[casi-analysis] Mass Demonstrations against Islamization of Iraqi Law

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Mass Demonstrations against Islamization of Iraqi Law


" ....So, the response of the Bush administration to the September 11 attack
on the United States by a group of radical Islamist extremists has been to
abolish secular law for Iraqi women and impose a fundamentalist reading of
Islamic law on them. ..."

".... Since the Interim Governing Council was appointed directly by the
United States, it is in effect an organ of the Occupation Authority. As
such, it is a contravention of the 1907 Hague Regulations for it to change
civil law in an occupied territory. The US appointed a number of clerics and
leaders of religious parties to the IGC, almost ensuring that this sort of
thing would happen.

      The US is now in the position of imposing on the Iraqi public,
including the 50% who are women, a theocratic code of personal status. The
question is whether this step is just the first in the road to an Iraqi
theocracy."

-------------------------------


1)
Source: http://www.juancole.com/

Wave of Demonstrations against Abrogation of Civil Personal Status Law

az-Zaman reports a "storm" of street protests again on Thursday against the
Interim Governing Council's abolition of the 1958 civil personal status laws
in favor of religious law. Az-Zaman, a modernist Arab nationalist newspaper
close to Adnan Pachachi, ran several essays Thursday by Iraqi intellectuals
denouncing the move as harmful to Iraq.

The Financial Times, to its credit, picked up the story
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1073281040335
for Thursday (most of the Western press
had ignored it initially). It looks to me as though IGC members tried to
deceive Nicolas Pelham and Charles Clover with claims such as that the IGC
decree implementing religious law was "voluntary" and anyway would not be
implemented because it needed Paul Bremer's signature. You don't need a
government law to have voluntary compliance with shariah or Islamic law. If
someone wants to write a will in accordance with literalist approaches to
Islamic law, they already can. What is objectionable is the government
imposing religious law on people who may or may not want it, and that is
what the IGC is trying to do. As for the claim that Bremer won't implement
the law, just issuing the decree gives vigilante militias a pretext to pry
into the private affairs of Iraqis and to impose religious practices on
them.

So, the response of the Bush administration to the September 11 attack on
the United States by a group of radical Islamist extremists has been to
abolish secular law for Iraqi women and impose a fundamentalist reading of
Islamic law on them. Yes, it all makes perfect sense.

2)
Source: http://antiwar.com/cole/index.php?articleid=1701

      January 15, 2004
      Mass Demonstrations by Women, Others, Against Sudden Islamization of
Iraqi Law

      by Juan Cole
      The Baghdad/London daily az-Zaman reports that there were widespread
demonstrations on Tuesday by women against the order decreeing abolition of
Iraq's uniform civil codes in favor of religious law, which they say
"repeals women's rights" in Iraq. This story appears to have been completely
missed so far by the Western news media, which is a great shame. Women are
important, too, guys.

      Women activists representing 80 women's organizations (including the
female Interim Minister of Public Works!) gathered at Firdaws Square in
downtown Baghdad to protest the IGC decree, issued three days ago. Minister
of Public Works Nasreen Barwari complained to az-Zaman about the lack of
"transparency" and of "democratic consultation" in the promulgation of the
decree by the IGC. Protesters carried placards with phrases like "No to
discrimination, No to differentiating women and men in our New Iraq." and
"We reject Decree 137, which sanctifies religious communalism." Activist
Zakiyah Khalifah complained that the law would weaken Iraqi families.

      US observers, including US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, have
continually worried in public about Iraq becoming a theocracy, and have
rejected that option. But the American-appointed Interim Governing Council
has suddenly taken Iraq in a theocratic direction that has important
implications for women's rights. As reported here earlier, the IGC 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.

      Since the Interim Governing Council was appointed directly by the
United States, it is in effect an organ of the Occupation Authority. As
such, it is a contravention of the 1907 Hague Regulations for it to change
civil law in an occupied territory. The US appointed a number of clerics and
leaders of religious parties to the IGC, almost ensuring that this sort of
thing would happen.

      The US is now in the position of imposing on the Iraqi public,
including the 50% who are women, a theocratic code of personal status. The
question is whether this step is just the first in the road to an Iraqi
theocracy.




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