Editing Women's suffrage (section)

==== Iraq ====

Full women's suffrage was introduced in Iraq in 1980.

The campaign for women's suffrage started in the 1920s. The women's movement in Iraq organized in 1923 with the ''Nahda al-Nisa'' ([[Women's Awakening Club]]), lead by [[Asma al-Zahawi]] and with elite women such as Naima a-Said, and Fakhriyya al-Askari among their members.<ref name="auto">Zuhur, S. (2006). Iraq, Women's Empowerment, and Public Policy. USA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College. pp. 12-13</ref>  
[[Faisal I of Iraq|King Faysal]] himself had supported women's suffrage during his prior short tenure as king in Syria.  
Feminists such as [[Mary Wazir]] and [[Paulina Hasun]] raised the issue in the 1920s.<ref name="auto"/> 
Paulina Hassan published the first Iraqi women's magazine, ''Layla'', in 1923–1925, followed by a number of women's magazines in the 1930s and 1940s that voiced feminist demands.<ref>Al-Tamimi, H. (2019). Women and Democracy in Iraq: Gender, Politics and Nation-Building. Indien: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 20</ref> 
When the Constituent Assembly of Iraq was inaugurated in 1924, Paulina Hassun appealed to the Assembly that women should not be excluded from political participation in the new nation, and one of the members, Amjad al-Umari, unsuccessfully proposed that the word "male" be erased from the Electoral Law to include women in it.<ref name="auto6">Efrati, N. (2012). Women in Iraq: Past Meets Present. Tyskland: Columbia University Press.</ref>

The Women's suffrage reform was primarily supported by the opposition parties, notably the [[Iraqi Communist Party|Iraq Communist Party]].<ref name="auto7">Al-Tamimi, H. (2019). Women and Democracy in Iraq: Gender, Politics and Nation-Building. Indien: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 21</ref>
During the 1930s, the Communist ICP and the leftist al-Ahali supported women's suffrage.<ref name="auto6"/>  
Even those supporting the reform, however, often did so with the reservation that woman should reach a higher level of education before they were ready for it.<ref name="auto7"/>

The Iraqi monarchy prioritized foreign policy rather than internal issues and showed little enthusiasm to address the issue of women's suffrage.<ref>Al-Tamimi, H. (2019). Women and Democracy in Iraq: Gender, Politics and Nation-Building. Indien: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 22</ref>
The monarchy was careful to avoid alienating conservative and religious circles, who considered women's suffrage as incompatible with the  "nature" of women, the proper social order and gender hierarchies, and women's suffrage was not given refused serious consideration.<ref name="auto6"/>  
Both the Sunni and Shia clergy rejected women's suffrage as being in opposition to the natural roles of gender, as the "joke of the day", an attack on the law of nature and the proper way of life, since women were the weaker sex and "lesser persons" similar to children.<ref name="auto6"/>
When women's suffrage in Syria was introduced in 1949, MP Farhan al-Irs of al-Amara commented: "Women are shameful. How could they possibly sit with men?"<ref name="auto6"/>

In 1951 a motion to include women in the Electoral Law was rejected in the Chamber of Deputies.<ref name="auto6"/>
During the discussion to change the electoral law to include women's suffrage in March–April 1951, the MP Abd al-Abbas of Diwaniyya opposed suffrage as this would contradict Islamic sex segregation, as elected women MP would then sit among male MPs in the Chamber of Deputies: "Is this not forbidden? Are we not all of Islam?"<ref name="auto6"/> 
 
An electoral decree in December 1952 provided direct elections but did not include women.<ref name="auto6"/>
A Sunni scholar published an article in the paper al-Sijill in October 1952 named "The Crime of Equality Between Men and Women": as an imam and khatib of the mosques of Baghdad and scholar of the al-Azhar University, he stated that women's suffrage was a plot against Islam and contrary to Quranic verses which delineated gender hierarchies that made women in politics incompatible.<ref name="auto6"/>

A number of women's organization was founded in the 1940s and 1950s that campaigned for women's rights including suffrage, notably the [[Iraqi Union for Women's Rights]] (1952).<ref name="auto7"/> 
[[Naziha al-Dulaimi]] of the [[League for Defence of Women's Rights]] ([[Iraqi Women's League]]), which gathered 42,000 members, campaigned for gender equality (including suffrage), organized educational programs, provided social services, established 78 literacy centers, and drafted the 1959 Personal Status Law, which was accepted and introduced by the Government.<ref>Al-Tamimi, H. (2019). Women and Democracy in Iraq: Gender, Politics and Nation-Building. Indien: Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 22-25</ref> 
In the 1950s the Iraqi Women's Union petitioned senior state figures including the prime minister and wrote articles in the press.<ref name="auto6"/>

A Week of Women's Rights was launched in October 1953 by Iraqi Women's Union suffrage, who arranged a sumposium and voiced their demand in radio programs and articles in the press to campaigned for women's suffrage.<ref name="auto6"/>
As a response, the Islamic clergy launched a Week of Virtue and called for a general strike against women's suffrage and called for women to "stay at home" since women's suffrage was against Islam.<ref name="auto6"/> 
During the Week of Virtue, the Sunni Nihal al-Zahawi, daughter of Amjad al-Zahawi, head of the Muslim Sisters Society (Jamiyyat al-Aukht al-Muslima), spoke on the radio against women's suffrage: she described the suffragists as women who revolted against the very Islam that gave them rights, and that women's suffrage was lamentable since it broke sex segregation and resulted in gender mixing, which was an unrestricted liberty that broke the rules of against Islam.<ref name="auto6"/>

A breakthrough came in 1958. During the Arab Union of [[Arab Federation|Iraq-Jordan]], the Iraqi Constitution was set, in March 1958, to be amended to include women's suffrage later that year, but the matter became moot when the monarchy was abolished in July that year.<ref name="auto6"/>
An unnamed MP to the newspaper al-Hawadith that he could never run against a female candidate, since if he lost he would have lost to a woman, which would have been dishonorable, and if he won, he would only have won over a woman; he claimed many male MPs felt the same, and that voters would also feel dishonored by being represented and ruled by a woman.<ref name="auto6"/> 
The MP Tawfq al-Mukhtar commented to a reporter: "Friends, women's rights bother me a lot, and anybody who condemns or criticizes them gives me great pleasure"; he added that he would withdraw if he was put against a female candidate, and he was one of four MPs to vote against the proposed amendment of March 1958.<ref name="auto6"/>

In 1958 the Iraqi Monarchy was replaced by the Baathis regime. The early Baathist regime saw women's emancipation in many aspects, with urban liberal modernist women enjoying professional and educational equality and appearing unveiled.<ref name="auto1">Al-Tamimi, H. (2019). Women and Democracy in Iraq: Gender, Politics and Nation-Building. Indien: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 23</ref>
The [[Baath Party (Iraq)|Baathist Party]] supported women's rights by principle, though it initially focused in expanding women's educational and professional rights rather than their political rights.<ref name="auto"/>
Article 19 of the Iraqi Provisional Constitution of 1970 granted all Iraqi citizens equal before the law regardless of sex, blood, language, social origin or religion, and the state women's umbrella organization [[General Foundation of Iraqi Women]] (GFIW) of 1972 guaranteed women's full equal rights in the professional and educational sphere, prevented all discrimination and recognized women's political participation in principle.<ref>Al-Tamimi, H. (2019). Women and Democracy in Iraq: Gender, Politics and Nation-Building. Indien: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 25</ref>
However, while women's rights progressed in other aspects, the political rights was delayed. The regime was unstable and saw four regime changes in the 1960s.<ref name="auto1"/>

In 1980 full suffrage was granted and women were given the right to vote and be elected to political office.<ref name="auto3"/><ref name="auto4"/>
The suffrage reform was granted when the new Iraq National Assembly was formed before the 1980s Elections, and 16 of 250 seats where filled by women.<ref>Al-Tamimi, H. (2019). Women and Democracy in Iraq: Gender, Politics and Nation-Building. Indien: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 26</ref>