Betwixt and between
For young women in Baghdad, it's a disorienting time to be a teen
Baghdad--Hours before the roosters crow their wake-up call or the paperboys hit the streets of this war-weary capital, a young woman stirs from her bed to pray. It is 3 a.m., and for the hours that stretch before the first gray of morning, Leila Ali Hussein will kneel and bow in observance of the predawn prayer practiced only by the most devout Shiite Muslims.
She is not the only one who can't sleep. Alone in her dark, windowless living room, Qitaf al-Jabouri absent-mindedly flips through the 300-plus channels on satellite television that, along with the Internet and mobile phones, have flooded into postwar Iraq. She settles on the American sitcom Friends. Street violence and the threat of kidnapping have kept Qitaf holed up for weeks, and within the confines of the four walls she shares with her older sister and parents, time has lost its meaning. "We're in jail," she says. "I sleep all the time; then I wake up and watch TV."
Panic attacks. These young women are like the country they live in--insecure, tentative, and caught in a tide of violence and violent change that along with new freedom has brought new affliction. For some, Saddam Hussein's ouster has meant the right to embrace religious extremism; for others, the right to embrace jeans, Internet chat rooms, and the Backstreet Boys . But for all teenage girls in Iraq, it has meant pervasive crime, economic uncertainty, and social upheaval that are forcing them to abandon the whims of childhood and precipitately come of age. "The continuous effect of these problems--clashes, insecurity, bombs--has affected young women more than adults," says Mohammed al-Kureishi, a psychiatrist who has a private practice on Baghdad's busy al-Sadoon Street. "This is the age of change of personality, a period of turmoil. I have seen many young patients complaining of anxiety and panic attacks, or crying without cause and severe depression."
Listen to these young Iraqi women: "We don't feel like teenagers. Our minds have grown old," says Rana al-Asadi, 18, who lives on Haifa Street, the site of repeated standoffs between insurgents and coalition troops. "We watch movies with teenagers living teenage lives, [but] we are deprived of almost everything, like freedom, security." "We are so scared," adds her friend Dina al-Qasir, 16, who took the posters of her favorite pop idols off the wall because she was afraid they would be damaged by the mortars crashing outside her window. "We just want to live a peaceful life with no attacks."
At 17, Qitaf is a self-professed "modern" Iraqi teenager. She has her own E-mail account on Yahoo! and speaks fluent English, after having meticulously studied the lyrics of popular American songs (a tribute to which hangs on her bedroom wall in the form of a Metallica poster). Out of earshot of her middle-class parents, she reveals the best-kept secret of Iraqi adolescence: "We all have secret boyfriends, which is much more interesting than something public." Qitaf is wearing bell-bottom jeans and a T-shirt her mother gave her, which notably reads in English, "May we never break the strong spirits of our daughters." "I used to think life is much easier," she says ruefully. "I feel like I was really silly before the war, and now I've seen dead people and people who have nothing to eat."
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."
But more than just a fad or symbol of faith, the hijab , along with long-sleeve shirts and loose skirts, has become a means of security, providing young women the shapeless anonymity that will let them blend into the crowd and out of the eyes of would-be assailants. Fatin Abbas, 17, puts it simply: "People look at me if I wear my hair down. But no one looks at me if I wear a hijab. "
Peer pressure. There is also social pressure to conform--not just from troublesome clerics but also from other women. For Leila Ali Hussein, 20, covering herself from head to toe was a hard-won imperative. "After the fall of the regime, I started covering my face completely," says Leila, who will reveal her bright eyes and toothy grin to only a few close relatives and female friends. She says under Saddam, dressing so conservatively aroused suspicion, if not persecution. Leila's family has suffered hard times since the start of the war. Her widowed mother, Mediha, was kicked out of her brother's home in the Sadr City slum, where 2 million Shiites live in crumbling housing blocks. Her younger brother, Yassir, 17, was forced to work on a construction site to support the family. Living under the constant threat of eviction, the family squatted in a threadbare, two-room abode.
Despite her extreme views, Leila is like many teenage girls. Her walls are covered with pictures of her idol (in this case, the wagging finger and irascible face of the militant street cleric Moqtada al-Sadr). She yearns for a father figure, dreams of a greater role in society, and cries when she doesn't get her way. She is impressionable, motivated, and outraged, and it wasn't long before she found an outlet for her angst in religious extremism. She stopped listening to music, which she now considers un-Islamic, and started praying. She enrolled in religious classes at a Sadr City mosque and reinvented herself as a "warrior." Finally, she found her role model in Sadr, who has branded himself as the leader of Iraq's impoverished, dispossessed Shiites. "My life is dedicated to the honorable Moqtada al-Sadr because he is the right way," she says, her eyes glowing, and then proudly boasts that she now knows how to assemble a semiautomatic rifle and plant a roadside bomb. "I wish to die for my cause. I want to be a martyr; I always ask God for this."
Like a wayward American teenager looking for acceptance in an inner-city gang, Leila found a community to belong to, a place of acceptance, and unlike most of her friends, who accept their fate as housewives and second-class citizens, Leila found a path that enables her to feel important. "Now, women have a great role in society. We are ready even to be suicide bombers," she says proudly. And that is the most chilling kind of teen rebellion imaginable.
This story appears in the October 4, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.