Women and Gender in Iraq: Between Nation-Building and Fragmentation by Zahra Ali (review)

Women and Gender in Iraq is an ethnographic account of Iraqi women's political activism since 2003. It is the first book to study Iraqi women's organizing after the American invasion and the fall of the Ba'th Party regime. Zahra Ali's path-breaking study of women's institutional and individual organizing is an important contribution to studies of women and gender in Iraq and in the Middle East more broadly. Furthermore, it pushes the wider field of women and gender studies to contend with how ethnosectarian divisions and conflicting political agendas shape discussions of women's legal rights during periods of war and conflict.

Ali carried out ethnographic fieldwork between 2010 and 2017 in Baghdad, Erbil, Sulaymaniyya, Najaf, Kufa, Karbala, and Nasiriyya. The introduction details the challenges of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Iraq during this period, especially having to navigate roadblocks and a changing security climate. Nonetheless, Ali conducted 80 interviews with women from 21 to 74 years of age from across the ethnic, religious, sectarian, and political spectrum. The voices of the Iraqi women Ali interviewed are preserved in long, unedited quotes. Ali uses these transgenerational interviews to reveal the long–standing women's activist tradition in Iraq. Chapters One and Two address "the woman question" from British rule through the monarchy and the Iraqi Republic (1958–68) to the Ba'th coup and women's rights and organizing under the Ba'thist regime (1968–2003). The oral histories she introduces in these chapters offer new perspectives on women's organizing in relation to the various governments and regimes that have ruled Iraq.

Ali's interviews with Arabs, Kurds, Sunnis, Shi'a, Christians, communists, nationalists, and Islamists reveal how women's rights activists in these communities navigate different social and political forces to secure rights. The heterogeneity of Islamist and secular women's activism in Iraq is explored from Chapters Three through Six and is explicitly foregrounded in Chapter Seven. Ali's ability to capture the diversity of the women's movement in Iraq is one of the great strengths of the text. Ali also brings new voices to the table, including the perspectives of Kurdish Islamist women's rights activists, studied in Chapter Five, which have never been studied before. In addition to interviews, Ali also draws upon archival sources and documents from women's organizations, revealing her unparalleled access to the inner workings of the 36 women's organizations, groups, and networks she studied.

Ali attunes her reader to the many forms of violence that Iraqi women have to navigate in their daily lives but emphasizes that even if their "everyday lives are marked by unspeakable violence, their lives are certainly not reduced to this violence" (p. 29). The conclusion, subtitled "Making Sense of Violence as Feminist Praxis," makes an important theoretical intervention in women's history and feminist studies about the role of physical and epistemic violence, especially in the law, in states contending with ethno–sectarian divisions. Ali's emphasis on violence and its impact on women's organizing could have been further established throughout the book, not to reduce her interviewees to victims but to elaborate the activists' tenacity in the face of years of war, sanctions, and growing sectarianization.

Ali is refreshingly transparent about her research practices and her personal connection to Iraq. As a diasporic Iraqi woman who grew up in exile in France and now lives in the United States, the issues of women's rights in Iraq are personal. Ali shares her research questions and methodology with her readers. For example, she opened each of her interviews with "What made you become a woman or feminist activist?" (p. 31). This question allowed her to capture the life stories of her interlocutors and where and when they engaged in formal women's organizing. Ali notes "I did not remain neutral during these exchanges; I engaged in deep discussions about women's issues and rights in...