A lonely struggle

Iraqi woman's road to power comes at great personal cost.

Salama Khafaji did not make a powerful first impression. When I met her, she had just been appointed to the US-backed Iraqi Governing Council as the replacement for a female official who had been assassinated, and she barely spoke during our interview. She wore, as she always does, the traditional abaya.

In response to most of my questions she deferred to a man — her chief adviser, Shaikh Fatih Kashif Ghitaa — who sat nearby. I left doubting that she would make a mark in the predominantly male world of Iraqi politics.

But, two years later, Khafaji has found her voice, espousing a striking mix of Shiite and feminist thought.

She is now one of the most powerful women in Iraq, and is in constant demand on Arabic radio and television. She plans to run for a seat in the permanent parliament in December.

Khafaji's journey to prominence makes plain the possibilities and the risks for educated Iraqi women.

On the one hand, she has been able to play much more of a role than many would expect of a woman from a traditional and religious society.

But her achievements have come at terrible personal cost. Her eldest son was shot to death during one of three attempts on her life. Her marriage, strained by the boy's death and her political work, collapsed.

She anguishes over whether she has taken the right path, yet feels she cannot abandon a struggle that few other women will take up.

Salama Khafaji was born nearly 50 years ago to a modest Baghdad family that valued learning.

Her father, a carpenter, spurred her to pursue a career. "He encouraged me to be a doctor or a dentist and he always said, ‘You should have been a man'."

She became a dentist, but out of intellectual curiosity also began the formal study of Islam.

Though women are barred from becoming judges and ayatollahs, it is not unknown for a woman to spend years studying with the goal of becoming a mujtahid, a scholar of Islamic law, and then teaching it to others.

The decision to pursue religious study in the 1990s was a risky one because Quranic schools were infiltrated by Saddam Hussain's secret police.

Saddam, a Sunni, feared that the Shiite schools were a cover to plots against him.

Khafaji and a small group of like-minded women studied with Shaikh Fatih until 1998, when he was arrested on charges that he was educating people to oppose the regime and was a supporter of the Badr Brigade, a rebellious Shiite militia. He was sent to Abu Ghraib prison.

His arrest radicalised Khafaji and forced her to see the world in more political terms.

"We were educated women, we had graduated from college, we were dentists, pharmacists, doctors, some had been in prison themselves or had relatives who had been in prison," she said.

Reduced sentence

Along with Fatih's mother, the women collected money to hire a lawyer and get him out of solitary confinement, where he was being tortured, and ultimately to get his sentence reduced to five years.

The women's success spurred them to continue their resistance work, helping the families of other political prisoners to improve the conditions of their relatives.

When the US invaded in March 2003 and Saddam went into hiding, "that was a big opportunity for us," Khafaji said.

Six months later, Governing Council member Akila Hashimi was assassinated by gunmen as she left for work.

Khafaji, who was known because of her involvement in teaching Islamic studies to women, was recommended by the Islamic Dawa Party as her replacement.

She wanted to take the post, but first travelled to Najaf to consult the marjaia — the most senior body of Shiite clerics, which at the time consisted of four grand ayatollahs.

"I said to the marjaia, ‘I think I have to work in politics, others say no, it's not for women to work.' I asked them, ‘Is it possible for me to work with the Americans?' "

The marjaia told Khafaji that it was her duty to serve her country. On working with the Americans, Khafaji recalled, "they all said, ‘This is very important. There have to be some Iraqi people to work with the Americans'."

Khafaji's family turned out to be the greater obstacle. By then her greatest supporter, her father, had died.

"When I started in politics, my mother and brother disapproved, they fought it because of the danger. No one in our family had been in politics, but I know my father would have supported my political work and I decided to do it.

"At first," she said, "my husband supported me."

On the council, Khafaji staked out positions that set her apart, basing many of her views on her understanding of Islam and her experience as a woman.

When the council was contemplating whether to strip Iraq's civil courts of power over domestic relations — divorce, marriage, child custody and inheritance — she sided with Shiite clerics who wanted to place such issues in the hands of imams.

The measure was approved but never went into effect because the country was still under US occupation and L. Paul Bremer III, then the civilian administrator of the country, refused to sign it.

Khafaji was also willing to oppose the Shiite leadership, most notably when it wanted to isolate the young, radical cleric Moqtada Al Sadr in the spring of 2004.

Khafaji thought that strategy would backfire, swelling Al Sadr's popularity and probably leading to violence.

If the United States chose violence, Khafaji said, then politicians could not tell Al Sadr to refrain from violence.

"Our idea before Saddam was pushed out was that we needed to build a society that did not resort to violence. That's why we were against violence — violence against everyone, also against the occupiers," she said.

On the Governing Council, few people agreed with her. The two leading Shiite political parties, Dawa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, viewed Al Sadr as a poorly trained preacher and an unstable character who was happy to attract criminals rather than scholars to his cause.

Khafaji was unswayed. In early April, she announced she would quit, along with one other Shiite member of the 25-member council, if the US military persisted in its onslaught on Fallujah. Three Sunnis joined her.

Their strategy worked. The Americans backed down, aborting their attack on Fallujah — a decision that the US Marines felt was a serious mistake.

Meanwhile, fighting continued between the US military and Al Sadr's Al Mahdi militia in Najaf.

Khafaji joined one of Iraq's foremost politicians, Ahmad Chalabi, and other prominent Shiites who were trying to negotiate a ceasefire with Al Sadr.

By May 2004 she was travelling frequently to Najaf for talks with Al Sadr lieutenants, sometimes in convoys, but often on her own.

Triangle of death

The road south from Baghdad led her through the so-called "triangle of death", where Shiites were