Betwixt and between
For young women in Baghdad, it's a disorienting time to be a teen
No longer able to go shopping or swimming, or while away the hours gossiping with her housebound friends because the telephone broke, Qitaf has grown bored, listless, and resentful of America's promises of freedom and democracy. "Before the war, I used to wish that Iraq would be more open, that we would have satellite TV and mobile phones. Now we have them, and the sacrifice is not worth it," she says pointedly. "I used to struggle to make my dreams come true. Now I have to struggle to have a dream."
Family secrets. Though officially secular, with a significant number of women enrolled in colleges and filling the secretarial ranks of ministry buildings, Iraqi society at large is in fact fiercely conservative and especially protective of the virtue of its daughters. Doctors say that after a young woman is kidnapped, the first order of business upon her return is a visit to the hospital to check that her virginity is still intact. As rumors of rape and shamed families fleeing abroad are whispered by fathers in smoke-filled coffee shops or recounted by scared mothers in hushed phone conversations, young girls are increasingly being tucked away behind tall fences, drawn curtains, tinted windows, and black veils.
Because of continuing violence, the Ministry of Education has postponed the start of this year's classes until mid-October. Meanwhile, after whole sections of textbooks were ripped out in a de-Saddamification frenzy, the question of what and how to teach the next generation has not been answered. Only English and history books have been reprinted, but they are missing crucial chunks of Iraqi history, like the Iran-Iraq War and the invasion of Kuwait in the Gulf War.
At the al-Houda secondary school for girls in Baghdad's middle-class Karrada neighborhood, headmistress Senna Naji Abbas, 50, is mindful of the pressures on teenage girls. In addition to the normal vicissitudes of raging hormones, she says, they are facing extraordinary problems--electricity shortages, school books destroyed by bombings, and deaths in the family. As a result, grades have dropped and students have dropped out. Ten percent of the school's 250 students did not register for classes in the postwar school year. "[Our] youth doesn't know what is expected of them," says Abbas. "We don't want Saddam, but we don't want the occupation forces, and this generation is paying for our indecision."
On the battleground of ideas, religious conservatism and the pressure to Islamify are waging a fierce battle against the influx of western cultural currency. In April (coincidentally, the bloodiest month since the end of combat), a troupe of clerics came to speak to Abbas's students--as they did in many schools throughout Baghdad--about morals, chastity, and the need to wear head scarves for security. They plastered the school with posters of the snowy-bearded leaders of Shiite Islam. Pointing to a placard bearing the face of Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim, one of the militant martyrs in Shiite politics, Abbas frowns: "That wasn't sanctioned by the Ministry of Education."
In Baghdad's upscale Zayona shopping district, Khadir Ali sells frilly, rhinestone-studded lingerie and a rainbow of nail polish. Even in this progressive neighborhood, few women dare to leave the house without concealing their form-fitting T-shirts and neon-colored pedal pushers underneath baggy robes and head scarves. In Ali's shop, the hijab , or head scarf, is the bestselling item. "The hijab became fashionable after the fall of the regime," he says as women rummage through a mosaic of patterned polyester. "Lots of women like to wear it."
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