The Iraqi government's attempt to change what is often called the most liberal personal status law in the Middle East has been met with protests and social media outrage.

"Here is Baghdad," Ali al-Mikdam, a journalist and human rights activist, wrote on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend about a demonstration in the Iraqi capital attended by about 500 people.

"The capital of our Iraq was not and will not be Kandahar!" he said, referring to drastically restricted women's rights in Afghanistan.

Personal status laws, or family laws, govern marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance. In the Middle East, many of these are based on religion, but Iraq's Personal Status Law No. 188, passed in 1959, is less so. It basically replaced Sunni and Shiite Muslim religious courts with a civil judiciary and more liberal interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence.

But now, Iraqi politicians affiliated with conservative Shiite Muslim parties want to try and change this. Their draft bill to amend Law No. 188 was read in parliament on August 4. In response, a coalition of activists, politicians, and human rights organizations formed Alliance 188, named after the law, to organize protests all around Iraq last weekend.

"We have a civil law, and we should be changing it for good, not bad. We should not be going backward," Rasha, a local who attended the protests, told DW. The 53-year-old didn't want to give her full name because some of the protesters had been harassed. In the central Iraqi city of Najaf, police had to separate angry groups of demonstrators.

"I don't even know why they want to do this," Rasha continued. "I think they just hate the rights of women, and that's why they want to change this law. Really, I thank God I am not married, that I don't have to worry about my children in the future."

How the bill would change the personal status law

Should the changes go ahead, new rules would basically give couples a choice as to how they want their marriage to be adjudicated: By civil courts or by religious courts, whether Sunni or Shiite.

Those who want the change point out that many marriages in Iraq are only ever conducted by local clerics anyway, and they're accepted as legitimate even though they're not official by law. They argue this amendment would align the law with reality.

But for opponents of the change, the choice of legal system opens the door to potentially damaging interpretations of Islamic law. For example, under current Iraqi law, the legal age for marriage is 18. Under religious rules, activists argue children as young as nine years old could be wed.

Iraq already has a problem with underage marriage — the UN says around a third of Iraqi females are married before 18. In a March report, Human Rights Watch stated that unregistered marriages performed by clerics "function as a loophole around legal restrictions on child marriage."

Women's rights will also be rolled back, opponents of the law change say. For example, the husband has more power because he gets to choose which set of religious rules the couple follows.

The other big problem is how the choice could divide Iraqi society. While the current law applies to all Iraqis equally, separate legal systems could inflame societal and sectarian tensions and degrade the status of Iraq's judiciary.

Chance of success

This is not the first time Iraq's Personal Status Law has come under attack. There have been failed attempts to change it, including in 2003, 2005, 2014 and again in 2017. But experts told DW that there's a good chance this amendment might pass because of an apparent political deal between opposing parliamentary factions.

Sunni politicians opposed changing the law the last time this issue came up. But now they want to pass their own bill, what is known as an "amnesty bill," which would forgive former members of the extremist "Islamic State," or IS, group. Shiite Muslim politicians have previously opposed that. But insiders say the two groups have agreed to back each other's bills to ensure both pass.

"In the past, there have been some senior leaders who have managed to push this aside behind the scenes," said Renad Mansour, project director of the Iraq Initiative at British think tank Chatham House. "Although it's hard to say whether it will pass, it's as close as it's ever been."

Moving away from the West?

This bill comes on the heels of other events in Iraq that could be described as a shift away from Western influence. These include the 2025 withdrawal of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), which has been there since 2003; the end of UNITAD, the UN's investigative unit for crimes committed by the IS group; the agreement to pull out US troops and recent bidding for Iraqi oil not involving Western nations. 

"But I don't see this as a loss of Western influence. I see it as Iraqi regaining its sovereignty," says Hamzeh Hadad, a Baghdad-based researcher and visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. "No state enjoys foreign troops on their soil."

Mansour agreed that, in some ways, this is about Iraq reasserting the appearance of its sovereignty when it comes to the US and the UN. But in other ways, it's about the image these politicians want to present to their domestic audience.

"These political parties have been struggling with a legitimacy crisis because of their failure to deliver services," Mansour continued. "This is their way of saying, 'Please excuse the fact you don't have water or electricity, but you know, let's focus on the bigger picture.'

"They're using these bills to bring religion back into the conversation because they think they can at least regain ideological legitimacy with their constituency."

"It is being done to say, 'Look, we're no longer at war, we no longer need a special status in the UN system, and we've organized a withdrawal of US troops,'" Mansour explained.

But at the same time, out of the public eye, the same politicians are negotiating bilateral security agreements with the US. "And the end of UNAMI isn't going to be the end of the other UN institutions in Iraq," Hadad pointed out.

Conservative religious politicians are trying to make the country into what they think it should be, Hadad concluded.

"And if they're successful [with changes to the Personal Status Law], it will be a massive wake-up call to the many more liberal Iraqis, who have generally been associated with boycotting the last two elections."

Edited by: Davis VanOpdorp