A Painful Road to Leadership

Salama Khafaji did not make a powerful first impression. When I met her, she had just been appointed to the U.S.-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 head abaya favored by religious Shiite women in Iraq, a flowing black robe that covers everything but the face. In response to most of my questions she deferred to a man -- her chief advisor, Sheik 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 one hand, she has been able to play a much larger 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.

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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 Koranic schools were infiltrated by Saddam Hussein’s secret police. Hussein, a Sunni, feared that the Shiite schools were a cover to plot against him.

Khafaji and a small group of like-minded women studied with Ghitaa 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 radicalized 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.

Along with Ghitaa’s mother, the women raised money to hire a lawyer and get him out of solitary confinement, where he was being tortured. They ultimately managed 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 improve the conditions of their relatives.

When the U.S. invaded in March 2003 and Hussein went into hiding, “that was a big opportunity for us,” Khafaji said.

Six months later, Governing Council member Aqila 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 Hashimi’s replacement. She wanted to take the post, but first traveled 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 bigger 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.”

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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 -- marriage, divorce, 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 it never went into effect because the country was still under U.S. occupation and L. Paul Bremer III, then the civilian administrator of the country, refused to sign it.

Some secular women accused Khafaji of bowing to pressure from Shiite conservatives.

Months later she explained to me that she believed Shiite rules would be more advantageous to women in divorce proceedings than the civil law.

She was worried particularly that “on child custody, under the civil law, the father would have the same right to the children as the mother [in divorce cases], and that would be very bad.”

Under Sharia, or Islamic law, children live with their mother until they are 18.

I did not realize it at the time, but this was also a personal concern for Khafaji. Her husband was growing increasingly unsupportive of her political career, and Khafaji was struggling to decide which meant more to her: her work or her marriage.

*

Khafaji was also willing to oppose the Shiite leadership, most notably when it wanted to isolate the young, radical cleric Muqtada Sadr in the spring of 2004. Khafaji thought that strategy would backfire, adding to Sadr’s popularity and probably leading to violence.

At that time, the U.S. Marines were on the verge of their first major assault on Fallouja, a western Iraqi stronghold of Sunni fundamentalists. Sadr had made alliances with the anti-American Sunni Arab leaders and was building an army of his own.

Khafaji understood the extent of Sadr’s political strength, as did few other Iraqi politicians, most of whom had lived outside the country for more than 20 years. The cleric’s father and uncle had been ayatollahs. Both were assassinated, it is widely believed, on the orders of Hussein. Sadr’s father pioneered the use of Shiite faith through Friday prayers as a form of resistance to the Hussein regime. The young cleric, like his father before him, has a following in Sadr City, the destitute Baghdad slum named after the family, and in many cities in southern Iraq, especially among the impoverished.

If the U.S. chose violence, Khafaji said, then politicians could not tell 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 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 that she would quit, along with another Shiite on the 25-member council, if the U.S. military persisted in its onslaught on Fallouja. Three Sunnis joined her.

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

Meanwhile, fighting continued between the U.S. military and 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 cease-fire with Sadr. By May 2004 she was traveling frequently to Najaf for talks with Sadr lieutenants, sometimes in convoys, but often on her own.

The road south from Baghdad led her through the so-called triangle of death, where Shiites were often set upon by Sunnis, gunned down or taken at gunpoint to isolated places, tortured and then executed.

One day during this period I asked whether she was frightened on those drives. She smiled and shook her head. “It is in the hands of God,” she said.

On May 27, as she sped back from one of these sessions through the Sunni town of Latifiya, her car was attacked. Her driver floored the accelerator and the bullets missed her car, but as she turned to look back, she could make out through the cloud of dust that the second car had been forced off the road, barraged with gunshots. She beseeched her driver to turn back, but it was too dangerous.

The vehicle carried her 17-year-old son, Ahmad. A day later his body was recovered.

“He always begged to come with me. I said over and over, ‘No, you have to study,’ but this was a holiday and he had been taught how to use a gun from childhood. He said, ‘I like to protect you. I’m your bodyguard.’ I said, ‘I have a lot of bodyguards,’ and he replied, ‘If something happens to you, I have to protect you.’ ”

She spoke softly as she recalled the episode, and then fell silent.

For solace and guidance, Khafaji turned to her faith, to the great women of Islamic literature -- to Fatima, the daughter of the prophet Muhammad, and to Zainab, Fatima’s daughter, who, when her brother Hussein was killed by traitors, refused to let her grief overwhelm her.

“I remember the day of the attack, I thought of Sayeeda Zainab, the heroine of Karbala. After she saw many deaths, she kept taking care of the children. She was a very great inspiration for me. She did not cry in front of the others. She only cried when she was alone.

“I reminded myself of all the Iraqi women who had lost fathers and husbands and sons. I had seen so many of them,” she said quietly, referring to the women who were left to fend for themselves when their loved ones were killed in the Iraq-Iran war and by Hussein’s regime.

Her eyes grew luminous, and she added even more softly: “On the road to heaven, we must leave blood behind us.”

*

A visit to Khafaji’s home this summer revealed much about the life she has chosen -- garrisoned but also still accessible to the public. Despite three attempts on her life, she has neither fled into the heavily fortified Green Zone nor left politics.

Her house is hidden down a street blocked by a makeshift barricade of sandbags. In the middle stands a small concrete structure designed with an opening to accommodate a machine gun. A visitor must navigate through openings in furls of concertina wire to reach her gate.

Her office is reached by an external stairway. She works mostly in a large library that she shares with Ghitaa. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves line the room, which has a comfortable leather couch as well as a large desk for each of them. On the spotless bathroom sink stands a cup with five new toothbrushes and next to it a full tube of Crest, reminders of her career as a dentist.

She has a staff that monitors the news and takes telephone calls in a simple waiting room. On a stifling evening, as the electricity flickered on and off, she described the private journey she has taken at the same time as her public one.

“Here in Iraq the woman’s first duty is to her house and children. It was like this for me.

“The woman must sew, clean, prepare the food, take care of the children, take them to school, help them with homework, iron the clothes -- it is not a simple life here.

“You take the clothes, you wash them in a tub, you hang them up, then you iron them. Taking the clothes to the laundry is expensive. We have big houses, the weather is dusty, it always needs to be cleaned. You must sweep and wash the floor, sometimes several times a day. Then we spend a lot of time in the kitchen, cooking food.”

Like many educated Iraqi women, Khafaji wed soon after college. “My family knew his family, so it was an Iraqi formal marriage, you know, when his sisters see the girl and like her, so they nominate her and the man trusts his sisters’ taste and that’s how it goes.

“He graduated as an architect, but went into the family business, which was trading in spare parts. He was not an intellectual -- the opposite of me. I came from a family where I had a father who loved to read, and I love to read as well.”

The fissures in their relationship widened as Khafaji became increasingly immersed in her government work.

“When I was on the Governing Council I had to get up at 5 a.m. I had to prepare the food for the children to take to school. Then as soon as I got home, I had to cook and check their homework and wash and iron. I had to keep up with what was said on television, read all the newspapers. Each morning I would reread what the council had done the day before. It was too much, so I paid with my own money for a woman to come and help me, but my husband fired her. The Iraqi man likes to be the boss.

“I asked my sister to help me, and he did not want that, either.”

Then her son was killed. “My husband did not support me after that.”

He told her to leave politics and stay at home. She prayed and read and talked with a few women friends. “Destroying a family is very hard. If you are divorced, you will be criticized. It’s something seen very negatively in our society.”

At the same time, she believed she had something to offer Iraq. “I have Islamic ideas on justice, but I am moderate. I have optimism. I can speak with people who are liberal and with those who are from the Islamic party.

“If I leave, other women may not come and take so burdensome a job

Weary but clear, she made her decision. “I left the house,” she said.

It was very quiet in the small outer office as the electricity surged and ebbed.

“It’s a shame [in Iraqi society] for a woman to have to leave her house, her family. And when I took my children, I said, ‘I can take care of them as mother and father and I can provide everything for them.’

“I can speak so much now, and I do. Before, there was something covering my mouth.”

But Khafaji’s struggle remains lonely. She finds comfort in her religious studies; she talks daily with Ghitaa and a small group of women who work with him in a public policy research center he founded.

When she gets discouraged, she thinks back to January’s election, when Iraqis voted freely for the first time in decades.

“It was something so happy for me to see the election day.... I was one of the first ones to vote. The women came wearing their abayas, and many of those women had lost their children, their husbands, their brothers. I cried on election day. One cries also when one has succeeded.”