The scene is postwar Iraq. Nada Jassem is the flute player in an all-female band. Nada cannot walk down the street in Iraq carrying her flute. Sahera Zouhair, a Sunni Muslim, is abused if she stands on her own balcony with her hair showing. Rapes go unreported, women are afraid to go outside without an escort, and the hijab (head covering) is now, at least in practice, mandatory for all women.
Iraq has traditionally had one of the most liberal stances on women's rights in the Arab world. Iraqi women were allowed to go to college, hold high-level positions and study overseas. In the 1990s, Saddam Hussein revoked a woman's right to travel alone as he embraced political Islam in order to gain credibility with other Arab nations. But even then, women held 40 percent of positions in civil service, and wearing the headscarf was optional.
Now, however, women who fail to cover themselves completely may be subject to beatings and harassment. Women, who used to fear going out at night because of Saddam's soldiers' penchant for rape, are now afraid to go out because Fundamental Islamists could kill them.
"Things are a lot worse now. There's no security. Women cannot go out, cannot express themselves. The veil has become compulsory for Muslims and Christians," said Zouhair in an interview with the BBC News.
With the fall of Saddam's regime, many Iraqi women's rights advocates hoped for improvement, yet the American-appointed leadership coalition of 25 people included only three women and has repeatedly denied requests to implement a quota system forcing women into the new government. Such a system was employed in Afghanistan's draft constitution.
Conservative Shiite Muslim leaders want the Shariah, Islamic law, to be the governing authority on family matters like divorce and inheritance, a move that would further stifle the independence of women.
The problem is that in Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, women's rights are not perceived to be an urgent issue. So women have been ignored, As Zainab Salbi, founder of Women for Women International, said, "There seems to be no clear political agenda to exclude women as much as a lack of attention to the importance of women's participation."
Seats in the cabinet, national parliament and constitutional drafting committee have been reserved for Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and Assyrians, which makes it even more striking that there are no quotas mandating seats for women, who make up nearly 60 percent of the Iraqi population.
Slowly but steadily, fundamental Islam's stranglehold on women is choking the advocates in Iraq. Ibtisam Ali, a women's rights activist, is becoming increasingly reluctant to push her case due to threats and harassment. Many women have stopped trying, taking the veil, and with it hiding both their faces and their concerns. They are receding into invisibility.
There is still time, but Iraqi women's window of opportunity is closing. The U.S. government has a responsibility to ensure that these women have a chance in the new Iraq. If their demands continue to be ignored, their faces will be covered and their minds closed. And we as a country, the self-proclaimed re-builders of Iraq, will be just as culpable as the fundamental Islamists. Iraq cannot surface from the rubble of war as a beacon to the Arab world if women are oppressed.
Katie Kelberlau is a history and religious studies junior. Reach her at katherine.kelberlau@asu.edu.
