In freer Iraq, new curbs on women's wear

The only parts of Maryam Mohammed and Zeinab Sarowa visible to the world are their hands and faces. But when they come for Friday prayers at the Shiite mosque where they have worshiped all their lives, they are turned away.

The reason: though covered head to toe, they're not wearing the dark, billowing clothing the guard says is required for Muslim women during prayer.

Sulking with her friends outside one of Baghdad's holiest Shiite shrines in the neighborhood of Kadhumiya, Ms. Mohammed says that in the past, even when visiting the world-famous Shiite sites in Najaf and Karbala, no one questioned her dress or barred her from entering.

But that was then. In the new Iraq, religious groups, once under the stifling control of Saddam Hussein, are testing out their newfound elbow room. Some Iraqis view this as the unfettering of faith after decades of a Baathist regime that brutally suppressed religion, particularly the majority Shiites. For others, many women in particular, it is as if the piercing summer sun, which bathes the courtyard of the shrine, is also drying up their liberties before their eyes.

"Thursday they sent my sister away. Who are they? Who put them in charge?" snaps Ms. Sarowa, who finished a political science degree two years ago, but has yet to find a job. "If there were a government here, they wouldn't be able to do that."

There is an authority of sorts at the shrine containing the tomb of Imam Musa al-Kadhum and his grandson, for whom the neighborhood is named. It is called the Hawza el Miya, which is the world's foremost seminary of Shiite religious learning. It is made up of 1,000 scholars who are authorized to issue fatwas, or religious edicts. The word of the Hawza is considered the most authoritative in the Shiite world, and presents a challenge even to the clerics in Iran's holy city of Qom, whose role was elevated by the flight of Iraqi religious leaders during Mr. Hussein's rule.

It is the Hawza, says an armed guard actively turning away women who are not in abaya, who has ordered the enforcement of this new dress code.

Both Mohammed and Sarowa are wearing long, light-colored suit-jackets, floor-length skirts, and hijab, or an Islamic head scarf. But they are not, the guard at door of the dazzling mosque and Shiite shrine complains, wearing the abaya. The abaya, a big and billowing head-to-toe black cloth that is placed over a long black cloak - which itself is worn over a woman's indoor clothing - with a separate, tightly fastened head scarf, is similar to the chador worn by many women in Iran. What Iraqis call the jupeh, a long, straight-cut gown similar the Western equivalent of a housedress, is not sufficient, says Said Alla Azaidi.

"My dear sister," he tells an inquiring woman, "it is an order from the Hawza of Najaf, because all of the body of a woman should be protected. A woman must not show any part but her face to strangers." The coat she wears "must be wide," he says, at least when she's coming to a religious establishment.

The policy, Mr. Azaidi says, began to be instituted after the fall of Mr. Hussein's regime.

"The [long dresses] which open in the front with buttons, that's no good. We don't consider that lawful hijab," Azaidi continues. Nor are light or pastel fabrics, like the whites and blues worn by Mohammed and Sarowa approved.

"When a man who is praying at the mosque looks at a woman with this colorful clothing, he will be distracted by Satan, and she will be distracted, too," he says. The policy could not be enforced in the past, he adds, because "Saddam Hussein was persecuting the Shiites and he didn't want a Muslim society."

The quickly evolving dress code is not limited to mosques. At Al Mustansirriye University in Baghdad, new guidelines have been posted on student bulletin boards by "security officers" who say they have been elected to represent the Hawza on campus. On professor complains that Baath Party enforcers are just being replaced by Hawza authorities.

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