The Colonial State and Multiple Senses of Belonging

The Iraqi population was heterogeneous in its ethnic (Arab, Kurd, Turkmen, Armenian, etc.), sectarian (Sunni, Shi‘a), and religious (Muslim, Christian, Jews, etc.) composition. The Iraqi state established under the British Mandate (1920–32), which began as a military occupation in 1917, was a contested and weak state. It was born in the face of popular movements repressing the Constitutionalist movement launched by the Shi‘a ‘ulemas in the first decade of the twentieth century, the movement against British occupation, and the Kurdish refusal to be incorporated into an Arab state. This Iraqi state relied on the ancient elite of the Ottoman Empire; Sunni Arabs exclusively comprised its leadership, administration, and army. In Baghdad, Sunni Arab religious, political, and economic figures – whether ‘ulemas, heads of Tariqas (such as ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Gilani), Sayyid related to the tribal leadership (such as ‘Abdul Muhsin al-Sa‘dun), Ashraf, land owners, or wealthy merchants – generally collaborated with and got involved based on the wishes of the British occupying authorities. Although some Iraqi Shi‘a families belonged to the wealthy commercial elite, the urban educated elite was dominated by Sunni Arabs because they benefited from secondary and higher education under both Ottoman and British rule, unlike the Shi‘as. Christians and Jews were also part of the educated urban elite because they were favored by the British Empire. The power of the new state was effective only in urban areas; the countryside was managed by tribesmen who, at the time, were more heavily armed than the state army.Footnote ⁷

The Ottoman policy in the nineteenth century was to reduce the power of the tribes by settling the tribes in permanent villages and playing one tribe against the other. Many tribesmen resisted by refusing to register their land. While presumably intending to promote the formation of an integrated nation-state, the governments both under the Mandate and under the monarchy (1932–58) perpetuated tribal relations through tribal and land-tenure policies. These policies halted the decline and disintegration of tribal leaders’ power, which had been occurring toward the end of the Ottoman period, by providing administrative and fiscal powers, as well as land grants, to selected Shaykhs. Such policies enabled the Shaykhs to tax and control those who subsequently became “their” tribesmen; thus British policy contributed to the transformation of a free cultivating peasantry into a population of serfs tied to the land of sharecroppers. (Davis Reference Davis2005; Dodge Reference Dodge2003; Marr 2004; Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett Reference Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett1991, Reference Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett1987; Jabar Reference Jabar, Dawod and Jabar2003). Under the monarchy, nation-building relied on traditional status groups – ethnic and religious – and overlooked the growth of the new, modern middle and working classes in the cities. The division in Iraqi society between the urban use of Civil Law and the rural, predominantly Shi‘aFootnote ⁸ use of Tribunal Criminal and Civil Disputes Regulation (TCCDR), more commonly called the “tribal law,” is the most revealing aspect of this reliance.

For Zubaida (Reference Zubaida2002), the four main social groups at the head of the society – the effendiyya or “urban officials,” the ex-Ottoman officers that came to Iraq with Faysal, the clerics (Shi‘a and Sunni), and the tribal leadership of the mid-Euphrates as well as Tigris districts – all constituted the “fragments” that imagined differently the new nation-state. Thus, as shown by Fattah (Reference Fattah, Tejtel, Sluglett, Bocco and Bozarslan2012: 95–103), Davis (Reference Davis2005), Tripp (Reference Tripp2000), and Bashkin (Reference Babakhan2009), the social process of becoming Iraqi was very complex and fluid, a constant negotiation between unequal partners by virtue of the undemocratic and unsystematic nature of the new Iraqi state. Moreover, it can be argued that at any given moment in the history of the Iraqi nation, there has not been a single national narrative or a single memory of the nation but rather competing visions advanced by the state and opposition forces.

Since 1921, the constitution had been drafted and redrafted; it was finally adopted in March 1925. Iraq was to function as a Western-style constitutional monarchy, with a king, cabinet, two legislative chambers, and democratic rights for the population. In practice, the constitutional system allowed Britain, the royal family, and former Ottoman officers (Sunnis) to effectively control formal politics for decades. The nascent state divided Iraqis into “original” and “nonoriginal.” Nationality Law No. 42 of 1924, which was enacted in the 1925 Constitution (al-Qanun al-Asasi), deemed “original” Iraqis to be those registered as Ottoman subjects, the Sunnis, and the Kurds. Shi‘as were registered as “Iranian dependency” (taba‘iyya) and hence second-class citizens because they were not Ottoman subjects prior to the establishment of the Iraqi nation-state due to geographic and political reasons.Footnote ⁹ The Law for the Election of the Constituent Assembly went even further in defining Iraqis as “every Ottoman subject now residing in Iraq and not claiming foreign citizenship” (Luizard Reference 306Luizard1991, Reference Luizard2006; Nakash Reference Nakash1994; Shaaban Reference Shaaban2010), imparting that any Sunni, even non-Iraqi, had more rights than Iraqi Shi‘as. Most Shi‘as had to apply for Iraqi citizenship, even when they belonged to well-known and established Arab families.Footnote ¹⁰

The Constitution also provided a base for the election system in Iraq that alienated an important segment of the population; the Electoral Law of 1924 provided a two-tiered electoral system in which primary electors were to nominate secondary electors, who were, in turn, to vote for deputies. Only male taxpayers older than twenty could be primary or secondary electors, and only male taxpayers older than thirty could become deputies. Thus the Electoral Law excluded the lower class, men younger than thirty, and women from serving in Parliament, and the system was mandated in such a way that it was difficult for men of the opposition to be elected, whereas, in contrast, tribal leaders were well represented.

With the formation of the Iraqi state, the Shi‘a movement against the British became a subaltern memory, whereas elite social groups found their place in the emerging nation-state. At a time when pan-Arab nationalism was a growing ideology in the region and fitted very well many Sunni Arabs, Iraq’s ideologies regarding issues of nationalism and belonging were diverse and competing during the Hashemite period. As Luizard (Reference 306Luizard1991), Nakash (Reference Nakash1994), and Jabar (Reference Jabar, Dawod and Jabar2003) explore it in their research on the Shi‘a movement and Haddad (Reference Haddad2010) thouches on in his study of sectarian relations in Arab Iraq, Sunnis and Shi‘as did not share a unified national narrative, symbolism, or ideology. As pointed out by Zubaida (Reference Zubaida, Fernea and Louis1991, Reference Zubaida2002) and Davis (Reference Davis2005), neither Sunnis, Shi‘as, nor Kurds represented homogeneous groups because class, kin-based positions, regional belongings, and political affiliations (nationalists, communists, etc.) were also important to their identities and consciousness.

It has often been argued that when nationalism began to spread as a new political ideology in Iraq, Sunnis, Shi‘as, and Kurds supported competing versions of nationalism: Iraqi-oriented nationalism – “Iraqism” – was favored by the Shi‘as and Kurds; pan-Arab nationalism, linked to the rest of the predominantly Sunni Arab region, was favored by the Sunnis. However, according to Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett (Reference Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett1987, Reference Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett1991), pan-Arab nationalism was never dominant neither among the intelligentsia, nor as the ideology promoted by the state, apart from a brief period when it dominated Iraqi politics in the later 1930s and early 1940s as also argued by Wien (Reference Wien2006, Reference Wien, Tejtel, Sluglett, Bocco and Bozarslan2012). If most members of Arab nationalist parties were Sunnis, and the Iraqism-leaning Communist Party was predominantly composed of Shi‘as, and the Kurds had their own national memory and symbolism related to the ideal Kurdish nation-state, Kurdistan, as Zubaida (Reference Zubaida2002) and Davis (Reference Davis2005) argue, the Iraqi population was fragmented into different “nation imaginaries” that were often competitive, conflicting, and grounded in sectarian, class, and geographic divisions.

Bashkin’s (Reference Bashkin2009) research on intelligentsia under the monarchy shows convincingly that these competing imaginaries – pan-Arab nationalism and Iraqism – were more blurred than it is often thought. She argues that the question that occupied many intellectuals of this period was not whether there should be a nation-state but rather what nature this state should assume to accommodate a variety of hyphenated identities (Iraqi-Shi‘i, Arab-Jew, Iraqi-Kurdish, etc.). More importantly regarding women and gender issues, the production of organic intellectuals, on the one hand, and the inability to control their radicalization, on the other, is one of the features of the Hashemite period (Bashkin Reference Bashkin2009: 127–56).

Women and the Colonial State: Between the Shaikhs and the ‘Ulemas

The Constitution adopted in 1925 divided Iraqi citizens in three different classes regarding the law and established three different courts: civil and religious courts in the urban areas and TCCDR for tribesmen in rural areas. The Constitution divided the religious courts into shari‘a courts for the Muslims and Spiritual Councils for other religious communities. It affirmed that shari‘a courts only were to handle matters of personal status – issues of marriage, divorce, and inheritance (thus related to family and women’s rights) – and in accordance to each sect. Thus, under the Mandate, women’s legal rights were divided according to religion (Muslim, Christian, Jew, etc.), sect (Sunni, Shi‘a), and location (rural, urban).

According to Efrati (Reference Efrati2012) and J. Ismael and S. Ismael (Reference Ismael and Shereen T2007), the legal system of colonial Iraq led to the “tribalization of women.” Women were tribalized in the rural areas not only in their construction as tribal, subject to separate “tribal law,” but also in the British involvement in determining tribal law. Even in urban areas, people could involve “tribal motives” when it came to crimes committed in the “name of honor.” Two main social groups advocated against the very establishment of the TCCDR: urban intellectuals – Sunnis and Shi‘as – depicted it as backward, unfair to women, and halting the modernization of the emerging nation, whereas tribal Shaikhs considered it as a direct threat to their power over tribesmen. Although J. Ismael and S. Ismael (Reference Ismael and Shereen T2007) describe tribal law as “inherently misogynous” and its very existence as detrimental to women, Efrati (Reference Efrati2012: 30–50) introduces a more nuanced analysis on the matter. The Tribal Code advocated by many Shaikhs during the Mandate and monarchy periods and aimed at reducing the power of the state over the tribes was characterized by a certain leniency and pluralism concerning women’s issues. This leniency could be a reflection of the reality in the Iraqi countryside where customs regarding women were dynamic and diverse and not necessarily as harsh toward women as it was represented by the British and the urban elite. According to Efrati (Reference Efrati2012: 35), extramarital relations did not automatically mandate a death sentence; in some places, murder for adultery was very exceptional, and there was a diversity of views regarding the way to settle blood disputes in which the handing over of women was not the rule. The British refused the Tribal Code proposed by the Shaikhs and wanted to set their own tribal law. Thus tribal law tribalized rural women not only in their construction as tribal, subject to separate “tribal law,” but also by the British involvement in determining tribal law, affecting rural women as harsh and uncompromising.

In the urban areas, in addition to being exposed to the possibility of the advocacy of “tribal motives,” women were ruled by shari‘a courts, divided into Sunni and Shi‘a courts. Efrati (Reference Efrati2012: 80) explores the reasons why both the British Mandate and the Iraqi monarchy maintained shari‘a courts in the cities, despite increasing criticism from urban intellectuals, especially leftists, demanding a civil code similar to the secular Turkish judicial system. Examining the argument developed by Charrad based on North African countries, which found that the breadth of state-tribe relations correlated directly with the liberalness and egalitarianism of family law, Efrati highlighted that the state-mosque relationship was central under the monarchy. It is tempting to argue that because the Iraqi ruling elite emerged from the Mandate period in close alliance with tribal kin groupings, the state was about to adopt a conservative personal-status legislation that protected extended male-centered patrilineage. Nevertheless, because the personal-status legislation governed only the urban population (Anderson Reference Anderson1953), the rest of the population was ruled by the TCCDR; in reality, it was the state-‘ulemas relation that was central to debates around personal-status legislation. Preserving shari‘a courts allowed the influential and respected ‘ulemas class, from which the qadis were drawn, a share in the country’s administration and thus ensured their loyalty and support to the ruling elite.

The dominant trend of British politics under the Mandate and in the following years of the monarchy, as I will show it in the next section, was to emphasize the “different needs” of Iraqi society and to establish a differentiated legal system in which citizens were granted different “rights” according to their religious and sectarian belonging as well as to their location and gender. Differences existed among women: Muslim and Christian women were not granted the same rights regarding personal matters, neither Sunni nor Shi‘a, and the gap was even stronger between rural and urban women. This differentiated system was highly criticized among the intelligentsia, and the emergence of women’s organizations challenged the fragmented and uneven colonial system.

The “Woman Question” under the Monarchy: Education and Political Activism

As shown by al-Shaikh Da‘ud (Reference Da’ud1958), al-Derbendi (Reference Al-Derbendi1968), and al-Zublef and Said’s (Reference Al-Zublef and Said1980) study dedicated to women’s education and literacy from 1920 to 1979, as well as by Pursley (Reference Pursley2012, Reference Pursley2013), the British did not push for progress in women’s education. The first girls’ school was opened in 1899 with the support of the famous poet Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi (1863–1936).Footnote ¹¹ The evolution of primary education at the beginning of the twentieth century, girls’ secondary educationFootnote ¹² in the 1930s, and mixed education beginning in 1928 were limited to the urban elite composed mainly of Sunni Arabs; Christians and Jews funded their own schools. In 1932, Baghdad Medical School welcomed its first female student; the faculty of law also accepted Sabiha al-Shaikh Da‘ud in 1936. Omnia Shakry describes the debates around motherhood and women’s education in colonial Egypt among the intelligentsia as characterized by “cultural translation and hybridizations” instead of a bad copy of the European model (Shakry Reference Shakry and Abu-Lughod1998: 126–70). The same can be said regarding the debates around girls’ education in Hashemite Iraq, although it was clearly marked by the will of Western-aligned Iraqi bureaucrats and Western, mainly American advisors to “produce gender differences,” according to Pursley (Reference Pursley2012: 119–41). While in the 1920s the education system was dominated by Arab nationalists such as Sati‘ al-Husri, who view education as a way to produce future nationalists, men and women, since the 1930s the implementation of American policymakers’ recommendation by Iraqi officials introduced differences in boys’ and girls’ curricula, with courses related to domesticity for girls. This resulted in a situation where the more girls mixed with boys and women with men in the public sphere, the greater was the impetus to produce differences in their learned modes of being and thinking. According to Pursley (Reference Pursley2012: 119–41), one aspect of the shift was a conceptual reorientation of women’s household labor from the sphere of production to that of consumption at a time when foreign goods were invading the growing consumer market. As shown by Shakry (Reference Shakry and Abu-Lughod1998: 126–70) in the case of colonial Egypt, “ideal mothers” should carry the model of the bourgeois domestic way of life, and in Iraq as well, ideas of creating new desires and promoting bourgeois domesticity were at the core of these reforms of the education system built on gender differences.

However, despite these measures of mandatory female education in domesticity, in the 1950s, the political radicalization of society, especially students, created a sense among Iraqi officials that the education system, instead of producing modern mothers raising strong and healthy citizens, was producing a generation of educated Iraqi women who were resistant to marriage, domesticity, and motherhood and who were more attracted to political activism than managing a household (Pursley Reference Pursley2012: 119–41) More generally, the political elite aligned with Western powers was extremely worried about the politicization of the youth attracted by the ideas of the radical anti-imperialist left (Pursley Reference Pursley2013).

Bashkin (Reference Bashkin2008) shows how much writing about women in Hashemite Iraq became an important mode of political and social identification. It was used to denote whether one belonged to the left or the right, to the religious or the secular camp, and how one conceptualized Iraqi law, independence, and electoral structures. She argues that the changes in the representations of women mirrored the radicalization of the Iraqi intelligentsia. While during the 1920s and 1930s the conversation about gender roles was mostly conducted among men who debated education, seclusion, veiling, and domesticity, in contrast, in the 1940s and 1950s, social democrats, communists, and radical pan-Arabists used the mistreatment of women as a way to criticize the Hashemite state. These groups argued that the Hashemite state preserved the tribal and premodern, where women’s conditions represented the markers of the state’s indifference toward Iraqi society. As in colonial Egypt (Shakry Reference Shakry and Abu-Lughod1998: 126–70), the discourse on “women’s backwardness” in Iraq symbolized the “nation’s backwardness”; the ways in which women were viewed in Iraq were related to other sets of representations, such as those of peasants and tribesmen, and, more broadly, to the ways in which the Iraqi intelligentsia imagined the nation. For Bashkin (Reference Bashkin2008), in the 1940s, this discourse was far more specifically Iraqi than in the past, although the transregional dimensions remained powerful as the intelligentsia spoke about the problems of Arab women and hybridized colonial perceptions of Muslim women.

According to Batatu (Reference Batatu1978), Bashkin (Reference Bashkin2008), and Efrati (Reference Efrati2012), leftists, Marxists, and communists advocated for women’s rights as part and parcel of the struggle for social justice and equality – the most egalitarian conception of women’s rights – whereas nationalist and liberal political groups considered women’s social and political rights (education and the vote) as a means to “educate” and “raise nationalist consciousness” in families. For nationalists and liberals, women primarily represented “mothers” and “educators” of the young generation, and they could be granted political rights only through a “gradual modernization” because they were not deemed ready for full political rights. In Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries, al-Nahda al-Niswiyya (“the Women’s Awakening”) advocated for women’s emancipation within a modernist, reformist understanding of religion and marked a rupture with traditional kin-based powers, criticizing “archaic traditions” and “tribal mentality.” The British played a key role in the antisuffrage movement, especially through some of its leading representatives – such as Gertrude Bell and Edgar Bonham-Carter. Bell, for example, considered that raising children was women’s essential task and described the school opened by the British authorities in Baghdad in January 1920 as a way to “create proper mothers” (Al-Derbendi Reference Al-Derbendi1968; Efrati Reference Efrati2012).

According to Efrati (Reference Efrati2004, Reference Efrati2012), it appears that in Iraq – unlike other Arab countries – faith-based charitable societies did not precede secular, more overtly social and political organizations: the first women’s organization was secular, and a number of organizations developed later in parallel. In addition, the emergence of new women’s organizations on the “nationalist stage” had less to do with “periods when nationalist feelings were at their peak” and more to do with governmental control. The anti-British movement in Baghdad was composed of the few Sunni Arabs opposed to British rule (e.g., Shaikhs Ahmed Da‘ud and Yusef al-Suwaydi), Shi‘a clerics (e.g., Muhammed al-Sadr), and wealthy Shi‘a merchants (e.g., Ja‘far Abu al-Taman). Women’s participation in all movements against the British – the Shi‘a-led 1920 Revolution and even more the 1948 al-Wathba and the 1952 intifada – revealed their politicization especially with the expansion of the education system. Nadi al-Nahda al-Nisa’iyya (“the Club of Women’s Awakening”) was the first women’s organization, which was founded in 1923 and composed of bourgeois women from the Baghdad urban elite.

The British, along with the Iraqi monarchy they brought to power, created a small class of powerful, semifeudal landlords, marginalized the tribal population, and discriminated against the Shi‘a population, giving rise to growing communist and nationalist sentiments. These movements thus found a claim to unite their advocacy for social justice and liberation: the end of British domination. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the anti-British movement had a unifying effect and contributed to the weakening of sectarian and religious divisions (Bashkin Reference Bashkin2008; Davis Reference Davis2005). Following this evolution, women’s charities and political groups, both nationalist and communist, became involved in the burgeoning transnational Middle Eastern and Arab nationalist women’s networks; such networks advocated for women’s political and legal rights alongside the Palestinian and anti-imperialist causes. When the monarchy was overthrown in 1958, Iraqis were more than ready to demonstrate, especially through women and gender issues, that their new revolutionary regime was no less radical than that of their Arab and Muslim neighbors.

Nationalist Feminists and Communist Feminists: Competing and Overlapping Trends

The Iraqi Women’s Union (al-Ittihad al-Nisa’i al-‘Iraqi) was founded in 1945 after the Arab Women’s Congress in Cairo. This union was mainly composed of bourgeois women close to male nationalist elites and advocated for women’s rights in the Constitution, marriage, and work, as well as the development of girls’ and women’s education. Simultaneously, women’s groups linked to the Communist Party gathered in the League for the Defense of Women’s Rights (Rabitat al-difa‘ ‘an Huquq al-Mar’a) and advocated for social justice, anti-imperialism, and women’s rights. All organizations that made up what was commonly called the “women’s movement” organized literacy and charity programs, including in rural areas, as well as civil and political rights campaigns. In the beginning of the 1950s, campaigns were launched by the women’s movement demanding that the Iraqi government implement women’s social, economic, and political equality; reform legislation on private matters; abolish the TCCDR; and reform the Constitution. Moreover, the leftist secular atmosphere in Iraq – the Communist Party dominated the political scene from the 1940s to the 1970s – helped to somewhat bridge sectarian divisions and spread egalitarian conceptions of citizenship and women’s rights.

In the mid-1940s, women’s organizations had broadened, strengthened, and to an extent institutionalized. Two trends characterized the women’s movement landscape – the nationalist feminist and the communist feminist. While their activists seemed to work together as part of the Women’s Union, the government crackdown against left-wing organizations in 1947 shifted their activism (Efrati Reference Efrati2008: 65, Reference Efrati2012: 137–62). The Iraqi Women’s Union yielded under this pressure and removed the representatives of the leftist Women’s League Society from its directorate. While Iraqi Women’s Union received support from the government and royal family and remained a relatively small, elitist organization loyal to the regime, the Women’s League acted underground after failed attempts to obtain government permission under the name of the League for the Defense of Women’s Rights in 1952. The League was composed of leaders from the lower middle class and very much influenced by the radical anti-imperialist Iraqi Communist Party. Two personalities of the time represent these two trends, sometimes aligned and often in competition, Naziha al-Dulaimi, who remained vocal regarding the repression of the government of leftist activists, and Sabiha al-Shaikh Da‘ud, who in contrast stayed silent regarding the shift in women’s activism due to governmental pressure.

Naziha al-Dulaimi, in her book, al-Mar’a al-Iraqiyya (Iraqi Woman) (Reference Al-Dulaimi1952), posed the first and dominant competing narrative on Iraqi women’s activism. Here al-Dulaimi puts forward a short study of the conditions of women’s lives in Iraq in the 1940s, which uses social class as an analytical framework. Al-Dulaimi was a gynecologist by trade, a prominent figure of the League for the Defense of Women’s Rights,Footnote ¹³ the first Iraqi (and Arab) woman minister,Footnote ¹⁴ and prominent communist activist; hence her reading and experiences with activism differed greatly from those of the nationalist elite. She considered women in the al-fallahin (“peasant”) class as the most deprived of rights. She depicted the “double servitude” of these peasant women: they were enslaved and exploited by male domination and tribal rules and by class oppression. When analyzing women of the land-owning, bourgeois and working classes, al-Dulaimi noted that although the conditions of economic oppression varied, women of all classes were oppressed by marriages in which they were considered possessions rather than individuals, as well as social injustice and imperialism. Using a Marxist and early feminist understanding of justice and equality, al-Dulaimi tackled issues of maternal and child protection, marriage, and, indeed, prostitution – a subject on which she did not employ a moralizing analysis of sexuality but rather pushed the boundaries far beyond even that which Iraqi women activists would be able to cross today.

In this book, al-Dulaimi situated qadiyyat al-mar’a (the “woman question”) as a fundamental part of the struggle for class and national liberation; thus her argumentation was far more radical and challenging of the status quo than that of al-Shaikh Da‘ud. Al-Dulaimi and women’s activist of the left believed in the line of the leader of the Iraqi Communist Party, Yusuf Salman Yusuf, that Iraq has lost its sovereignty to imperialist forces, who had fortified their position by allying with local reactionaries. Getting rid of the whole system thus was the only way to attain liberation for both men and women. Therefore, feminist activists of the radical left rejected the idea of “gradual modernization” promoted by the pro-British nationalist elite in power and considered that only a radical political change could put Iraq on the road to becoming modern, which meant achieving economic prosperity, technological progress, social justice, rights for women, and political freedom. For al-Dulaimi, women of the bourgeoisie could not escape the lot of their less-privileged sisters because their marriages too had the characteristics of a financial transaction between their fathers and their future husbands which did not allow them any real say about their marriages. The discourse and activism of the women of the League on less-privileged women were characterized by a willingness to address women’s everyday and concrete problems.

Sabiha al-Shaikh Da‘ud’s landmark book, Awwal al-Tariq (Reference Da’ud1958),Footnote ¹⁵ represents the second competing trend of feminism in Iraq, the nationalist feminist. Her book was published three months before the Revolution that ended the monarchy and is considered one of the first feminist books in Iraq. It provides interesting insights into the social, economic, and political realities of women under the British Mandate (1920–32) and the monarchy (1932–58). Al-Shaikh Da‘ud, the first female lawyer in Iraq, belonged to a prominent Sunni familyFootnote ¹⁶ and provided an Arab nationalist version of Iraqi social and political historyFootnote ¹⁷; her work overlooks underground, especially communist, women’s groups. Nevertheless, her study is the first account detailing the gender dimensions of Iraq’s modernization in the decades after the establishment of the Iraqi state, as well as of such modernization’s social, economic, and political realities at the turn of the first Republic (July 14, 1958). Al-Shaikh Da‘ud’s work brings to light the emergence, among urban educated Iraqi women, of a growing nationalist awareness that placed women and gender issues at the core of aspirations for modernization and national liberation. It gives fascinating details about how women’s rights issues – such as access to education and the work sphere, veiling, and legal and political rights – structured the emerging nationalist consciousness and the idea of the “new nation” among the elite. The politics and representations of gender issues, along with the evolution of women’s realities, illustrate the vision of “the nation” for certain social and political elites. Thus al-Shaikh Da‘ud’s study poses fundamental considerations about how to approach women and gender in Iraq: to equally consider women and gender’s material, ideological, and political dimensions in the colonial and postcolonial context of nation-state building.

Al-Shaikh Da‘ud and the Iraqi Women’s Union activists were more accommodating to the government’s “gradual modernization” discourse that considered that women needed to progress before they could be granted full citizenship rights. As shown by Efrati (Reference Efrati2012: 137–62) and expressed clearly in Awwal al-Tariq, women of the Union used the rhetoric of the “new woman” active and assertive and the “modern woman” – educated, professional, patriotic, and capable citizen willing to build the modern state – to promote the expansion of women’s legal and political rights. As pointed out by Efrati, these activists from the elite families conducted their struggle in an “orderly manner” through legal and constitutional channels: asking the government to expand education and health services. In order not to be perceived as “too radical,” they insisted on the fact that they did not want to “compete with men” in power leadership but “participate in the country’s problems,” such as poverty and illiteracy, and act as “mothers” demanding their rights to participate in the drafting of laws for their sons and daughters, as a natural extension of their maternal duties that would not threaten the family structure, let alone the political and social order.

Awwal al-Tariq sections dedicated to the contribution of Sunni and Shi‘a religious thinkers to the defense of women’s rights contrast with Al-Dulaimi’s silence about religion. This use of a Muslim feminist rhetoric is very typical of transnational nationalist narratives of the time that relied on the work of Muslim reformers to advocate for an indigenous Muslim modernity. However, Al-Shaikh Da‘ud seemed to have been influenced by Al-Dulaimi on the condition of the peasant women as she also evoked in her book the “double servitude” that characterizes her life. This precise issue can be analyzed through the argument of hybridization of the different nationalist narratives – pan-Arab and Iraqi – analyzed by Bashkin (Reference Babakhan2009: 194–228). The division between the civilized nation – the urban – and the uncivilized – the rural – structured the nationalist narrative as the difference between the capital and the rif structures’ nationalist visions of the nation. This shows that despite their very different ideologies, agendas, and proposed solutions to change the political order of the time, nationalist and communist narratives also shared common visions regarding the relationship between modernity and nationhood.

In 1954, the government intensified its repression of the opposition, dismantling hundreds of societies and clubs and banning the existence of unions. The Iraqi Women’s Union had to be reestablished as a single society rather than as a federation; it would be called the Women’s Union Society (Jam‘iyyat al-Ittihad al-Nisa’i). Members of the Union and the League now, after this repression campaign, explicitly criticized the government gender discourse that constructed women as noncitizens: the TCCDR that symbolized the absence of state intervention in matters of personal status and women’s disenfranchisement. This evolution echoes the radicalization of the intelligentsia now dominated by the radical anti-imperialist left; it also prepared the ground for the institution of a legal frame regarding personal matters uniting all Iraqis – rural and urban, Sunnis and Shi‘as – the Personal Status Code (PSC).

The Postcolonial State: Toward an Indigenous Modern Nation-State

The military coup (July 14, 1958) that toppled the monarchy and led to the radical regime of ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim (1958–63) furthered this evolution, contributing to the consolidation of the middle class and the weakening significance of ethnic and religious belonging. Qasim put oil revenues toward efforts to reduce poverty, build social housing, and institute a welfare-state system. Moreover, the power of tribesmen and the significance of ethnic (Arab/Kurd) and sectarian (Sunni/Shi‘a) belongings weakened for several reasons: first, increasing rural to urban migrationFootnote ¹⁸ and Qasim’s various land reform policies, which affected the power of tribesmen, the clerical class, and the aristocratic class, and second, the growing sectarian heterogeneity of the middle class due to the gradual incorporation of rural Iraq into the state and the national market. Although oil revenues were weaker in the 1940s and 1950s than in the 1970s, they were still sufficient to develop the state, modernize education, and update essential infrastructures, but the monarchy (1932–58) operated through a clientelist system open only to selected businessmen. The dismantling of the institutions for nation-building, such as Parliament and the Upper House, pushed the new revolutionary regime to rely mainly on the military and popular support for its power. Although Qasim’s regime lasted fewer than five years and made no attempt to establish institutions for democratic participation, it did enact openly nationalist and socialist policies that benefited the poorest and contributed to unifying Iraqi society across communal belongings. According to Bashkin (Reference Bashkin2011), this period was also marked by a certain hybridization of pan-Arab nationalism and Iraqi nationalism, although the latter was predominant at a moment when international anticolonial leftist activism was also present in the vision.

Moreover, the revolutionary regime initiated radical reforms that strengthened the urban, modern middle class, questioning traditional powers, both tribal and religious. Socioeconomic reforms favored the poorest and aimed to narrow the gap between the upper classes and the impoverished population. Medinat al-Thawra (actually Medinat al-Sadr) is one of the most commonly referred to of such measures; its aim was to welcome the impoverished population – known as al-sharagawa, who hailed originally from the southern tribal regions and were either already living in the slums of Baghdad or were newcomers – into modern urban housing. Three of Qasim’s measures symbolized the rupture with traditional aristocratic, tribal, and religious powers. First, the abolition of the TCCDR ended tribesmen’s power in rural areas and enhanced the state’s power. Second, land reforms consisted of the appropriation and redistribution of land from the clerical and aristocratic classes to the impoverished population, provoking a huge backlash from the classes that had lost some of their privileges. Third, the enactment of the new family law provoked much criticism among the ‘ulemas, both Sunni and Shi‘a, who feared the radical questioning of their authority. According to J. Ismael and S. Ismael (Reference Ismael and Shereen T2007), through all these reforms, the framework of feudalism and tribalism in Iraq was effectively undermined.

Women Mobilizing in Revolutionary Times

The family law, in the form of the Personal Status Code (PSC),Footnote ¹⁹ represented a field of struggle between different political elites, the women’s movement, and the state (Charrad Reference Charrad2011) in the postcolonial Middle East. In Iraq, as Efrati (Reference Efrati2005, Reference Efrati2012) points out, the adoption of a PSC in Law No. 188 (promulgated in December of 1959) was not only the product of the revolutionary elite surrounding ‘Abd Al- Karim Qasim, which had ended both the monarchy and British colonial domination over the country, but the adoption of an openly egalitarian and unified PSC also marked the questioning of ‘ulemas and tribal leaders’ control over private matters; both the shari‘a courts and the TCCDR were abolished. Very importantly, the PSC also marked the beginning of women activists’ inclusion in the process of negotiating for their rights. Many articles of the PSC openly opposed religious – Muslim, Christian, Jewish – jurisprudence (Khayun & Badurzeki Reference Khayun and Badurzeki2006). By adopting measures such as putting the intestate inheritance rights for male and female heirs under the Civil Code and thus granting through an indirect mechanism gender equality in that matter in certain cases, severe limitations on polygamy, making eighteen the legal age for marriage, and protecting women from arbitrary divorce (Anderson Reference 298Anderson1960: 546), the state was sending a clear message of its authority over this new Republic to the ‘ulemas and Shaikhs. Women were also given political rights, though limited, for the first time: the right to vote and run for office. As mentioned previously, Qasim appointed Naziha al-Dulaimi Minister of Municipalities in 1959, the first woman Iraqi and Arab minister.

Law No. 188 was a text clearly stating its routings within shari‘a and uniting Sunni and Shi‘a jurisprudences, granting the authority to a judge appointed by the state to rule on personal matters without the intercession of ‘ulemas. Moreover, according to Efrati (Reference Efrati2012), women activists, such as the Iraqi Women’s League (al-Rabita) activist Naziha al-Dulaimi, participated to the drafting of the PSC alongside legal specialists and Sunni and Shi‘a ‘ulemas who elaborated it straight after the July 14, 1958 Revolution. Thus the PSC was the result of women activists’ demands of and participation in the legislative process. Under Qasim, the political field was open, but sporadic repressions did occur. For example, communist organizations, which dominated the political scene at the time, were authorized and then forbidden a few years later; some communist leaders were also brought to power, and then dismissed shortly after due to Qasim’s fear of competition. Nevertheless, women activists were very vocal during this period and advocated to extend women legal rights: forbidding extralegal marriage contracts, outlawing judges from marrying girls under the legal age, reforming articles related divorce and polygamy that privilege men’s rights, and extending women’s rights to child custody.

Maqbula B., seventy-four, is one of al-Rabita’s oldest and most active women activists. Maqbula belongs to an urban Sunni Arab family from ‘Ana that emigrated to al-Kerrada, central Baghdad, at the beginning of the 1950s. Born in 1938, she was twenty years old when the Revolution began; at that time, Maqbula was already an active member of the Communist Party, and her mother was a founding member of al-Rabita. Prior to the Revolution, Maqbula was drawn to communist activism by the Palestinian cause. After the Revolution, she dedicated her activism to women’s rights and the establishment of the PSC:

Maqbula participated in the formation of the well-known lejna hal al-mashakel (the “problems resolution committee”), which were dedicated to mediating in private matters and supporting women within the family sphere. Being from an urban, educated Sunni Arab family, Maqbula had good connections with women of the nationalist elite and mentioned that some al-Rabita’s actions were supported by or even conducted in partnership with other women’s groups. The effervescence of women’s political activism in Iraq following the establishment of the Iraqi Republic was also described by Al-Ali, in her chapter “Living with the Revolution” (Reference Al-Ali2007: 56–108). The women of the same generation interviewed by Al-Ali also spoke to the politically and socially revolutionary atmosphere, as al-Rabita emerged as a prominent women political organization.

Indigenous Secularism: Gender and Nation

This period also signified a time of secularization: traditional religious practices were on the wane, and the adoption of nonreligious ideologies, such as communism, Marxism, and secular ideologies, dominated the political culture. For example, the year after the Revolution, Shi‘a participation in communist-led political life was at an unprecedented high, absorbing the energies and attention of vast masses, especially among the middle, lower, and manual, urban, and rural classes (Jabar Reference Jabar2003: 75; Nakash Reference Nakash1994). Thus, in 1959, pilgrimages to Karbala and Najaf – the cornerstones of Shi‘a religious rituals – were at their lowest-ever number, clearly indicating that traditional religious practices and rituals were not strong at the time.

Nevertheless, I argue that the symbolic power of religion, especially as it pertains to women and gender issues, did not completely lose its status but instead was reformulated into the nationalist, socialist, and anti-imperialist framework. For example, the way Qasim himself advocated for the PSC, especially the more radical articles, such as the one on inheritance, is very revealing. In March 1960, Qasim gave an interview on the issue in Al-Thawra, he insisted on showing his “Muslimness” by indicating that he had “fasted Ramadan since the age of ten” and “knows the Qur’an by heart.” In response to “the men of religion’s” protest on the issue of inheritance, Qasim developed an argument that would be deemed by many today as Muslim feminist. He directly quoted the verse of the Qur’an related to inheritance, interpreting it as an exhortation (wisaya) and not a command. He compared this verse with other verses from the Qur’an – those related to the punishment of thieves and fornication – and pointed out that the verb used in the latter verses clearly indicates a divine “command.” He then said:

In addition to revealing the symbolic power of religion in the postcolonial period and its use in nationalist terms, the Muslim feminist rhetoric used by Qasim showed how much gender issues were at the core of the “new nation.” Questioning the power of the ‘ulemas, as well as affirming the identity of the new nation, was symbolized through reforming gender-related laws and granting women more rights. Here, in the framework of the formulation of the postcolonial state with conflicts between Westernization and cultural authenticity, the link between gender and nation appears very clearly. As shown by Jayawardena (Reference Jayawardena1986) and others, women were represented as “bearers of the nation,” their issues and rights symbolizing the progress of the new nation obtained in the framework of anti-imperialist struggles.

Consensual Memory on Revolutionary Times: Women’s Liberation and the Unity of the Nation

The oldest women activists I interviewed, who were born either at the end of the 1930s or early 1940s, recalled this period with nostalgia and admiration. It is described as an era characterized by both political openness and women’s emancipation and national unity, especially regarding religious and sectarian divisions. My interviewees described this period as foundational to and influential in their political awareness and activism, especially regarding women and gender issues. Rabab H., a leading figure of al-Rabita and active in the postinvasion women’s movement, was twelve years old when the Revolution started. She was living with her apolitical Arab Christian family in Basra at the time.

Haifa F. – a sociologist and professor at Baghdad University and member of al-Rabita – was sixteen years old when the Revolution began. She belongs to a nationalist Baghdadi family with close ties to leftist and communist political groups at the time. She recalled participating in demonstrations for “social justice” in secondary school. Haifa described this period as very culturally and intellectually rich and dominated by leftist ideas: “everyone was reading a lot” and “open minded.” She described the Communist Party as having “a civilizing role” for the population, and of the gender norms during this period, she said: “[a]t the time, the veil was internal. People were well mannered. Boys were not harassing girls even when they were not veiled, and no matter what they were wearing.”

Nashwa A. – a member of a women’s rights organization in Baghdad – was fifteen years old when the Revolution began. She belonged to a prominent Shi‘a religious family from Karbala. Her father was one of the leading Shi‘a nationalist figures who opposed the British under the monarchy and participated in the 1920 Revolution. Nashwa’s family moved to the Medinat al-Huriyya neighborhood in Baghdad after the Revolution. One of her brothers, a communist activist, was jailed under Nuri al-Sa‘id. Nashwa recalls that the time of Qasim was a period of great happiness and expressed admiration for the leader: “We were so happy for the revolution; my brother was jailed under Nuri al-Sa‘id. I loved ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim’s personality, and appreciated him very much. After the 14th of July, the houses were open; there was no stealing at all. ‘Abd al-Karim was clean.”

Whether expressing admiration for the Revolution’s leader or its reforms, most of the activists I interviewed – from various political, regional, ethnic, and religious backgrounds – remembered this as a time of national unity. Maha S. – born in 1946 and a prominent women activist in Baghdad – was a teenager during the Qasim period. At the time, she lived in Nasiriyah with her mother, father, and four brothers and sisters. Her family emigrated from a Christian village north of Mosul and settled there until the mid-1970s. Maha’s father worked as a merchant, opened a shop, and was a communist activist. She speaks of the Nasiriyah period in her life with great nostalgia and a strong feeling of belonging:

Maha S. gives a very emotional and tender recollection of her youth Nasiriyah at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s. She speaks of the fact that despite here being a Christian, the atmosphere of sharing and unity was so strong in the Arab Shi‘a–dominated south that she was even invited to participate in Shi‘a rituals:

Although biased due to their grounding in women’s subjectivities, these personal and emotional accounts are nevertheless revealing of what the Qasim period meant for many Iraqis, especially women political activists. Al-Ali (Reference Al-Ali2007: 56–108) interviewed diasporic Iraqi women who had experienced that period; they also expressed similar feelings and the sense of a unified nationhood. Their words show how much the idea of national unity overlapped with women’s emancipation in the context of communist and nationalist activism. Qasim himself – the son of an Arab Sunni father and a Faili (Shi‘a) Kurdish mother – personified national unity. His noncommunal, pro-women, and pro-poor politics marked Iraqi women activists’ vision and created a consensual memory. This consensual memory, where both the advancement of women’s rights and shared nationhood are perceived as interrelated, forms the basis of what women activists designate as “Iraqi culture.” In their attempt to define a unified national memory, women activists did not mention the military nature of the revolutionary regime in their narratives – e.g., the bloody ethnoreligious conflicts of Mosul and Kirkuk – choosing instead to focus on the general atmosphere of political openness and the feeling of unified nationhood. The intense violence that characterized the Ba‘th overthrow of Qasim’s regime can explain the terms in which this period is narrated.