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This chapter consists of collected oral histories of Iraqi women refugees in Jordan. It examines the identity of Iraqi women refugees as revealed through their personal narratives. In the Ba’athist regime, the Iraqi identity was reinforced as an Arab identity. During the 35-year rule of this regime, Iraqis watched other Arab nationalities enjoying privileges while they lived in Iran. After the fall of the regime, the new government emphasized Iraqi identity as separate from the Arab identity. The new regime imposed an Iranian identity within the concepts of ethnic and sectarian power sharing. While this new identity posed a dilemma with the manner refugees formed representations of themselves in host countries and with the distribution of privileges they used to enjoy in the former regime, many of the Iraqi women refugees still saw themselves as Arabs and refused the sectarian criteria. All the women interviewed in this chapter expressed the notion that their identity was challenged as their life circumstances demanded them to accommodate the changes they experience.

This chapter focuses on Bint al-Huda, Baqir al-Sadr's sister, who led the movement to educate and uplift Iraqi Shi'pi women. Educated at home by her brother, Bint al-Huda devoted her life to the education and uplifting of her Shi'i sisters, relying on Qur'anic support for ideas of gender equality. She explored ways to reach her audience that her male colleagues would probably not have even considered. To illustrate her vision of the ideal Islamic life, she wrote novels that deplored both subservience to men and Western values. Though Ayatollah Khu'i ruled that women could not be mujtahids, he still funded her religious school for girls in Najaf, suggesting that she was able to work effectively with the ulama—even the most conservative among them. However, she was far less successful in her dealings with the Ba'thist government. On April 8, 1980, Saddam Hussein's government executed both Bint al-Huda and her illustrious brother.

This chapter delves deeper into the women's movement in Iraq during the Hashemite period. It suggests that there were two main reasons why the full scale of women's response against the constitutional monarchy was difficult to trace. The first is connected with circumstances of the time—that is, with the government's censoring of the women's movement. The second, however, is rooted in accounts portraying the history of the women's movement, provided by Iraqi women activists and their later reproduction in contemporary scholarly literature published in English. The chapter argues that the early history of the women's movement in Iraq remains little known because the two key organizations involved in the movement—the Iraqi Women's Union, which was harshly sanctioned by the regime, and the underground League for the Defense of Women's Rights, produced two competing narratives of the women's movement.

This chapter engages with the stories told by two female Iraqi bloggers, who write a digital self online: ‘Riverbend’, as she is known, whose blog is titled Baghdad Burning; and Faiza al-Araji, whose blog is titled A Family in Baghdad. Both blogs tell the story of women growing up and working (before the war) in Baghdad. Faiza and Riverbend are tied together by friendship. They are digitally networked, prominent figures in the Iraq War blogosphere, due partly to their position as two of the first female Iraqi bloggers, and partly to their ability to capture their audience with eyewitness accounts of life in Iraq. Many of Faiza's posts are translated by Riverbend. Many of Riverbend's stories and calls for justice are echoed in Faiza's own blog.

This concluding chapter describes how the Iraqi women's rights activists believe that the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq were pulling back to the days of the British-backed Hashemite monarchy, when women were treated as second-class citizens. It marks similar threads running through past British and present American policies influencing the fate of two generations of Iraqi women separated by half a century. Under the Americans who came to Iraq armed with a vision of creating a free and democratic state in which women's rights are enshrined, women were returned to pre-1958 conditions, which led to a new wave of tribalization and subordination. Similar to as in the Hashemite period, the American occupational forces were desperate to impose order. They recruited tribal elements to secure borders and protect oil facilities, and convened tribal courts that sanctioned coercive practices pertaining to women.

Women’s rights have been central to the post-invasion Iraqi political scene, which is dominated by conservative and sectarian Islamist parties who advance their own gender rhetoric of women as bearers of the “New Iraq.” This chapter presents a short ethnographic account of the 2012 Women’s Day celebration in Baghdad, held by a longstanding leftist women’s rights organization, the Iraqi Women’s League, which re-formed in 2003 after being banned by the Ba‘th regime for two decades. By providing this brief account, Zahra Ali seeks to highlight the context and political significance of the mobilizations around women and gender issues in post-invasion Iraq.