Iraqi women fear rising child marriages as lawmakers consider giving conservative clerics more freedom

IRBIL, Iraq — Shaimaa Saadoun is haunted by the memory of being forced into a violent marriage to a 39-year-old man shortly after she turned 13.

Her impoverished family, living near the southern Iraqi city of Basra, hoped that a dowry of gold and money would help them improve their situation. Her husband gave her a bloody piece of cloth to prove her virginity after their wedding night.

“I was expected to be a wife and mother when I was a child myself. No child or teenager should be forced to live what I went through and experienced,” said Saadoun, who divorced her husband when she was 30 and is now 44.

Saadoun’s marriage was illegal, although a judge — a relative of her husband — signed it. Iraqi law sets the minimum age for marriage at 18 in most cases.

But such child marriages to girls could soon be state-sanctioned. Iraq’s parliament is considering controversial legal changes that would give religious authorities more power over family law matters, which rights groups and opponents say could open the door to marriages of girls as young as 9.

The law would allow clergy to decide at what age a girl can marry.

The pressure for change is coming largely from powerful Shiite Muslim political factions backed by religious leaders who are increasingly campaigning against what they describe as Western imposition of cultural norms on Muslim Iraq. In April, parliament passed a tough anti-LGBTQ+ law.

The proposed changes would allow Iraqis to turn to religious courts on matters of family law, including marriage, which is currently the exclusive domain of civil courts.

That would allow clerics to rule according to their interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law, as opposed to the laws of the land. Some clerics interpret sharia to allow marriages for girls in their teens — or as young as 9, according to the Jafari school of Islamic law, which many Shiite religious authorities in Iraq follow.

Many Iraqi women reacted with horror, staging protests outside parliament and campaigning against the changes on social media.

“The law that brings back 1,500 years of history is a disgraceful thing… and we will continue to reject it until our last breath,” Heba al-Dabbouni, one of dozens of activists who protested in August, told The Associated Press. “The job of the Iraqi parliament is to pass laws that will raise social standards.”

Conservative lawmakers say the changes give people a choice between civil or religious law and say they protect families from secular, Western influences.

Sarah Sanbar, a Human Rights Watch researcher in Iraq, said the changes prioritize husbands’ preferences. “Yes, it gives choice, but most importantly it gives choice to men.”

Not all religious leaders are on board

The often-fierce debate has spilled over into Iraqi media — even among clerics. In a recent news program, a Sunni cleric opposed the lower marriage age, calling it harmful for girls and saying that Islam has no problem with the current laws.

In a lecture posted on social media, Shiite cleric Rashid al-Husseini insisted that Sharia law allows the marriage of a 9-year-old girl. “But in practice, does this actually happen? … It could be zero percent or 1% of cases,” he said.

The proposed amendments are supported by a majority of Shiite lawmakers in a bloc called the Coordination Framework, which has a parliamentary majority. But disputes over the bill continue. Parliament was due to hold an initial vote on the bill on Tuesday but could not reach a quorum and was forced to adjourn.

Iraq’s Personal Status Law, passed in 1959, is widely seen as a strong foundation that largely protects the rights of women and children. It sets the legal age of marriage at 18, although it allows girls as young as 15 to marry with parental consent and medical proof that the girl has reached puberty and is menstruating.

Marriages outside the state courts were prohibited. Yet enforcement is lax. Individual judges sometimes approve younger marriages, either because of corruption or because a marriage has already been made informally.

Parliamentarian Raed al-Maliki, who introduced the proposed amendments, said the state would continue to provide protection and that discussions on the minimum age of marriage were still ongoing.

The age will be “very close to the current law,” al-Maliki told the AP, without giving details.

Iraqi women lead the fight against change

Al-Maliki and other supporters present these changes as a defense against Western secularism.

He said the original law was influenced by “communists and Baathists,” the latter referring to the secular pan-Arab nationalist party that ruled the country with an iron fist from 1968 until its rule under Saddam Hussein fell in 2003 following a US-led invasion.

“In the West, they take children away from their parents for the simplest of reasons and accuse them of violence, and then they change their culture and make them homosexuals,” al-Maliki said, referring to an Iraqi law passed in April that criminalized same-sex relationships and promoted LGBTQ+ rights. “We cannot imitate this or consider it development.”

Criticism of Western culture has gained new force since the outbreak of the latest war between Israel and Hamas, when most Iraqis sympathize with the Palestinians in Gaza. Many see the statements of the United States and others on human rights as hypocritical because of their support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

But the most ardent opponents of change are Iraqi women, said Sanbar of Human Rights Watch.

“This shows that this is what Iraqi women want, not that foreign organizations are dictating what Iraq should do,” she said.

It wasn’t the first such set of amendments proposed in the past decade. But now, Shiite parties are more united behind them.

Harith Hasan, a research fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, says Shiite parties previously had other priorities, focusing on the multiple conflicts that have rocked the country over the past two decades.

“There is now a kind of consensus among them” on cultural issues, he said, adding that the new amendments would lead to “institutionalized sectarianism” in Iraq and could weaken civilian courts.

“When they say it is the right of religious officials to deal with marriage, inheritance, divorce, and the court cannot question it, you are creating two parallel authorities,” Hasan said. “This will create confusion in the country.”

Saadoun, who now lives in Irbil, in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq, said she fears for women and girls in Iraq.

“The new changes to the personal status law will destroy the future of many little girls and many generations,” she said.

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Chehayeb reported from Beirut. Associated Press videographer Ali Abdulhassan in Baghdad contributed to this report.