Iraq War: The Rights of Women

In the centuries of conflict between the Western/European/Christian world, it's always been a feature of Western views of Islam to emphasize how the Muslim nations mistreat women. In the Middle Ages and well into the modern period, the alleged sexual decadence of the harems seemed an especially scandalous thing. Today, the supposed extreme "puritanism" of the Islam world is held against them by Western polemicists.

Juan Cole is taking note of recent changes in Iraqi law, approved by the occupation authority, to apply Islamic law (Sharia) to areas directly affecting women's status:

As reported here earlier, the IGC [Interim Governing Council] took a decision recently to abolish Iraq's civil personal status law, which was uniform for all Iraqis under the Baath. In its place, the IGC called for religious law to govern personal status, to be administered by the clerics of each of Iraq's major religious communities for members of their religion. Thus, Shiites would be under Shiite law and Chaldeans under Catholic canon law for these purposes.

The IGC has ceded to the religious codes jurisdiction over marriage, engagement, suitability to marry, the marriage contract, proof of marriage, dowry, financial support, divorce, the 3-month "severance payments" owed to divorced wives in lieu of alimony, inheritance, and all other personal status matters.

For the vast majority of women who are Muslim, the implementation of `iddah or the obligation of a man to support a woman for 3 months after he divorces her (a term long enough to see whether she is pregnant with his child) has the effect of abolishing the divorced woman's right to alimony. This abrogation of alimony was effected for Muslims in India in the mid-1980s with the Shah Banou case, as the Congress Party's sop to Indian Muslim fundamentalists. The particular form of Islamic law that the IGC seems to envisage operating would also give men the right of unilateral divorce over their wives, gives men the right to take second, third and fourth wives, and gives girls half as much inheritance from the father's estate as boys.

This is a reminder that we have to be careful about simplistic assumptions about the status of human rights in postwar Iraq.