Women Fear Family Law
Shelved legislation curbing women’s rights may soon be implemented.
Women Fear Family Law
Shelved legislation curbing women’s rights may soon be implemented.
While women’s rights activists worry about what role Islam will have in the new constitution, they are also keeping an eye on legislation that they say could be used to undermine their cause.
The law, Act 137, passed in December 2003, would have applied Sharia law to family issues - such as marriage, inheritance, alimony and dowries - but was never implemented because of protests from women and a change of government.
Act 137 was meant to replace the 1959 civil code governing family law, which at the time was one of the most progressive in the region.
Women would have lost out under the new legislation because, under Islamic law, in cases related to family issues, women are often considered to be worth half a man and, therefore, entitled to only half of what a man would get in the same circumstances.
Now women’s rights groups worry that if conservative Shia politicians fail to make Islam the “main source of legislation” in the constitution, they will try to implement Act 137.
Shruq al-Abaichi, a women’s rights activist, said that since the mainly Shia United Iraqi Alliance list won the January elections, Islamists have been trying to draw back women’s rights.
“Shia Islamists want to make Iraq a second Iran,” she said.
Wiqar Mohammed, an Iraqi women’s rights activist who works from Sweden, said, “Women expected salvation after the oppression of the Saddam era, but the reality is that Iran’s followers will make us dream of Saddam’s times.”
Iraq was largely a secular society under the Saddam regime, but people have become more religious since then. Insurgents have also encouraged extreme Islamic views, and have attacked women who did not wear headscarves.
Nagham Kadhim of the Iraqi Women’s Network said the Islamists are trying to revive Act 137 to force their beliefs on Iraqi women.
“We are not servants for the Islamists to force us to stay indoors like their wives,” she said.
But Sheikh Humam Hammoudi, a prominent United Iraqi Alliance member and head of the committee drafting the constitution in the National Assembly, said reports of women’s rights being curbed in the constitution were just rumours - insisting they would be protected.
Some religious women, however, believe that implementing Sharia would be good for women.
Uhood Ziyad, an Islamic women’s activist in Sadr City, said Iraq is an Islamic state so Sharia should be applied, and that those protesting Act 137 were either supported by the Americans or were Saddam sympathisers.
“They are hired women - America is behind their protests,” she said.
Basim al-Shara’a is an IWPR trainee in Baghdad.
