported competing
versions of nationalism: Iraqi-oriented nationalism – “Iraqism” – was
favored by the Shi‘as and Kurds; pan-Arab nationalism, linked to the rest
of the predominantly Sunni Arab region, was favored by the Sunnis.
However, according to Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett (1987, 1991), pan-
Arab nationalism was never dominant neither among the intelligentsia, nor
as the ideology promoted by the state, apart from a brief period when it
dominated Iraqi politics in the later 1930s and early 1940s as also argued
by Wien (2006, 2012). If most members of Arab nationalist parties were
Sunnis, and the Iraqism-leaning Communist Party was predominantly
composed of Shi‘as, and the Kurds had their own national memory and
symbolism related to the ideal Kurdish nation-state, Kurdistan, as Zubaida
(2002) and Davis (2005) argue, the Iraqi population was fragmented into
different “nation imaginaries” that were often competitive, conflicting, and
grounded in sectarian, class, and geographic divisions.
Bashkin’s (2009) research on intelligentsia under the monarchy shows
convincingly that these competing imaginaries – pan-Arab nationalism and
Iraqism – were more blurred than it is often thought. She argues that the
question that occupied many intellectuals of this period was not whether
there should be a nation-state but rather what nature this state should
assume to accommodate a variety of hyphenated identities (Iraqi-Shi‘i,
Arab-Jew, Iraqi-Kurdish, etc.). More importantly regarding women and
gender issues, the production of organic intellectuals, on the one hand, and
the inability to control their radicalization, on the other, is one of the
features of the Hashemite period (Bashkin 2009: 127–56).

Women and the Colonial State: Between the Shaikhs and the
‘Ulemas
The Constitution adopted in 1925 divided Iraqi citizens in three different
classes regarding the law and established three different courts: civil and
religious courts in the urban areas and TCCDR for tribesmen in rural areas.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 52 Genesis of the “Woman Question” (1917–1968)

The Constitution divided the religious courts into shari‘a courts for the
Muslims and Spiritual Councils for other religious communities. It affirmed
that shari‘a courts only were to handle matters of personal status – issues of
marriage, divorce, and inheritance (thus related to family and women’s
rights) – and in accordance to each sect. Thus, under the Mandate,
women’s legal rights were divided according to religion (Muslim,
Christian, Jew, etc.), sect (Sunni, Shi‘a), and location (rural, urban).
According to Efrati (2012) and J. Ismael and S. Ismael (2007), the
legal system of colonial Iraq led to the “tribalization of women.”
Women were tribalized in the rural areas not only in their construction
as tribal, subject to separate “tribal law,” but also in the British
involvement in determining tribal law. Even in urban areas, people
could involve “tribal motives” when it came to crimes committed in
the “name of honor.” Two main social groups advocated against the
very establishment of the TCCDR: urban intellectuals – Sunnis and
Shi‘as – depicted it as backward, unfair to women, and halting the
modernization of the emerging nation, whereas tribal Shaikhs consid-
ered it as a direct threat to their power over tribesmen. Although
J. Ismael and S. Ismael (2007) describe tribal law as “inherently
misogynous” and its very existence as detrimental to women, Efrati
(2012: 30–50) introduces a more nuanced analysis on the matter.
The Tribal Code advocated by many Shaikhs during the Mandate
and monarchy periods and aimed at reducing the power of the state
over the tribes was characterized by a certain leniency and pluralism
concerning women’s issues. This leniency could be a reflection of the
reality in the Iraqi countryside where customs regarding women were
dynamic and diverse and not necessarily as harsh toward women as it
was represented by the British and the urban elite. According to Efrati
(2012: 35), extramarital relations did not automatically mandate
a death sentence; in some places, murder for adultery was very excep-
tional, and there was a diversity of views regarding the way to settle
blood disputes in which the handing over of women was not the rule.
The British refused the Tribal Code proposed by the Shaikhs and
wanted to set their own tribal law. Thus tribal law tribalized rural
women not only in their construction as tribal, subject to separate
“tribal law,” but also by the British involvement in determining tribal
law, affecting rural women as harsh and uncompromising.
In the urban areas, in addition to being exposed to the possibility of the
advocacy of “tribal motives,” women were ruled by shari‘a courts, divided
into Sunni and Shi‘a courts. Efrati (2012: 80) explores the reasons why
both the British Mandate and the Iraqi monarchy maintained shari‘a
courts in the cities, despite increasing criticism from urban intellectuals,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Under British Rule (1917–1932) and the Monarchy (1932–1958) 53

especially leftists, demanding a civil code similar to the secular Turkish

judicial system. Examining the argument developed by Charrad based
on North African countries, which found that the breadth of state-tribe
relations correlated directly with the liberalness and egalitarianism of
family law, Efrati highlighted that the state-mosque relationship was
central under the monarchy. It is tempting to argue that because the
Iraqi ruling elite emerged from the Mandate period in close alliance
with tribal kin groupings, the state was about to adopt a conservative
personal-status legislation that protected extended male-centered
patrilineage. Nevertheless, because the personal-status legislation
governed only the urban population (Anderson 1953), the rest of the
population was ruled by the TCCDR; in reality, it was the
state-‘ulemas relation that was central to debates around personal-
status legislation. Preserving shari‘a courts allowed the influential and
respected ‘ulemas class, from which the qadis were drawn, a share in the
country’s administration and thus ensured their loyalty and support to
the ruling elite.
The dominant trend of British politics under the Mandate and in the
following years of the monarchy, as I will show it in the next section, was
to emphasize the “different needs” of Iraqi society and to establish
a differentiated legal system in which citizens were granted different
“rights” according to their religious and sectarian belonging as well as
to their location and gender. Differences existed among women: Muslim
and Christian women were not granted the same rights regarding perso-
nal matters, neither Sunni nor Shi‘a, and the gap was even stronger
between rural and urban women. This differentiated system was highly
criticized among the intelligentsia, and the emergence of women’s orga-
nizations challenged the fragmented and uneven colonial system.

The “Woman Question” under the Monarchy: Education and

Political Activism
As shown by al-Shaikh Da‘ud (1958), al-Derbendi (1968), and al-Zublef
and Said’s (1980) study dedicated to women’s education and literacy
from 1920 to 1979, as well as by Pursley (2012, 2013), the British did not
push for progress in women’s education. The first girls’ school was
opened in 1899 with the support of the famous poet Jamil Sidqi al-
Zahawi (1863–1936).11 The evolution of primary education at the
11
Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi’s very famous article, “Women and Her Defense,” criticizes the
wearing of the traditional black ‘abaya, men’s mistreatment of women, and men’s
privileges in marriage, divorce, and inheritance. This article provoked his dismissal
from Baghdad Law School.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 54 Genesis of the “Woman Question” (1917–1968)

beginning of the twentieth century, girls’ secondary education12 in the

1930s, and mixed education beginning in 1928 were limited to the urban
elite composed mainly of Sunni Arabs; Christians and Jews funded their
own schools. In 1932, Baghdad Medical School welcomed its first female
student; the faculty of law also accepted Sabiha al-Shaikh Da‘ud in 1936.
Omnia Shakry describes the debates around motherhood and women’s
education in colonial Egypt among the intelligentsia as characterized by
“cultural translation and hybridizations” instead of a bad copy of the
European model (Shakry 1998: 126–70). The same can be said regarding
the debates around girls’ education in Hashemite Iraq, although it was
clearly marked by the will of Western-aligned Iraqi bureaucrats and
Western, mainly American advisors to “produce gender differences,”
according to Pursley (2012: 119–41). While in the 1920s the education
system was dominated by Arab nationalists such as Sati‘ al-Husri, who
view education as a way to produce future nationalists, men and women,
since the 1930s the implementation of American policymakers’ recom-
mendation by Iraqi officials introduced differences in boys’ and girls’
curricula, with courses related to domesticity for girls. This resulted in
a situation where the more girls mixed with boys and women with men in
the public sphere, the greater was the impetus to produce differences in
their learned modes of being and thinking. According to Pursley (2012:
119–41), one aspect of the shift was a conceptual reorientation of
women’s household labor from the sphere of production to that
of consumption at a time when foreign goods were invading the growing
consumer market. As shown by Shakry (1998: 126–70) in the case of
colonial Egypt, “ideal mothers” should carry the model of the bourgeois
domestic way of life, and in Iraq as well, ideas of creating new desires and
promoting bourgeois domesticity were at the core of these reforms of the
education system built on gender differences.
However, despite these measures of mandatory female education in
domesticity, in the 1950s, the political radicalization of society, especially
students, created a sense among Iraqi officials that the education system,
instead of producing modern mothers raising strong and healthy citizens,
was producing a generation of educated Iraqi women who were resistant
to marriage, domesticity, and motherhood and who were more attracted
to political activism than managing a household (Pursley 2012: 119–41)
More generally, the political elite aligned with Western powers was extre-
mely worried about the politicization of the youth attracted by the ideas of
the radical anti-imperialist left (Pursley 2013).

12
The first secondary school for girls was opened in 1931.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Under British Rule (1917–1932) and the Monarchy (1932–1958) 55

Bashkin (2008) shows how much writing about women in Hashemite

Iraq became an important mode of political and social identification.
It was used to denote whether one belonged to the left or the right, to
the religious or the secular camp, and how one conceptualized Iraqi law,
independence, and electoral structures. She argues that the changes in the
representations of women mirrored the radicalization of the Iraqi intelli-
gentsia. While during the 1920s and 1930s the conversation about gender
roles was mostly conducted among men who debated education, seclu-
sion, veiling, and domesticity, in contrast, in the 1940s and 1950s, social
democrats, communists, and radical pan-Arabists used the mistreatment
of women as a way to criticize the Hashemite state. These groups argued
that the Hashemite state preserved the tribal and premodern, where
women’s conditions represented the markers of the state’s indifference
toward Iraqi society. As in colonial Egypt (Shakry 1998: 126–70), the
discourse on “women’s backwardness” in Iraq symbolized the “nation’s
backwardness”; the ways in which women were viewed in Iraq were
related to other sets of representations, such as those of peasants and
tribesmen, and, more broadly, to the ways in which the Iraqi intelligentsia
imagined the nation. For Bashkin (2008), in the 1940s, this discourse was
far more specifically Iraqi than in the past, although the transregional
dimensions remained powerful as the intelligentsia spoke about the pro-
blems of Arab women and hybridized colonial perceptions of Muslim
women.
According to Batatu (1978), Bashkin (2008), and Efrati (2012), leftists,
Marxists, and communists advocated for women’s rights as part and parcel
of the struggle for social justice and equality – the most egalitarian concep-
tion of women’s rights – whereas nationalist and liberal political groups
considered women’s social and political rights (education and the vote) as
a means to “educate” and “raise nationalist consciousness” in families. For
nationalists and liberals, women primarily represented “mothers” and “edu-
cators” of the young generation, and they could be granted political rights
only through a “gradual modernization” because they were not deemed
ready for full political rights. In Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries, al-
Nahda al-Niswiyya (“the Women’s Awakening”) advocated for women’s
emancipation within a modernist, reformist understanding of religion and
marked a rupture with traditional kin-based powers, criticizing “archaic
traditions” and “tribal mentality.” The British played a key role in the
antisuffrage movement, especially through some of its leading representa-
tives – such as Gertrude Bell and Edgar Bonham-Carter. Bell, for example,
considered that raising children was women’s essential task and described
the school opened by the British authorities in Baghdad in January 1920 as
a way to “create proper mothers” (Al-Derbendi 1968; Efrati 2012).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 56 Genesis of the “Woman Question” (1917–1968)

According to Efrati (2004, 2012), it appears that in Iraq – unlike other

Arab countries – faith-based charitable societies did not precede secular,
more overtly social and political organizations: the first women’s orga-
nization was secular, and a number of organizations developed later in
parallel. In addition, the emergence of new women’s organizations on
the “nationalist stage” had less to do with “periods when nationalist
feelings were at their peak” and more to do with governmental control.
The anti-British movement in Baghdad was composed of the few
Sunni Arabs opposed to British rule (e.g., Shaikhs Ahmed Da‘ud and
Yusef al-Suwaydi), Shi‘a clerics (e.g., Muhammed al-Sadr), and wealthy
Shi‘a merchants (e.g., Ja‘far Abu al-Taman). Women’s participation in
all movements against the British – the Shi‘a-led 1920 Revolution and
even more the 1948 al-Wathba and the 1952 intifada – revealed their
politicization especially with the expansion of the education system. Nadi
al-Nahda al-Nisa’iyya (“the Club of Women’s Awakening”) was the first
women’s organization, which was founded in 1923 and composed of
bourgeois women from the Baghdad urban elite.
The British, along with the Iraqi monarchy they brought to power,
created a small class of powerful, semifeudal landlords, marginalized
the tribal population, and discriminated against the Shi‘a population,
giving rise to growing communist and nationalist sentiments. These
movements thus found a claim to unite their advocacy for social
justice and liberation: the end of British domination. From the
1930s to the 1950s, the anti-British movement had a unifying effect
and contributed to the weakening of sectarian and religious divisions
(Bashkin 2008; Davis 2005). Following this evolution, women’s cha-
rities and political groups, both nationalist and communist, became
involved in the burgeoning transnational Middle Eastern and Arab
nationalist women’s networks; such networks advocated for women’s
political and legal rights alongside the Palestinian and anti-imperialist
causes. When the monarchy was overthrown in 1958, Iraqis were
more than ready to demonstrate, especially through women and gen-
der issues, that their new revolutionary regime was no less radical than
that of their Arab and Muslim neighbors.

Nationalist Feminists and Communist Feminists: Competing

and Overlapping Trends
The Iraqi Women’s Union (al-Ittihad al-Nisa’i al-‘Iraqi) was founded in
1945 after the Arab Women’s Congress in Cairo. This union was mainly
composed of bourgeois women close to male nationalist elites and advo-
cated for women’s rights in the Constitution, marriage, and work, as well

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Under British Rule (1917–1932) and the Monarchy (1932–1958) 57

as the development of girls’ and women’s education. Simultaneously,

women’s groups linked to the Communist Party gathered in the League
for the Defense of Women’s Rights (Rabitat al-difa‘ ‘an Huquq al-Mar’a)
and advocated for social justice, anti-imperialism, and women’s rights.
All organizations that made up what was commonly called the “women’s
movement” organized literacy and charity programs, including in rural
areas, as well as civil and political rights campaigns. In the beginning of
the 1950s, campaigns were launched by the women’s movement
demanding that the Iraqi government implement women’s
social, economic, and political equality; reform legislation on private
matters; abolish the TCCDR; and reform the Constitution. Moreover,
the leftist secular atmosphere in Iraq – the Communist Party dominated
the political scene from the 1940s to the 1970s – helped to somewhat
bridge sectarian divisions and spread egalitarian conceptions of citizen-
ship and women’s rights.
In the mid-1940s, women’s organizations had broadened, strength-
ened, and to an extent institutionalized. Two trends characterized the
women’s movement landscape – the nationalist feminist and
the communist feminist. While their activists seemed to work
together as part of the Women’s Union, the government crackdown
against left-wing organizations in 1947 shifted their activism (Efrati
2008: 65, 2012: 137–62). The Iraqi Women’s Union yielded under
this pressure and removed the representatives of the leftist Women’s
League Society from its directorate. While Iraqi Women’s Union
received support from the government and royal family and remained
a relatively small, elitist organization loyal to the regime, the
Women’s League acted underground after failed attempts to obtain
government permission under the name of the League for the
Defense of Women’s Rights in 1952. The League was composed of
leaders from the lower middle class and very much influenced by the
radical anti-imperialist Iraqi Communist Party. Two personalities of
the time represent these two trends, sometimes aligned and often in
competition, Naziha al-Dulaimi, who remained vocal regarding the
repression of the government of leftist activists, and Sabiha al-Shaikh
Da‘ud, who in contrast stayed silent regarding the shift in women’s
activism due to governmental pressure.
Naziha al-Dulaimi, in her book, al-Mar’a al-Iraqiyya (Iraqi Woman)
(1952), posed the first and dominant competing narrative on Iraqi
women’s activism. Here al-Dulaimi puts forward a short study of the
conditions of women’s lives in Iraq in the 1940s, which uses social class
as an analytical framework. Al-Dulaimi was a gynecologist by trade,
a prominent figure of the League for the Defense of Women’s

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 58 Genesis of the “Woman Question” (1917–1968)

Rights,13 the first Iraqi (and Arab) woman minister,14 and prominent
communist activist; hence her reading and experiences with activism
differed greatly from those of the nationalist elite. She considered
women in the al-fallahin (“peasant”) class as the most deprived of rights.
She depicted the “double servitude” of these peasant women: they were
enslaved and exploited by male domination and tribal rules and by class
oppression. When analyzing women of the land-owning, bourgeois and
working classes, al-Dulaimi noted that although the conditions of eco-
nomic oppression varied, women of all classes were oppressed by mar-
riages in which they were considered possessions rather than
individuals, as well as social injustice and imperialism. Using
a Marxist and early feminist understanding of justice and equality, al-
Dulaimi tackled issues of maternal and child protection, marriage, and,
indeed, prostitution – a subject on which she did not employ
a moralizing analysis of sexuality but rather pushed the boundaries far
beyond even that which Iraqi women activists would be able to cross
today.
In this book, al-Dulaimi situated qadiyyat al-mar’a (the “woman ques-
tion”) as a fundamental part of the struggle for class and national libera-
tion; thus her argumentation was far more radical and challenging of the
status quo than that of al-Shaikh Da‘ud. Al-Dulaimi and women’s activist
of the left believed in the line of the leader of the Iraqi Communist Party,
Yusuf Salman Yusuf, that Iraq has lost its sovereignty to imperialist
forces, who had fortified their position by allying with local reactionaries.
Getting rid of the whole system thus was the only way to attain liberation
for both men and women. Therefore, feminist activists of the radical left
rejected the idea of “gradual modernization” promoted by the pro-British
nationalist elite in power and considered that only a radical political
change could put Iraq on the road to becoming modern, which meant
achieving economic prosperity, technological progress, social justice,
rights for women, and political freedom. For al-Dulaimi, women of the
bourgeoisie could not escape the lot of their less-privileged sisters because
their marriages too had the characteristics of a financial transaction
between their fathers and their future husbands which did not allow
them any real say about their marriages. The discourse and activism of
the women of the League on less-privileged women were characterized by
a willingness to address women’s everyday and concrete problems.

13
The League for the Defense of Women’s Rights became the Iraqi Women’s League in
1958.
14
She was appointed in 1959 at the Ministry of the Municipalities.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Under British Rule (1917–1932) and the Monarchy (1932–1958) 59

Sabiha al-Shaikh Da‘ud’s landmark book, Awwal al-Tariq (1958),15

represents the second competing trend of feminism in Iraq, the nationalist
feminist. Her book was published three months before the Revolution
that ended the monarchy and is considered one of the first feminist books
in Iraq. It provides interesting insights into the social, economic, and
political realities of women under the British Mandate (1920–32) and
the monarchy (1932–58). Al-Shaikh Da‘ud, the first female lawyer in
Iraq, belonged to a prominent Sunni family16 and provided an Arab
nationalist version of Iraqi social and political history17; her work over-
looks underground, especially communist, women’s groups.
Nevertheless, her study is the first account detailing the gender dimen-
sions of Iraq’s modernization in the decades after the establishment of the
Iraqi state, as well as of such modernization’s social, economic, and
political realities at the turn of the first Republic (July 14, 1958). Al-
Shaikh Da‘ud’s work brings to light the emergence, among urban edu-
cated Iraqi women, of a growing nationalist awareness that placed women
and gender issues at the core of aspirations for modernization and
national liberation. It gives fascinating details about how women’s rights
issues – such as access to education and the work sphere, veiling, and legal
and political rights – structured the emerging nationalist consciousness
and the idea of the “new nation” among the elite. The politics and
representations of gender issues, along with the evolution of women’s
realities, illustrate the vision of “the nation” for certain social and political
elites. Thus al-Shaikh Da‘ud’s study poses fundamental considerations
about how to approach women and gender in Iraq: to equally consider
women and gender’s material, ideological, and political dimensions in the
colonial and postcolonial context of nation-state building.
Al-Shaikh Da‘ud and the Iraqi Women’s Union activists were more
accommodating to the government’s “gradual modernization” discourse
that considered that women needed to progress before they could be
granted full citizenship rights. As shown by Efrati (2012: 137–62) and
expressed clearly in Awwal al-Tariq, women of the Union used the

15
Awwal al-Tariq ila al-Nahda al-Niswiyya fi al-‘Iraq (First Steps of Women’s Awakening in
Iraq), al-Rabita, March 1958.
16
Her father was al-Shaikh Ahmed Da’ud, a Sunni religious figure and nationalist leader,
and her mother was Naima Sultan Hamoodeh, one of the founders of Nadi al-Nahda al-
Nisa’iyya (the “Women’s Renaissance Club”), in1923, the first Iraqi women’s group.
17
The author draws a very elitist, urban, upper-class reading of women’s social, eco-
nomic, and political history; she overlooks rural and underprivileged women’s realities,
although she does draw a dramatic picture of women of the countryside in her chapter,
“Al-Iraqiyya fi al-Rif” (“The Iraqi Woman in the Countryside”). Throughout al-Shaikh
Da’ud’s study, she gives an apologetic view of the monarchal family and the Sunni Arab
nationalist elite.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 60 Genesis of the “Woman Question” (1917–1968)

rhetoric of the “new woman” active and assertive and the “modern
woman” – educated, professional, patriotic, and capable citizen willing
to build the modern state – to promote the expansion of women’s legal
and political rights. As pointed out by Efrati, these activists from the elite
families conducted their struggle in an “orderly manner” through legal
and constitutional channels: asking the government to expand education
and health services. In order not to be perceived as “too radical,” they
insisted on the fact that they did not want to “compete with men” in
power leadership but “participate in the country’s problems,” such as
poverty and illiteracy, and act as “mothers” demanding their rights to
participate in the drafting of laws for their sons and daughters, as a natural
extension of their maternal duties that would not threaten the family
structure, let alone the political and social order.
Awwal al-Tariq sections dedicated to the contribution of Sunni and
Shi‘a religious thinkers to the defense of women’s rights contrast with Al-
Dulaimi’s silence about religion. This use of a Muslim feminist rhetoric is
very typical of transnational nationalist narratives of the time that relied
on the work of Muslim reformers to advocate for an indigenous Muslim
modernity. However, Al-Shaikh Da‘ud seemed to have been influenced
by Al-Dulaimi on the condition of the peasant women as she also evoked
in her book the “double servitude” that characterizes her life. This precise
issue can be analyzed through the argument of hybridization of the
different nationalist narratives – pan-Arab and Iraqi – analyzed by
Bashkin (2009: 194–228). The division between the civilized nation –
the urban – and the uncivilized – the rural – structured the nationalist
narrative as the difference between the capital and the rif structures’
nationalist visions of the nation. This shows that despite their very differ-
ent ideologies, agendas, and proposed solutions to change the political
order of the time, nationalist and communist narratives also shared
common visions regarding the relationship between modernity and
nationhood.
In 1954, the government intensified its repression of the opposition,
dismantling hundreds of societies and clubs and banning the existence of
unions. The Iraqi Women’s Union had to be reestablished as a single
society rather than as a federation; it would be called the Women’s Union
Society (Jam‘iyyat al-Ittihad al-Nisa’i). Members of the Union and the
League now, after this repression campaign, explicitly criticized the gov-
ernment gender discourse that constructed women as noncitizens: the
TCCDR that symbolized the absence of state intervention in matters of
personal status and women’s disenfranchisement. This evolution echoes
the radicalization of the intelligentsia now dominated by the radical anti-
imperialist left; it also prepared the ground for the institution of a legal

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 The New Iraqi Republic (1958–1963) 61

frame regarding personal matters uniting all Iraqis – rural and urban,
Sunnis and Shi‘as – the Personal Status Code (PSC).

The New Iraqi Republic (1958–1963): The Foundational

Years for Women’s Activism, Legal and Political Rights

The Postcolonial State: Toward an Indigenous Modern Nation-State

The military coup (July 14, 1958) that toppled the monarchy and led to
the radical regime of ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim (1958–63) furthered this
evolution, contributing to the consolidation of the middle class and the
weakening significance of ethnic and religious belonging. Qasim put oil
revenues toward efforts to reduce poverty, build social housing, and
institute a welfare-state system. Moreover, the power of tribesmen and
the significance of ethnic (Arab/Kurd) and sectarian (Sunni/Shi‘a)
belongings weakened for several reasons: first, increasing rural to urban
migration18 and Qasim’s various land reform policies, which affected the
power of tribesmen, the clerical class, and the aristocratic class,
and second, the growing sectarian heterogeneity of the middle class due
to the gradual incorporation of rural Iraq into the state and the national
market. Although oil revenues were weaker in the 1940s and 1950s than
in the 1970s, they were still sufficient to develop the state, modernize
education, and update essential infrastructures, but the monarchy
(1932–58) operated through a clientelist system open only to selected
businessmen. The dismantling of the institutions for nation-building,
such as Parliament and the Upper House, pushed the new revolutionary
regime to rely mainly on the military and popular support for its power.
Although Qasim’s regime lasted fewer than five years and made no
attempt to establish institutions for democratic participation, it did
enact openly nationalist and socialist policies that benefited the poorest
and contributed to unifying Iraqi society across communal belongings.
According to Bashkin (2011), this period was also marked by a certain
hybridization of pan-Arab nationalism and Iraqi nationalism, although
the latter was predominant at a moment when international anticolonial
leftist activism was also present in the vision.
Moreover, the revolutionary regime initiated radical reforms that
strengthened the urban, modern middle class, questioning traditional
powers, both tribal and religious. Socioeconomic reforms favored the
poorest and aimed to narrow the gap between the upper classes and the

18
In 1947, 35 percent of the population was urban; in 1977, that number jumped to
65 percent.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 62 Genesis of the “Woman Question” (1917–1968)

impoverished population. Medinat al-Thawra (actually Medinat al-Sadr)

is one of the most commonly referred to of such measures; its aim was to
welcome the impoverished population – known as al-sharagawa, who
hailed originally from the southern tribal regions and were either already
living in the slums of Baghdad or were newcomers – into modern urban
housing. Three of Qasim’s measures symbolized the rupture with tradi-
tional aristocratic, tribal, and religious powers. First, the abolition of the
TCCDR ended tribesmen’s power in rural areas and enhanced the state’s
power. Second, land reforms consisted of the appropriation and redis-
tribution of land from the clerical and aristocratic classes to the impover-
ished population, provoking a huge backlash from the classes that had lost
some of their privileges. Third, the enactment of the new family law
provoked much criticism among the ‘ulemas, both Sunni and Shi‘a, who
feared the radical questioning of their authority. According to J. Ismael
and S. Ismael (2007), through all these reforms, the framework of feud-
alism and tribalism in Iraq was effectively undermined.

Women Mobilizing in Revolutionary Times

The family law, in the form of the Personal Status Code (PSC),19 repre-
sented a field of struggle between different political elites, the women’s
movement, and the state (Charrad 2011) in the postcolonial Middle East.
In Iraq, as Efrati (2005, 2012) points out, the adoption of a PSC in Law
No. 188 (promulgated in December of 1959) was not only the product of
the revolutionary elite surrounding ‘Abd Al- Karim Qasim, which had
ended both the monarchy and British colonial domination over the coun-
try, but the adoption of an openly egalitarian and unified PSC also marked
the questioning of ‘ulemas and tribal leaders’ control over private matters;
both the shari‘a courts and the TCCDR were abolished. Very importantly,
the PSC also marked the beginning of women activists’ inclusion in the
process of negotiating for their rights. Many articles of the PSC openly
opposed religious – Muslim, Christian, Jewish – jurisprudence (Khayun &
Badurzeki 2006). By adopting measures such as putting the intestate
inheritance rights for male and female heirs under the Civil Code and
thus granting through an indirect mechanism gender equality in that matter
in certain cases, severe limitations on polygamy, making eighteen the legal
age for marriage, and protecting women from arbitrary divorce (Anderson
1960: 546), the state was sending a clear message of its authority over this
new Republic to the ‘ulemas and Shaikhs. Women were also given political

19
More precisely, the PSC addresses issues of marriage, divorce, childbirth, paternity,
custody, maintenance, bequests, and succession.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 The New Iraqi Republic (1958–1963) 63

rights, though limited, for the first time: the right to vote and run for office.
As mentioned previously, Qasim appointed Naziha al-Dulaimi Minister of
Municipalities in 1959, the first woman Iraqi and Arab minister.
Law No. 188 was a text clearly stating its routings within shari‘a and
uniting Sunni and Shi‘a jurisprudences, granting the authority to a judge
appointed by the state to rule on personal matters without the intercession
of ‘ulemas. Moreover, according to Efrati (2012), women activists, such
as the Iraqi Women’s League (al-Rabita) activist Naziha al-Dulaimi,
participated to the drafting of the PSC alongside legal specialists and
Sunni and Shi‘a ‘ulemas who elaborated it straight after the July 14,
1958 Revolution. Thus the PSC was the result of women activists’
demands of and participation in the legislative process. Under Qasim,
the political field was open, but sporadic repressions did occur. For
example, communist organizations, which dominated the political scene
at the time, were authorized and then forbidden a few years later; some
communist leaders were also brought to power, and then dismissed
shortly after due to Qasim’s fear of competition. Nevertheless, women
activists were very vocal during this period and advocated to extend
women legal rights: forbidding extralegal marriage contracts, outlawing
judges from marrying girls under the legal age, reforming articles related
divorce and polygamy that privilege men’s rights, and extending women’s
rights to child custody.
Maqbula B., seventy-four, is one of al-Rabita’s oldest and most active
women activists. Maqbula belongs to an urban Sunni Arab family from
‘Ana that emigrated to al-Kerrada, central Baghdad, at the beginning of
the 1950s. Born in 1938, she was twenty years old when the Revolution
began; at that time, Maqbula was already an active member of the
Communist Party, and her mother was a founding member of
al-Rabita. Prior to the Revolution, Maqbula was drawn to communist
activism by the Palestinian cause. After the Revolution, she dedicated her
activism to women’s rights and the establishment of the PSC:
After the establishment of the Personal Status Code, I dedicated my struggle to
the defense of women’s rights. Me and the other activists, we started with the
struggle against analphabetism, and with working in the countryside, especially
against polygamy. We went to the women of the countryside and informed them
of their rights. While peasant women worked as much as men, they ignored most
of their rights, like for example her husband was obliged to ask for her permission
in order to marry a second wife. We were rejected by some husbands there,
because they thought we were bringing disorder to their families. We were telling
women that men were not their superiors, and that they were not obliged to obey
them, neither to obey their sons. We were telling them that they were equal to
men. It was a difficult struggle, and many women did not accept our ideas.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 64 Genesis of the “Woman Question” (1917–1968)

We relied heavily on the fact that the Personal Status Code was elaborated by all
the religious schools and the ‘ulemas from all of them. The Personal Status Code
was legitimate and popular because of the support of the religious leaders, and
because it was not against shari‘a. The committee that drafted it was composed of
jurists and fuqeha’. We obtained, in 1959, equal shares in inheritance. This
changed in 1963 with the Ba‘th and then with Saddam.
Maqbula participated in the formation of the well-known lejna hal al-
mashakel (the “problems resolution committee”), which were dedicated
to mediating in private matters and supporting women within the family
sphere. Being from an urban, educated Sunni Arab family, Maqbula had
good connections with women of the nationalist elite and mentioned that
some al-Rabita’s actions were supported by or even conducted in partner-
ship with other women’s groups. The effervescence of women’s political
activism in Iraq following the establishment of the Iraqi Republic was also
described by Al-Ali, in her chapter “Living with the Revolution” (2007:
56–108). The women of the same generation interviewed by Al-Ali also
spoke to the politically and socially revolutionary atmosphere, as al-
Rabita emerged as a prominent women political organization.

Indigenous Secularism: Gender and Nation

This period also signified a time of secularization: traditional religious
practices were on the wane, and the adoption of nonreligious ideologies,
such as communism, Marxism, and secular ideologies, dominated the
political culture. For example, the year after the Revolution, Shi‘a parti-
cipation in communist-led political life was at an unprecedented high,
absorbing the energies and attention of vast masses, especially among the
middle, lower, and manual, urban, and rural classes (Jabar 2003: 75;
Nakash 1994). Thus, in 1959, pilgrimages to Karbala and Najaf – the
cornerstones of Shi‘a religious rituals – were at their lowest-ever number,
clearly indicating that traditional religious practices and rituals were not
strong at the time.
Nevertheless, I argue that the symbolic power of religion, especially
as it pertains to women and gender issues, did not completely lose its
status but instead was reformulated into the nationalist, socialist, and
anti-imperialist framework. For example, the way Qasim himself advo-
cated for the PSC, especially the more radical articles, such as the one
on inheritance, is very revealing. In March 1960, Qasim gave an inter-
view on the issue in Al-Thawra, he insisted on showing his
“Muslimness” by indicating that he had “fasted Ramadan since the
age of ten” and “knows the Qur’an by heart.” In response to “the men of
religion’s” protest on the issue of inheritance, Qasim developed an

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 The New Iraqi Republic (1958–1963) 65

argument that would be deemed by many today as Muslim feminist. He

directly quoted the verse of the Qur’an related to inheritance, inter-
preting it as an exhortation (wisaya) and not a command. He compared
this verse with other verses from the Qur’an – those related to the
punishment of thieves and fornication – and pointed out that the verb
used in the latter verses clearly indicates a divine “command.” He then
said:
I repeat: some of my brothers the men of religion have visited me and objected to
sections of this code. And I recited to them these noble verses and we argued
about them. I said: In so far as the salaries of civil servants are concerned, and our
own salaries and even yours, you men of religion, both before and after the
Revolution, these are derived from the proceeds of taxation, including the duty
on wines. But has one of you refused to receive his salary? So long as our aim in
enacting this code is the service of the nation as a whole, there is no doubt that the
Creator will always help us and support us. (Anderson 1960: 562–63)
In addition to revealing the symbolic power of religion in the postcolo-
nial period and its use in nationalist terms, the Muslim feminist rhetoric
used by Qasim showed how much gender issues were at the core of the
“new nation.” Questioning the power of the ‘ulemas, as well as affirming
the identity of the new nation, was symbolized through reforming gender-
related laws and granting women more rights. Here, in the framework of
the formulation of the postcolonial state with conflicts between
Westernization and cultural authenticity, the link between gender and
nation appears very clearly. As shown by Jayawardena (1986) and others,
women were represented as “bearers of the nation,” their issues and rights
symbolizing the progress of the new nation obtained in the framework of
anti-imperialist struggles.

Consensual Memory on Revolutionary Times: Women’s Liberation

and the Unity of the Nation
The oldest women activists I interviewed, who were born either at the end
of the 1930s or early 1940s, recalled this period with nostalgia and
admiration. It is described as an era characterized by both political open-
ness and women’s emancipation and national unity, especially regarding
religious and sectarian divisions. My interviewees described this period as
foundational to and influential in their political awareness and activism,
especially regarding women and gender issues. Rabab H., a leading figure
of al-Rabita and active in the postinvasion women’s movement, was
twelve years old when the Revolution started. She was living with her
apolitical Arab Christian family in Basra at the time.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 66 Genesis of the “Woman Question” (1917–1968)

I can say that the 14th July 1958 was a turning point in my life. I considered it as
a turning point because the July Revolution introduced us to a new era character-
ized by an opening for the people, for their participation in social life in general.
It was an opening for women’s participation, her liberation from the veil and the
‘abaya, and the opening of education to her. It was also the emergence of new
social and working movements, such as the Students’ Union, the Women’s
Union, and movements that pushed citizens’ participation in social life. I started
my involvement very young, in secondary school and then in high school, with the
Students’ Union.
Haifa F. – a sociologist and professor at Baghdad University and
member of al-Rabita – was sixteen years old when the Revolution
began. She belongs to a nationalist Baghdadi family with close ties to
leftist and communist political groups at the time. She recalled participat-
ing in demonstrations for “social justice” in secondary school. Haifa
described this period as very culturally and intellectually rich and domi-
nated by leftist ideas: “everyone was reading a lot” and “open minded.”
She described the Communist Party as having “a civilizing role” for the
population, and of the gender norms during this period, she said: “[a]t the
time, the veil was internal. People were well mannered. Boys were not
harassing girls even when they were not veiled, and no matter what they
were wearing.”
Nashwa A. – a member of a women’s rights organization in Baghdad –
was fifteen years old when the Revolution began. She belonged to
a prominent Shi‘a religious family from Karbala. Her father was one of
the leading Shi‘a nationalist figures who opposed the British under the
monarchy and participated in the 1920 Revolution. Nashwa’s family
moved to the Medinat al-Huriyya neighborhood in Baghdad after the
Revolution. One of her brothers, a communist activist, was jailed under
Nuri al-Sa‘id. Nashwa recalls that the time of Qasim was a period of great
happiness and expressed admiration for the leader: “We were so happy for
the revolution; my brother was jailed under Nuri al-Sa‘id. I loved ‘Abd al-
Karim Qasim’s personality, and appreciated him very much. After the
14th of July, the houses were open; there was no stealing at all. ‘Abd al-
Karim was clean.”
Whether expressing admiration for the Revolution’s leader or its
reforms, most of the activists I interviewed – from various political,
regional, ethnic, and religious backgrounds – remembered this as a time
of national unity. Maha S. – born in 1946 and a prominent women activist
in Baghdad – was a teenager during the Qasim period. At the time, she
lived in Nasiriyah with her mother, father, and four brothers and sisters.
Her family emigrated from a Christian village north of Mosul and settled
there until the mid-1970s. Maha’s father worked as a merchant,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 The New Iraqi Republic (1958–1963) 67

opened a shop, and was a communist activist. She speaks of the

Nasiriyah period in her life with great nostalgia and a strong feeling
of belonging:
We never experienced any discrimination there, neither religious nor communal,
despite the fact that my father was selling alcohol. Nobody ever criticized that, and
we were highly respected and loved in Nasiriyah . . . The atmosphere was very
political, and culturally very rich. We were organizing a competition for who could
learn popular poetry and al-mu‘alaqat the best. In high school, we all knew al-mu
‘alaqat by heart. The atmosphere was towards political readings and debates
between boys and girls. I remember that there were no distinctions between us,
neither between religions or between boys and girls. This way of thinking, this
shared culture was dominant; there was no distinction between Christians and
Muslims. Initially, I did not even know that there were mazahib [“religious
schools”] for either Christians or Muslims.
Maha S. gives a very emotional and tender recollection of her youth
Nasiriyah at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s. She speaks
of the fact that despite here being a Christian, the atmosphere of sharing
and unity was so strong in the Arab Shi‘a–dominated south that she was
even invited to participate in Shi‘a rituals:
I remember laughing today that I performed ‘Arus al-Qasim in the qraiyyat [Shi‘a
religious ceremonies]. I was seen as pretty, and they imagined that ‘Arus al-Qasim
was very pretty, so they would cover me and make me participate in the qraiyya . . .
This city, Nasiriyah, I consider it mine. I never had the idea that I would not
belong there.
Although biased due to their grounding in women’s subjectivities, these
personal and emotional accounts are nevertheless revealing of what the
Qasim period meant for many Iraqis, especially women political activists.
Al-Ali (2007: 56–108) interviewed diasporic Iraqi women who had
experienced that period; they also expressed similar feelings and the
sense of a unified nationhood. Their words show how much the idea of
national unity overlapped with women’s emancipation in the context of
communist and nationalist activism. Qasim himself – the son of an Arab
Sunni father and a Faili (Shi‘a) Kurdish mother – personified national
unity. His noncommunal, pro-women, and pro-poor politics marked Iraqi
women activists’ vision and created a consensual memory. This consen-
sual memory, where both the advancement of women’s rights and shared
nationhood are perceived as interrelated, forms the basis of what women
activists designate as “Iraqi culture.” In their attempt to define a unified
national memory, women activists did not mention the military nature of
the revolutionary regime in their narratives – e.g., the bloody ethnoreli-
gious conflicts of Mosul and Kirkuk – choosing instead to focus on the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 68 Genesis of the “Woman Question” (1917–1968)

general atmosphere of political openness and the feeling of unified nation-

hood. The intense violence that characterized the Ba‘th overthrow of
Qasim’s regime can explain the terms in which this period is narrated.

The Ba‘th Coup of 1963 and the ‘Arif Brothers

Regime (1963–1968): Breaking with the
Revolutionary Atmosphere
The first Ba‘th coup of February 1963, backed by the CIA, ended the
revolutionary regime. The Ba‘th campaign of repression, from February
to November of 1963, has been described as the most terrible and bloody
moment in the post–World War II Middle East (Farouk-Sluglett &
Sluglett 1987). The Ba‘th blamed the communists for the Mosul and
Kirkuk events20 and claimed that their mission was revenge.
The sectarian, anti-Shi‘a dimension of the repression of communists
was also clear in the Ba‘th militias’ slogan: La Shi‘i, la Shuyu‘i, la
Shargawi (“No Shi‘a, No Communist, No Sharagawa”).21 Such militia’s
purged Baghdad’s communist (and predominantly Shi‘a) neighbor-
hoods – such as Medinat al-Thawra (actually Medinat al-Sadr) and
al-Kazimiyya. At the time, opponents responded, La za‘ym illa Karim
(“No Leader but Karim”), which referred to ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim.
Stadiums were transformed into huge prisons for political prisoners,
communist activists were shot in the streets, and thousands of people
were tortured and imprisoned. Summary executions, the torturing of
political activists, and the threatening, interrogating, and searching of
their families occurred on a massive scale. Political activists were
traumatized.
Maqbula B. narrated this very dark and traumatizing period of her life.
She was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured along with her husband,
a communist activist to whom she had been married for only one year:
Democratic work unveiled the faces of the activists. We became visible after the
revolution, which made it possible to repress us in 1963. The Ba‘thists began to
talk against the communists, against Iraq itself. They started to ally with the US;

20
In Mosul, in March 1959, conflicts between communists and nationalists who were
mostly conservative Sunni Arabs provoked the death of more than 200 people.
According to Batatu (1978), the clashes were more sectarian and tribal than political.
A few months later, in July, conflicts between Turkmens and Kurds, who were mostly of
communist obedience, provoked the death of between thirty-one and seventy-nine
people, Turkmens in the majority. The communists were accused of being responsible
for these events and of representing a threat to the central state authority.
21
The shargawi, all Shi‘as, are a population that emigrated from the southern region such as
al-‘Amara, and who occupied the slums in Baghdad in the 1950s. After the building of
social houses by Qasim, they lived in the popular areas of Baghdad.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 The Ba‘th Coup of 1963 & the ‘Arif Brothers Regime (1963–1968) 69

they said it themselves. Many acknowledged it: “We came in American trains.”
It was the radio channel Sawt America that guided them to the opposition activists
on the ground. 1963 was a terror and surprise for the nationalist forces . . . They
promulgated Declaration 13, which stipulated that anyone suspected of being
a communist could be killed without judgment. It was savagery; even tribal laws
do not do that. Blood was flowing in the streets. Entire families were killed . . .
They came to take me from my place of work [she was an employee in the faculty
of engineering at the campus of Bab al-Mu‘azem]. They gathered us in buses.
There were doctors, lawyers, educated women, even pregnant women who then
gave birth in prison. When we arrived in the prison, we found it full. There was
a part for men and a part for women.
Maqbula narrated crying about the month she spent in prison: the
general atmosphere, torture, and the solidarity between the prisoners.
I stayed a month in prison. There were 800 women in my prison, despite the fact
that there was only enough space for no more than 50. The cells were named after
the detained groups. There was the Ba‘quba cell and the Baghdad cell. There was
no cell for Najaf, because it was considered a holy place; the women from Najaf
were interrogated in Bayt al-Mokhtar. In Najaf they did not jail; the main detention
centers were in Baghdad because it was not simple to detain women in the country-
side; people would have made an uprising for that. So they took the women, and
brought them to Baghdad with their kids, because women could not leave their kids
when their husbands were detained as well. Our cells were full of children; babies
were even born inside the cells. Al-Rabita was in prison. This is why prison was not
so hard in the beginning, because we were all together, supporting one another.
I was jailed with Rosa Khaduri, Salima Fakhri, and the actress Nahida al-Ramah.
Then they sent us to detention centers; I was in the Kerrada center. There, we
heard the men being tortured in the basement. After 24 February, from one o’clock
in the morning, they would start hitting iron against the wall; it was deafening.
Torture would begin after that. We were left in our underwear, and they plunged us
into iced water and threw heaps of garbage on us. In that place, it was like an iced
bathroom where we were plunged; we were four women; one had just got married
and another one was pregnant. We took turns sitting in the only little corner where
one could sit, just to warm up our feet, one after the other. The one who was
pregnant gave birth. We stayed a month like that. They interrogated us, tried to
force us to speak. I heard about some who spoke.
During the campaign of repression, Maqbula’s father was jailed and
interrogated, her aunt’s husband and one of her close friends were killed,
her sister ran away, and her two brothers left the country. Maqbula’s
father told her about his experience of detention: how he was interrogated
and the harsh torture experienced by male political activists, even when
very old. He described that he saw “men as old as Shaikh Bahr al-‘Ulum22
hanging from their hands” and tortured to death. Her mother was the

22
Shaikh Bahr al-‘Ulum is a prominent Shi‘a figure and nationalist activist.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 70 Genesis of the “Woman Question” (1917–1968)

only one left at home and was frequently harassed, interrogated, and
searched by security forces who wanted information on her family.
Maqbula, after her release from prison, asked everyone she knew for
information on her husband’s whereabouts and managed to visit him in
Qasr al-Nihaya prison:
He was another man, emaciated; his face was not the same anymore. They had
ripped the nails from his feet and hands, and extinguished cigarettes on his skin,
even on his intimate parts. He was so weakened, and terribly sick. He caught
Tetanus and was cured for it. I did not know that human beings could endure so
much. I visited him a second time and brought him what he had asked for:
a transistor radio, some linens, simple things and some food.
Later, when Maqbula asked to visit her husband again, she was told
that he had been moved to another detention center. She thinks that this
is when her husband was likely killed because she never saw him again and
still does not know what happened. She got mobilized and organized with
the help of activists who fled the country and settled abroad, starting an
international campaign to release Iraqi political prisoners. These activists
also opened the organization to women from the bourgeois nationalist
elite who had supported them during the period of political repression.
Although most of their activities were underground, the activists mana-
ged to restructure al-Rabita:
After that, our activism became more structured and organized, always under-
ground. But we built connections with abroad and we were working very well.
We structured al-Rabita, and the house of Rosa Khaduri was our headquarters
after we came out from prison. The bourgeois nationalists supported us a lot
during that period. This solidarity movement helped us to psychologically over-
come this ordeal. We were witnessing the cases of women that were dealing with
situations far worse than ours. We carried on until 1968, we set up our High
Committee and Naziha al-Dulaimi also came back.
Then, after the second Ba‘th coup, Maqbula would again have to
endure Ba‘th repression because the Ba‘th arrested and tortured her
elderly mother in 1979. Maqbula fled the country, returning only after
the Ba‘th regime fell in 2003. Nevertheless, she remained active abroad,
representing al-Rabita and dedicating her activism to organizing aware-
ness campaigns against the Ba‘th regime and solidarity campaigns with
Iraqi political prisoners.
PSC reform – specifically the articles related to inheritance and
polygamy – was one of the measures undertaken by the Ba‘th regime
after the first coup (Anderson 1963).23 The inheritance article, which had
23
These articles of the PSC were reformed as soon as March 18, 1963, right after the fall of
the Qasim regime in February of 1963.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 The Ba‘th Coup of 1963 & the ‘Arif Brothers Regime (1963–1968) 71

relied on the Civil Code, was replaced with an article that relied on shari‘a
and privileged Ja‘fari jurisprudence. The revised article on polygamy,
while preserving its limitations, added a clause that allowed for polyga-
mous marriages contracted outside the courts. Thus the new article
legitimized the illegal practice of polygamy. Reforming the PSC’s most
controversial and symbolic articles was clearly aimed at marking the end
of the revolutionary atmosphere. Women activists, especially in the com-
munist ranks, were violently repressed: some were jailed and tortured,
and many others had no choice but to flee the country.
In November 1963, the ‘Arif brothers overthrew the first Ba‘th
regime via a military coup; their regime ruled the country for the next
five years (1963–68),24 combining military discipline with clan and
kinship allegiances, the jumailat (Sakai 2003). The ‘Arif brothers’ reli-
ance on a small Sunni Arab clan exacerbated feelings of sectarian
oppression among Shi‘a. Despite their opposition to communists, the
‘Arif brothers instituted several nationalist measures, such as nationali-
zation of the banks and assurances sectors, foreign trade, and several
industries. As long as oil revenues were limited and the political elite
divided, income from the oil industry was not completely centralized,
and thus the state’s despotic potential was restrained. The
arrangements for state-elite cohesion proved weak, at times disastrous:
four successful, and a dozen more attempted, coup d’états shook the
nation during this period, proving the vulnerability of this disciplinary
regime.
During this period, leftist and communist organizations resumed
their activism semiofficially and mainly underground. Rabab H. – an
undergraduate law student at Baghdad University at the time – recalls
this period, when she was very active in the General Students’ Union
affiliated with the Communist Party:
I belonged to the General Students’ Union of the Iraqi Republic; I was one of the
leading members. We were not officially members of the Communist Party, as
most of our activities had been underground since 1963. I remember that during
the student elections organized by the Iraqi Government in 1967, we won more
than 75% of the seats as the list of the General Students’ Union. After obtaining
my law degree in 1967, I got involved in the women’s movement. It was a semi-
official action, because at the time most of our activities were underground.
We were insisting on the link between women’s liberation and democratic free-
dom in the country, in the broader meaning of the term.

24
‘Abd al-Salam ‘Arif led the country from 1963 to 1966, and his brother, ‘Abd al-Rahman,
ran the country from 1966 to 1968. They were both Free Officers.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 72 Genesis of the “Woman Question” (1917–1968)

Perhaps the predominance of the Communist Party and organizations’

political culture, as revealed by Rabab’s experience, pushed the ‘Arif
brothers to adopt an openly “Islamic” discourse, Sunni tinted, and pre-
sent itself as a Muslim power. The “Islamic discourse” combined with
kin-based, patriarchal, and patrimonial politics produced conservative
political measures, which my interviewees remembered as the “moral
police.” The regime’s security officers went to university campuses to
paint women’s uncovered legs and prevent “immodest” clothing, such as
miniskirts. Haifa F. was, at the time, a young lecturer in sociology at
Baghdad University. She recalls a day she wore a knee-length skirt to
work:
I was told by one of my colleagues, when I was about to leave the faculty building
after class, that I should stay for a while. I asked why and was told that there was
a soldier outside holding a bucket of dark paint and a big brush, and that he would
paint my legs if I came across him. I decided to go out and talk to him. I told him
that I am not a student, that I am a professor here, and that my skirt goes below my
knees. After discussing with him for a while, he authorized me to leave the faculty
without having my legs painted.
In fact, according to many (Al-Khafaji 1986; Batatu 1978, 1991;
Farouk-Sluglett 1991; Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett 1991, 1987), Iraq’s
modernization and entrance to the world market were not as developed
as those of other Arab countries, such as Egypt. The introduction of
modern consumerism and sophisticated communications systems repre-
sented a facade of modernity more than the real transformation of
a traditional, precapitalist functioning society. Until the 1960s and
1970s, “beneath this facade, patriarchal values, and ties of family, clan,
locality, tribe, and sect continue[d] to be reproduced” (Farouk-Sluglett &
Sluglett 1991: 1412), and the dictatorial regimes worked against the
disintegration of such values and ties. Thus, as described by Jabar
(2003), cultural tribalism became an urban phenomenon: migrants
from rural areas retained their tribal names, value systems, lifestyles,
and solidarity commitments.25 Social alienation from urban life – with
its fragmenting division of labor, commercialized economy, alien lifestyle,
and hostile environment – strengthened cultural tribalism. Moreover, this
process was reinforced by the authoritarian nature of the post-1963
regimes; as Zubaida (1991: 209) notes: “[t]he ‘orientalist’ picture of
‘Islamic’ societies as communalistic, religious and impervious to modern
25
The most common example is Medinat al-Sadr, built as Medinat at-Thawra by Qasim to
contain the slums filled with peasant migrants in Baghdad who fled from the feudal
Shaikhs of al-‘Amara and Kut in the 1950s. Initially, each avenue or street was numbered
in order; in one year, these numbers were displaced by tribal names, usually of the
hamula.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Conclusion 73

ideologies has actually been realized as a modern phenomenon under

totalitarian regimes in Iraq and elsewhere.” According to J. Ismael and
S. Ismael (2000), who apply Sharabi’s concept of neopatriarchy to the
Iraqi context, the first decades after the end of the British Mandate – i.e.,
the formation of the Iraqi state – represented a “modernization of patri-
archy” – the distortion, not the replacement, of traditional patriarchy and
the malformation of the state by integrating a kin-based tribal social
dynamic into the public sector.

Conclusion
In colonial Iraq, the formulation and context of the “woman question”
were marked by both marginalization from power and the tribalization of
the majority of Iraqi society, which was ruled by tribal law in rural areas
and by a Sunni elite in the cities. Colonial Iraq was led by a politics of
uneven differentiation in terms of legal rights that created a fragmented
citizenship and nationhood. From its beginnings, the “new nation” was
contested by the majority of the population. This contestation, grounded
in class, ethnic, sectarian, and regional (urban/rural) divisions, gave the
“woman question” a peculiar shape. The most radical advocacy for
women’s rights came from secular and leftist political forces as religious
authorities were reluctant to relinquish their powers. Thus, unlike other
Muslim majority and Arab countries, in Iraq, Fleischmann’s (1999)
stages – described in the introduction to this chapter – did not emerge
until later; in the context of a secularized society with a political culture
dominated by the Iraqi Communist Party, these stages also came in the
form of nationalist, leftist, political forces.
The new Iraqi Republic contested tribal and religious powers, instead
pushing the emerging, modern middle class. The defense of women’s
rights was central to the new regime’s modernist nationalist politics,
which were shaped by a sense of shared nationhood and weakening
religious, ethnic, and sectarian divisions. Nevertheless, “Islam” remained
a key symbol of cultural authenticity, especially among nationalist femin-
ists. Although it included radical measures, the adoption of a PSC within
the framework of shari‘a indicated the postcolonial formulation of the
“woman question.” The link between a unified nation and women’s
emancipation was revealed through the adoption of a PSC that both
guaranteed progress in women’s rights and worked to overcome sectarian
divisions between Sunni and Shi‘a jurisprudence. This linkage was also
expressed by many of the women activists I interviewed. Nevertheless, the
exacerbation of ethnic, religious, and sectarian divisions; the new nation-
state’s lack of legitimacy as a result of colonization; and the military nature

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 74 Genesis of the “Woman Question” (1917–1968)

of the revolutionary regime resulted in a weak and contested political elite.

Then the Ba‘th coup that ended the first Iraqi Republic chose bloody and
patrimonial authoritarianism to preserve its rule over state and society.
As a result of these political, economic, and social developments,
women’s issues and gender norms evolved into what Hisham Sharabi
terms “neopatriarchy”: the old social structures of society were preserved
and distorted along the lines of the malformation of the new state by British
colonizers. Although revolutionary times contributed to the progress of
women’s rights and activism, and also revealed radical political forces
within society, the nature of the state and the preservation of old social
structures limited changes to gender norms and relations. The bloody
authoritarianism that followed these revolutionary times – its repression of
radical forces, normalization of political violence, and patrimonial nature –
reversed any process of social change and national unity, processes on
which women’s rights activists had relied for their advocacy.
As for political activism, the last period (1963–68) had the following
effects: it changed the political system and the social/ethnic and religious
structure of the ruling elites, disturbed national integrative processes,
altered the role of the state, and gradually led to the destruction of radical
movements on the left and the right, thereby creating an ideological/political
vacuum. These mutations broke with democratic and popular social and
political movements, opening the door to political movements that favored
identity-based modes of activism, as I show in Chapter 2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press