Family, Gender, and Law in a Globalizing Middle East and South Asia

6. Struggles over Personal Status and Family Law in Post-Baathist Iraq

105 6. StrugglesoverPersonalStatus andFamilyLawinPost-BaathistIraq Juan Cole The position of women and the shape of family law have been a key arena for cultural and imperial politics in post-Baathist Iraq, just as they were throughout the republican and Baathist period. Conflicts over the position of women had a global context in Iraq. On the one hand, the British colonialists had helped install a landed class that coded itself as traditionalist. This large conservative, pro-British landlord class and its clerical supporters were challenged in the 1950s and after by intellectuals, young officers, and workers adhering to the Communist and Baath parties, who deployed progressive, universalist, and international values. The Baath regime from 1968 created a significant population of highly educated Iraqi women. In this regard, it was one of a number of postcolonial Middle East states whose leaders often adopted “state feminist” policies that allowed them to undermine local elites and assert central state power through promotion of women’s education and rights (Kandiyoti 1991a, 1992). This state project often contributed to provoking nativist countermovements stressing neopatriarchy and local control by working-class or lower-middle-class men over their lives and families, as with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the Shiite movement of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Goldberg 1992; Riesebrodt 1993). Where such nativist critics of state feminism later came to power, as in Iran, they often enshrined restrictions on women in the law. The struggle over the place of women in the post-Baathist period from 2003 to a large extent also had a global context. The middle-class, educated 106 . Family Law Codes Contested and (Re)constructed Iraqi women formed by state feminism saw the fall of the Baath government of Saddam Hussein as an opportunity to make further gains for women by shaping law and administration. The Bush administration also trumpeted the liberation of women as among its goals in Iraq, apparently unaware of the Baath Party’s own relatively progressive stance on this issue. Bush’s paternalistic rhetoric of imperial uplift for women had the advantage of appealing to American women and liberals, creating a potential constituency for his policies in Iraq among Iraqi women and progressive Arabs and Kurds, and appealing to evangelical tropes of anti-Muslim polemic. Bush’s marriage of convenience with the Shiite religious parties, the Islamic Da’wa Party, and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI; the name was changed to the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council in May 2007), however, set up a central contradiction, insofar as these partners had opposed Baathist state feminism and were dedicated to enshrining their conservative interpretation of Sharia or Islamic canon law in the Iraqi constitution and in the statute (Batatu 1986; Wiley 1992). American and Iraqi political actors broached these issues and fought over them most vigorously at two crucial junctures, the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) in January through March 2004 and the drafting of the permanent constitution in the summer of 2005. In the first of these turning points, secular women won significant gains despite strong opposition from leaders of the Shiite religious parties. In the second, these gains were significantly compromised. What political and social dynamics explain these different outcomes? The fight in the Interim Governing Council over personal status law, which has implications for family law, broke out in January 2004. The grounds for the dispute were laid, however, when the IGC was appointed by U.S. Civil Administrator Paul Bremer the previous July. Bremer sought an alliance with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, in part because it had a trained militia of fifteen thousand men and could offset the power of the Baathists. So he gave seats on the IGC to SCIRI and its supporters, including the London and Basra branches of the Islamic Da’wa Party. The IGC had a Shiite majority, though a few members from a Shiite background were secularists. The religious parties’ strong representation on the resulting body helped shape subsequent debates. Personal Status and Family Law in Post-Baathist Iraq . 107 The IGC grossly underrepresented women, having only three among twenty-five members. In fact, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, and Saddam ’s repression of Kurdish and Shiite insurgencies had left Iraq with a female majority of some 60 percent. The strong patriarchal slant of the IGC was to create problems that winter. The United States tended to appoint men...