The New Fashion Brought to Iraq

In 1999, I was a freshman in college. Living in a former secular country, most Iraqis had no difference in dealing with each other. In college, I had a wonderful group of friends, males and females. Our group consisted of two males and two females.

I have to say that those days we spent at college were the best in my life. As a young man, I couldn’t continue to enjoy this period of life as I am supposed to. The war and the occupation destroyed my dreams and killed the vivid spirit of the youth inside me and the ones in my age, males and females.

My female friends did not put on scarf, like most Iraqi female students before the war. They did not even believe in putting it on.

Every year, there was a graduation celebration in colleges and universities marking the end of four-year undergraduate studies. University students decorate their colleges and sections with roses and colorful ribbons, female students dress up like models with their hair playing in the fresh air, and male students compete on who is going to dress more elegantly to look handsome. Female and male students gather according to their sections and hand in hand, they all dance on the loud DJ music.

Once, we were invited to attend a graduation party in the University of Technology. My group and some other female and male friends joined us to party. While we were walking, an apparently female student, putting on a black Burqa- a fuller version of Abaya- and a pair of black gloves, passed by. All of us laughed out loud. She was Yemeni, we discovered. “Oh my God,” said one of my female friends. “Why do they accept having such students in our universities? She is all covered. How can she read?”

Iraqi women did not believe in putting burqa. It wasn’t even in their dictionary. When we saw women wearing it, we said they were not Iraqis. They might be either Yemenis or probably from one of the Arab Gulf countries. However, some Iraqi women believe in putting the ordinary scarf, especially in religious areas like holy Najaf and Karbala. Most women there wear the scarf in devotion to God or to follow the traditional teachings of Islam.

This no longer exists. After the U.S.-led occupation to Iraq, religious parties brought by the occupier from neighboring Iran and from other countries imposed their own understanding of the scarf on the secular society. They started forcing women to wear scarves directly and indirectly.

Women, who joined these “religious” and political parties or trends, started the new trend of “religious fashion”: Wearing Burqa and gloves to hide their faces and hands. Not only this, they started giving lectures to the newly joined female members to make them spread the idea of wearing hijab and burqa.

A colleague of mine emailed me a disgusting photo of how this issue is changing the shape of the Iraqi women who once were ones of the most fashionable women in the world in former cosmopolitan cities like Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. I was so disgusted when I saw the photo. Inside me, I was shouting “Nooooooo. It shouldn’t be like this. We were not like this. Enough distortion and abuse to the women.”

This disaster continues. The Parties’ TV stations are doing the same thing. Iraqi Islamic Party’s Baghdad Sunni channel and SCIRI’s Al-Furat Shiite channel introduce their programs with fully-scarfed anchors to make the people get used to their ugly faces.

The new dictators of the “new” Iraq are doing things that Iraq’s former dictator did not do. As 24 Steps to Liberty said in his latest entry: “When they invaded Iraq, they didn’t have an already-formed Iraqi government to take place after Hussein’s was toppled… Their only advisors were Iraqis who’ve never been to Iraq in the last 40 years at least.”

These puppets came with their hatred to impose their masters’ orders as to make the first step to fulfill their dream of forming a religious state replacing the secular one once ruled by Saddam.

Update to Adhamiya clashes:

This morning, I woke up on the sounds of the shootings and explosions rather than the sound of my alarm. “Nothing new,” I said within myself. I took a shower, had my breakfast while the sound of the daily shootings was mixed with the songs of Fayrouz, the Lebanese famous singer which I listen to when I have breakfast everyday.

As usual, my mother insisted that I don’t go to work and as usual, I refused. Eventually, I left to work while the sound of heavy shooting was still continuous.

The clashes erupted in Adhamiya this morning at 7 a.m. after a quite night. A friend of mine who works at a government institution in Waziriya near Adhamiya said that he saw at least two armed men disguised in kaffiyas and carrying RPJs on his way to work, specifically in Raghiba Khatoon neighborhood, near Adhamiya. He also said he saw at least three police pick up trucks with dead bodies covered with blood, some where in police uniform and others were covered with winter blankets.

Another friend who lives near Nida mosque near Adhamiya has just emailed me. He wrote, “Heavy shooting is being heard near my Neighborhood ( Near Al-Nida’a Mosqe) since the early hours of the morning ( especially at 7 a.m ) and till now. You can still, hear rounds of shots in the far distance and lots of sirens. The sounds of shooting suggest that it is coming from a heavy caliber Machine Guns ( BKCs and up)”

I will keep you posted with anything new comes up…