Nadje Al-Ali

Biography

On March 8, 2006, International Women’s Day, we had the unique opportunity to speak with Dr. Nadje Al-Ali, an acclaimed expert and author on women and gender issues in the Middle East. Although Nadje was due to speak at a Congressional briefing later in the day, she agreed to meet with us for breakfast at a small Capitol Hill café, where we discussed the dynamic role of women in Iraq and women in the Iraqi Diaspora.

Nadje Al-Ali is a Senior Lecturer at University of Exeter (UK), where she specializes in women and gender issues in the Middle East, women’s movements and feminism, transnational migration and war, and conflict and post-conflict reconstruction. She is the author of Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women’s Movement (Cambridge Middle East Studies, July 2000), which according to the Asian and African Studies Journal of Contemporary History, “breaks new ground and points to a future programme of original and refreshing research.” She is currently working on a new book about Iraqi women in the Diaspora, which will be completed this fall and published by Zed Press in 2007.

Interview

Conducted in March 2006

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epic: Can you tell me about yourself and how you came to work in your field?

Nadje: My father is Iraqi, but I grew up in Germany. All of his family lived in Iraq, so I used to visit them regularly. This was long before Saddam Hussein, so my father wasn’t a political refugee. I have studied Iraq as a socio-anthropologist for the past five years. Currently, I teach at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, where I specialize in women and gender relations in the Middle East. I have written about gender relations and the impact of sanctions on women, and I work on migration and transnationalism in the context of foreign conflicts and regions.

A year and a half ago I was asked to write a book about the women of Iraq, post-2003, but I refused to do so because I believe it’s wrong to start the story at the end. The reader can not possibly understand what’s happening with women in Iraq without first knowing the historical context. So I told the publisher that if I were to write a book, it would have to be about the history of Iraqi women based on true life stories of the women themselves. He agreed, so I’ve been working on that book ever since and hope to have it completed by September.

For this book I have interviewed about 200 Iraqi women of different ethnic, religious and class backgrounds - mainly women who live in the Diaspora in the US, England, Germany and Jordan. In Jordan I was not only able to tap into the Iraqi community in Amman, but I’ve also interviewed Iraqi women who still live in Iraq, since many people frequently travel between Iraq and Jordan.

My goal for the book is to look at the many ways Iraqi women experienced different historical periods. How do they construct the past? How does the past relate to the present? A woman’s personal experience, her vision for the future, her relationships to the war, occupation and the current government — all these things determine how she constructs history, no matter where she is in the world.

epic: What historical periods are you including in the book?

Nadje: I started with the 50’s and 60’s because I thought it was important to portray Iraqi life before the Ba’ath party came to power in the coup d’etat of 1968. Next, I wanted to find out how women experienced the 1970s, which was the ‘golden era’ for many Iraqis. It is important to remember that Kurdish women or women in opposition groups were persecuted, arrested and tortured. One must investigate all sides of Iraqi society. During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, women were needed more than before because men were fighting at the front. When it became very clear that there was a demographic imbalance between Iraq and Iran, Saddam’s regime saw women in a new light. They encouraged every good Iraqi woman to produce at least five children to become future soldiers. So the Iraqi women of the 80’s were ‘super women’ because they were still very much a part of the labor force, despite pressures to raise a large family.

I will also look at the effects of 13 years of the most comprehensive sanction system ever imposed on a country. Unfortunately, I feel that this period is often written out of the contemporary debate about Iraq. Even the people who are against the occupation forget that it’s not just the past three years, but also the previous thirteen years of devastation and deteriorating infrastructure, which really had a huge impact on Iraqi women. When there is an economic crisis anywhere in the world, women are the first ones to be pushed back home.

The conclusion of the book looks at the current situation in Iraq. I’m introducing this by trying to map out the scene of the Diasporas around the world because this is where I spoke to the most women. There are so many different reasons why people have had to leave Iraq, both political and economic. Therefore, the millions of Iraqis who live abroad have to be considered when you examine Iraq and its society.

epic: How are Iraqi women organizing in the U.S.?

Nadje: There are many active women’s groups across the globe representing a wide range of views. Many women in the U.S. are too scared to be involved because they don’t have passports yet and don’t want to lose their green cards. One woman, who was a sympathizer of the Dawa party, told me that she had been living in the U.S. for 30 years, but after 2003 she had been coming and going from the U.S. to help family and friends back in Iraq. On one of her visits to Iraq the Americans took away her green card, and now she doesn’t know what to do. It is quite clear to me that there is no sense of security, and in the United States you hear women who are basically echoing what the Bush administration is telling them because there’s not much tolerance for women who have opposing views. It’s quite different in the U.K..

epic: In your view, are Iraqi women portrayed correctly in the public forums of the U.K. and U.S.?

Nadje: In terms of women, the main problem I always see in both the U.K. and the U.S. is in regards to Islam and its role in Iraq historically as well as today. I think Iraq in the past was an example of a country where women were suffering, regardless of religious ideologies. Saddam’s regime was not linked to Islam or Islamic identity; it was a secular regime. What women experienced had nothing to do with religion. Today there is this simplification going on because Iraq is a predominantly Muslim society and to many people Islam explains oppression. Women were not oppressed in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s because of Islam. They were oppressed because of the dictatorship, wars and economic sanctions.

epic: We have heard a lot about the military component of the conflict in Iraq, but there is little knowledge in the U.S. about the roles that civil society and women’s organizations play. Could you tell me about these?

Nadje: Yes, but let me first give some context. There was a period between 1958 and 1968 when the Communist Party had quite a bit of power and civil society flourished. When the Ba’aths came to power, there were no independent organizations; they were all state-controlled. In 2003 after the invasion and downfall of the regime, Iraq initially faced a few months of chaos and looting. Once that settled a bit, the first people to actually mobilize in Iraq were women and women’s organizations. For example, women came together as doctors providing free health care, and lawyers providing free legal advice.

The women also started to mobilize politically. In December 2003, the Iraqi Governing Council tried to push through what was called Article 137, which was basically an attempt to change a relatively progressive personal status code of family laws. These are the laws that govern marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance, and they are based on Islamic law. Article 137 was a conservative interpretation and a big step backwards, but the law had to be signed by Bremer to take effect. He didn’t sign it because there was a lot of lobbying against the law both inside and outside Iraq from numerous Iraqi and international women’s organizations.

epic: How has the security situation in Iraq affected women’s participation in civil society?

Nadje: Due to three wars and political oppression where lots of men were executed or chose to emigrate, there is now a demographic imbalance. The low estimates of femaleheaded households are 55% to 65%, and some studies have shown that in certain parts of Iraq, it is 70%. The positive element is that women were very active, and so civil society organizations started forming. But it has become more difficult for women to participate in civil society as the security situation has gotten worse.

The additional complication is the relationship between the Diasporas and Iraqi women inside of Iraq. There is a need for educated Iraqi Diaspora women to contribute to the political transition. The problem is that many of them did not just take advisory roles; they took leadership roles and ended up alienating a lot of Iraqi women. I spoke with many women from the Diaspora who left Iraq and felt disillusioned. Those who stuck it out really gained respect among the women in Iraq considering the tough situation that they faced.

epic: What do you think is the biggest obstacle to national unity?

Nadje: First and foremost, I think that the occupation is increasingly playing on sectarian tensions. I do think that sectarian tensions existed in the country before to a certain extent. But I feel strongly that the occupation has increased the sectarian divisions, and they are not considering the fact that class differences and political differences cut across ethnic and religious lines.

I was speaking to people at Baghdad University who were telling me that in the past you had to be a ranking member of the Ba’ath party to be a dean or head of a department.

Now you have to be a Shiite and a member of one of the political parties. Of course, national unity is difficult when those who are either non-Shiite or choose to be part of non- Shiite political parties feel like the new system is not working for them.

epic: What are your thoughts on the current status of Iraqi women?

Nadje: In my opinion, I think that women may be the biggest losers in what is happening now in Iraq. They are being used as a symbolic break with the old regime, which was seen as secular despite its shift in the 1990s. The occupation forces have been emphasizing women’s issues, saying that “We are liberating Iraqi women.” However there’s a resistance to the occupation, which creates a resistance to women’s rights agendas from people who would not normally oppose women’s rights—they are simply reacting against anything from the occupation.

Also, the people who were sent to work on gender issues in Iraq are not gender experts. They don’t know the meaning of gender; they hate the word ‘feminism’. They’re not even people who are lobbying for women’s rights in the U.S. Building flashy women’s centers in Iraq to have photo opportunities with Condoleezza Rice and organizing meetings does not mainstream gender.

Looking historically at other struggles, wars and conflicts, I think women too often were told, “Let’s liberate the country first, and then we’ll look at women’s issues.” It didn’t work this way in Iraq, and now it might be too late. Having said that, I’m also very painfully aware of the dilemma that if I demand women’s rights now, while there’s actually an occupation, I might be doing Iraqi women more harm than good.

I’m really worried about women in Iraq in the long term.

The longer the occupation goes on, the more difficult it will be to unravel the damage that’s been done.