Sisters in War

by Christina Asquith

  “Both girls studied at Baghdad University and are fluent in English,” Mamina added, deftly changing the subject. Zia admired how her mother controlled the situation, all while sitting alongside Baba with deference.

  The suitor’s aunt had brought a camera to take pictures of Nunu and Zia, but she left it turned off on her lap. Instead, she pulled out some dog-eared photos of her nephew from her purse and passed them around.

  “He is twenty-seven, and works in a corporation and supports many of the members of his family,” an uncle said, describing the elder boy. “He has a master’s degree in engineering, and is working toward his PhD.”

  When his remarks were met with silence, he continued.

  “He will give her a house by herself.”

  Zia smiled at the uncle. She could see he was a genuine man, unlike his unpleasant wife, who was still glaring in her direction. For a moment, she vacillated. Maybe her suitor was a nice young man. She understood that few young Iraqi men could afford an entire house, especially in London. At best, most young men could only afford enough bedroom furniture to fill an empty room in their family’s house.

  But something inside Zia made her want to be rude to this family. Perhaps it was the arrogant assumption that Zia and Nunu would jump at the chance to get married just because the suitors were in London. Zia also felt a small sense of superiority over them because she worked with Americans. She knew that in America, it wasn’t unusual for new couples to have their own houses.

  She glanced at the photo of the suitor, which had been passed to her. He was okay. Not as tall as Keith and less handsome. He wore a tie and looked sophisticated. He wasn’t so bad.

  “Why doesn’t she speak?” complained the aunt, who was still staring at her.

  “I’m sorry,” Zia said. “I’m tired from work.”

  “He will let you work!” the aunt said, as if she considered this a great favor. “And after so many years, if you wish to go back to school for a higher degree, he will consider it.”

  The silence returned. Nunu was not expected to say anything. As the conversation became more and more strained, the second aunt grew aggressive, referring to a pretty cousin that she had in mind who would be more suitable.

  “They would already be married, but the boy says he refuses his cousin. So modern.”

  “She must make a decision quickly,” the nice uncle said. The boy would come to Iraq in one month. A small wedding party would be held in Jordan, where most of the family had fled during the war. Six months later, she’d be in the UK, where his family would give her a big wedding party.

  Zia had hoped her denim jacket and taciturn manner would change their minds, but the uncle clearly liked her. Finally, however, impatience got the better of him.

  “Now, you see the man, you see the situation. What do you say?” he asked.

  Mamina and Nunu looked at Zia. A million thoughts raced through her mind at once: rejecting the family outright would be a grave dishonor, and she knew this was a good offer. And it was an opportunity to get herself and Nunu out of Iraq and to the UK, where Mamina and Baba could visit. Maybe this suitor wouldn’t fulfill her dreams, but he would offer a safe future for her sister and her parents. He was the sensible choice.

  But Zia couldn’t do it. She had lived a lifetime of forced choices. She loved Keith, and she willed herself to believe that the situation in Iraq would settle shortly, and she and Keith could carve out a life for each other in Baghdad.

  She took a deep breath and said simply, “What is destined to happen will happen.” The mood of the room seemed to deflate like a balloon losing air.

  Nunu brought out the final round of acrid coffee, and the family left.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  BY THE TENTH month of the occupation, Manal and most other Iraqi women activists felt increasingly bitter. They were angry that the interim Iraqi government created in June had included only three women out of twenty-five members, only one female cabinet official, and no women on the committee selected to draft the nation’s first constitution. The recommendations from Fern’s “Heartland of Iraq” conference had been ignored. Its signature demand—for a quota of 30 percent women in government—was now being openly opposed by Bremer and the Bush administration, which, Manal was convinced, was allergic to the word quota. This was a far, far cry from the adminstration’s prewar promises that women would play a signature role in the new Iraq.

  Manal complained to Heather, but she herself was devastated by political turns of events. In late November 2003, the Bush administration decided to shorten the CPA’s management of Iraq from two years to one year. Bremer, Heather, and the rest of the CPA had banked on running the country for two years, during which time they would transition the ministries slowly back to Iraqi control, assist them in writing their constitution, and oversee nationwide elections for a government.

  However, they hadn’t anticipated the opposition of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a powerful hermetic sheik holed up in Najaf, who refused even to meet the Americans. Sistani wouldn’t stand for two years of U.S. control. He wanted elections to be held first, and demanded a shortened occupation—or he would call for a nationwide uprising. Under pressure, Bremer was forced in November to agree to cut the occupation to one year. The news demoralized the CPA. Everyone had been working on projects on the assumption they’d be around until June 2005. Now they’d be packing up their bags and leaving in June 2004—and all their work would be turned over to the Iraqi government, ready or not. No one thought it was ready.

  For Heather and her women’s centers, this was terrible, terrible news. After several months of almost finding the perfect building for a women’s center and then losing it, she had thrown up her hands and decided to rent. She’d finally found a center to rent in the Mansour district, and they were spending $250,000 to renovate it. Now, come June 2004, it would fall into the hands of the Iraqi government, with no guarantee of being kept as a women’s center. More likely, it would be given to a top official to live in.

  To make matters worse, Manal and the other activists weren’t sympathetic to the woes of the CPA. They had begun to point fingers and complain that women’s lives were more confined than under Saddam. Heather agreed that things weren’t going as planned, but she didn’t believe it was because Bremer didn’t want Iraqi women to have rights. Intelligence reports indicated that ex-members of Saddam’s government were organizing raids with Al Qaeda, and suicide attacks across the country had increased in frequency. Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shia militia was attacking police departments and army facilities, trying to undercut the basic foundations of security in the country. Most of the CPA employees were too terrified to leave the palace grounds anymore, and reconstruction had ground to a halt. Bremer was preoccupied trying to keep the country together, and women had been bumped down the priority list. Heather understood all this, but whether her aid-worker friends did or didn’t, they weren’t intending to sit silently on the sidelines.

  INDEED, MANAL, FERN, and the Iraqi women’s rights leaders decided to turn up the pressure. In early December, Fern led the charge. She and several other activists had circulated an open letter to Paul Bremer listing several facts that showed the absence of women in government.

  “These facts demonstrate pervasive sex discrimination in the government structure established, appointed and supervised by CPA,” the letter stated. “It would be a real tragedy if the Coalition were to leave Iraq with a government less intent on equal rights for women than the previous regime.”

  Rather than put her name on it, Fern had circulated it among Iraqi groups and gathered the signatures of twelve Iraqi women and men, including the heads of the country’s human rights and women’s rights groups. It also circulated among American women’s groups and attracted the attention of the National Coalition of Women’s Organizations (NCWO), which represents 180 American women’s groups—collectively ten million women nationwide. The NCWO piggybacked with its own press release.

  �
�This is a crucial time for women of Iraq, and the U.S. has an ironclad obligation to assure parity for women …” wrote Martha Burk, chair of the NCWO. “Clearly Iraqi women have been shortchanged, and the situation must be corrected immediately. President Bush has expressed strong support for equal rights for women in Iraq, and the U.S. government is obligated to make that a reality.”

  Yet, on December 27, 2003, things got even worse.

  In a largely empty parliament chamber, the head of the radical Islamic political party SCIRI proposed legislation called Resolution 137, which would overturn Iraq’s 1959 secular law, called the “Personal Status Law,” that protected women’s rights, and replace it with Islamic law, called sharia. Although less than half the chamber was in attendance, there had been enough for a vote, and the legislation had passed. Now all it needed was Paul Bremer’s signature to be signed into law.

  Manal and other activists received this news like a slap to the face. Already, the Islamists were quietly taking over top positions in the schools, universities, and ministries. Now they were throwing around their weight in government, too. Whether to have a justice system that followed Islamic law or secular law had always been one of the biggest debates among Arab-world feminists, with many saying that Islamic law was ultimately bad for women. Examples of oppression under Islam law were abundant, as Iran, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia all followed it, and women in those countries had few rights and suffered harsh punishments for transgressions. Some feminists, including Manal, argued that Muslim women were duty-bound to follow Islamic law. However, they called for a reinterpretation of the sections that dealt with women’s issues.

  Islamic law, also called Sharia law, refers to a body of laws derived from the Quran and the example set by the Prophet, as remembered and recorded by those who knew him. A country that follows Islamic law is still confined to the basic architecture of the seventh-century manuscript, but what, exactly, the Quran says and how it should be applied to modern-day life is open to wide interpretation by judges and scholars across the Muslim world. Over the centuries, they have interpreted the Quran’s teachings in order to apply them to contemporary situations, similar to how the U.S. Supreme Court debates contemporary applications of the U.S. Constitution.

  Like many Islamic feminists, Manal believed that sharia could be interpreted in a very progressive way for women. For example, Manal interpreted the Quran as protecting women from forced marriage. She felt it defended women’s rights by stating that women could make any number of prenuptial stipulations—such as being allowed to work, or only having to bear a certain number of children—before entering into the marriage contract. In instances of divorce, the Quran defends a woman’s right to keep her dowry, and allows her to remarry after three months. The Islamic societies in which women are denied rights are incorrectly following the teachings of the Quran, Manal believed. She had met many Islamic clerics who agreed with her and defended women’s rights. One recent high-profile incident that Manal knew of involved an Iraqi woman who was refused a powerful position as a judge in Najaf. The ruling that rejected her said that women were “too soft and emotional” to be judges. She complained to Grand Ayatollah Sistani, who issued a fatwa, or judgment, in her favor. In his decision, Sistani wrote that “anyone with masculine characteristics” would be allowed to serve, hence opening up the job to women, as long as they could show they were as tough as men.

  Manal saw this as evidence that women could progress under sharia, but she also recognized that Sistani was special; he was beloved for his wisdom and fairness, and he was a university-trained scholar of the Quran. Many Iraqi judges who would be confronted with cases involving divorce and child custody were not Islamic scholars; in fact, some in the countryside were semiliterate tribesmen. They didn’t want women to have rights and twisted the Quran to justify their chauvinism. Manal knew enough about the highly conservative SCIRI party to fear that their kind of sharia would catapult women back hundreds of years and strip them of the rights they had been given under Saddam. The fact that SCIRI was proposing replacing secular law with Islamic law said plenty about the dark way in which it would be interpreted.

  Iraqi women had long been proud of Iraq’s 1959 Personal Status Law, and the current government’s move to overturn it was shocking. It could be compared to the USA’s 1964 Civil Rights Act, in the sense that it was overarching federal legislation that defended all individuals against discrimination. When women in Iraq brought forward any number of cases to the hundreds of Iraqi courts across the country, they could feel assured of the basic protection provided to them by the secular national law, despite any individual biases of the judge. Imagine if the Civil Rights Act were overturned, Manal thought. Some U.S. judges would still rule against discrimination, but others might not. This is exactly what she feared would happen without the Personal Status Law. Some judges would still interpret the Quran to defend women, but there would no longer be that guarantee. Furthermore, why seek to overturn it? What was SCIRI’s intention?

  Word spread quickly. This move went against the U.S. promises of democracy and freedom, but, when people turned to the American authorities for assistance, they were mostly rebuffed. In January, Manal even took a trip to D.C. to lobby U.S. lawmakers for help, but many dismissed her, reasoning, “The Iraqis must want this. The Iraqi government voted for it. We can’t intervene.” Manal even approached the offices of many of the fifteen female senators, urging them to pressure Iraqi lawmakers to overturn the resolution, hoping they could sympathize. She received mostly lukewarm responses. They didn’t get it, she thought.

  Back in Baghdad, Manal and several other female activists decided to approach Paul Bremer directly, seeing as his signature was required in order for any Iraqi legislation to pass. They had already met with Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the top UK representative in Iraq, and he had agreed to support the women publicly on all their issues, including overturning Resolution 137 and supporting the quota. His wife, Lady Anne Greenstock, met regularly with Iraqi women and had impressed Manal with her dedication. The UN representatives also offered their endorsement to the women’s rights advocates.

  But not Bremer.

  In his office in the palace, Manal sat in disbelief as Bremer preached to her about “strong Iraqi women” who didn’t need help. “You guys have probably worked across the world, but these are tough women,” Manal recalls him saying. In other words, Iraqi women are fine. We don’t need to do anything.

  Just shoot me now, Manal thought. This guy is out to lunch. But she had persisted in trying to convince him. She made little headway. Bremer did promise the women he would not sign Resolution 137 when it reached his desk, but he didn’t want to come out publicly and denounce the legislation, even though they argued that that would send a clear message to the government that women’s rights were a U.S. priority. Instead, he encouraged the women to lobby the other members of the interim Iraqi government to overturn the legislation before it even reached his desk.

  They left the meeting feeling unsupported and suspecting that Bremer feared upsetting the Islamic leaders with such a political hot potato as women’s rights. He would stand up to them on some issues, but not that one. He wanted the women to go through the democratic process by lobbying and raising awareness enough that the Iraqi government would overturn the legislation. This idea had its merits, but the irony wasn’t lost on the women. Bremer’s office made dozens of national decisions every day, and no other group was told to “go out and lobby.” Only when it came to women’s issues did the Americans suddenly say, “That’s an internal issue. That’s for Iraqis to decide.”

  MANAL’S GROUP WAS not the only one lobbying Bremer. Another group of powerful Iraqi women had also gone to see him, including Zainab al-Suwaij; Nesreen Berwari; Ala Talabani, a civil engineer and women’s rights leader; and Maysoon Damluji, an architect, whose father was the former head of Baghdad University’s medical school and whose uncle was Iraq’s former foreign minister. Damluji was currently the de
puty minister of culture and head of the Iraqi Independent Women’s Group. They wanted Bremer’s support both to overturn Resolution 137 and to implement a mandatory quota of women representatives in the new parliament. But this group received a similar brush-off to the one Bremer had given Manal, even after they explained that many other countries have similar quotas, including South Africa, Rwanda, and Sweden. Bremer nodded, but Damluji recalls him telling them, “I’m not going to support you, because I don’t think quotas are the right thing. Go do whatever you want to do, go lobby, and do what you need to to get yourself in the government and in high positions, but we are not supporting quotas.”

  They left fuming, but undeterred. The women decided they would adopt Bremer’s advice and take matters into their own hands. They launched a countrywide campaign of petitions to require a quota of female representatives in government, and protests to overturn efforts to implement sharia.

  That month, an Iraqi committee was drafting the Transitional Administrative Law, which was to serve as Iraq’s temporary constitution until a permanent one was drafted in 2005. Maysoon Damluji’s cousin was a lawyer on the committee. She approached one of the more moderate members of the Governing Council, a secular Sunni named Adnan Pachachi, and asked him to add a line on quotas saying “women will make up no less than 40 percent of all future Iraqi governing bodies.”

  Pachachi laughed.

  Damluji’s cousin had drafted legal language. “Just put it in, and let’s get laughed at. We’ll see what happens,” Damluji recalls telling him.

  “I will put it in, but they will never accept it,” Pachachi said.

  Sure enough, when the mostly male parliament reviewed the document, and reached the line about 40 percent, laughter filled the chamber.