When former US president George W Bush sent troops into Iraq in 2003, he offered a variety of reasons to justify the invasion, including building a more free, open, and democratic Iraq.

He even promised that the US-led invasion, which toppled the Baath Party regime of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, would be a model for other Middle Eastern nations and “a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”

Over the years, however, the idea of rebuilding Iraq as a democratic nation has become so dubious that much of its current usage is merely ironic as the country has continued to descend into the rule of a Shia oligarchy, kleptocracy, and now theocracy.

A major misdeed by the US Occupying Authority after 2003 was the hasty drafting of a new constitution, which was heavily influenced by Shia groups and Kurdish nationalist parties advancing their own narrow agendas.

When the new constitution was endorsed in a referendum largely boycotted by Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, it was claimed that this was a test case of whether secularism and democracy could be reconciled with Political Islam and if Iraq’s new rulers could navigate between contradictory values and cultures.

Such claims soon turned out to have been oversold, and they were quickly refuted by many shortcomings and numerous problems in the application of the new constitution.

Nearly 20 years later, it appears that the constitution, which was meant to be a new “social contract” between the Iraqi people and the state, is structurally and politically flawed.

Today, the conflict-ravaged country is having to cope with instability in its fragile political system and sectarian and ethnic divisions that have reduced Iraq to a collection of Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, and other minorities.

Instead of stimulating “consensual democracy,” something professed by the constitution’s drafters, Iraq’s post-invasion institutions created a sectarian and ethnicity-based quota system that led to the country’s main Shia political groups dominating the government, parliament, judiciary, and security institutions.

One of the manifestations of such constitutional failure has been evident in the increasing Islamisation of the public sphere in Iraq, with the latest example being the introduction of a bill in the country’s parliament to amend the 45-year-old family status law that had been widely seen as one of the most women-friendly in the Muslim world.

The bill, which will allow weddings to be performed by Muslim clergy outside state agencies, will, if passed, roll back women’s rights and increase underage marriage in what is still a deeply patriarchal society.

It will effectively scrap the minimum age for Muslim girls to marry, set in the earlier 1959 law at 18. It will also allow the religious authorities to decide on a range of family affairs including inheritance, divorce, and child custody.

The 1959 law was passed shortly after the fall of the Iraqi monarchy and transferred the right to decide on family matters from the religious authorities to the state and the judiciary.

This progressive legislation, called Law 188, also provided for a single code governing both Shia and Sunni Muslim family affairs while allowing non-Muslims to follow their own laws.

Women’s activists and some independent MPs have protested against the new law, accusing its Islamist drafters of trying to harm women, children, and families and weaken social cohesion and undermine the authority of the state.

Foreign critics, including the UN, the US, and human rights groups, have blasted the new law as undermining the rights of women and children. They have urged the Iraqi authorities to continue to abide by the international treaties to which Iraq is a signatory and by their obligations under international law.

According to the UN children’s agency UNICEF, 28 per cent of girls in Iraq are already married before the age of 18, sometimes at the age of 15 with judicial approval. Divorce rates are high among those who marry underage.

It is unclear if the present bid to change the 1959 law will succeed where several earlier attempts have failed. Last week, Iraq’s parliament failed to meet to begin a second reading of the bill due to the lack of a quorum.

One key element absent from the debate is the view of the powerful clerics in the Hawza in the city of Najaf, the seat of Shia theology which cannot reject legislation that is in line with religious beliefs and has traditionally distanced itself from the state.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and other senior clergy in the Shia religious establishment, which would assume huge responsibilities if the law passed, have been quiet about the proposed changes.

In recent years, Iraq has seen a rising tide of Islamisation on all levels, and this has become a preoccupation of the dominant Shia ruling class, most of which is Islamist and close to the Islamic regime in Iran.

The annual ceremony of Arbaeen, the culmination of 40 days of mourning commemorating the death of the Imam Hussein at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE, draws millions of pilgrims to the holy city of Karbala in Iraq.

The event has become a display of religious identity by Iraqi Shias and a showcase of power for their political groups in government.

In May, the Iraqi parliament, acting in response to a suggestion from the leader of the National Shia Trend Muqtada Al-Sadr, declared the Eid Al-Ghadir, commemorating a controversial event in Islamic history, to be an official national holiday in the country.

According to the Shia calendar, the event commemorates the Prophet Mohamed’s final sermon in which he designated his cousin and Shia saint Imam Ali as his successor to lead the Muslim community.

Shia and Sunni scholars differ on the Eid Al-Ghadir and its religious significance in Islam. Before the Shia empowerment in Iraq, the issue was largely absent from Iraqi public discourse for fear of enflaming sectarian divisions.

In another recent event, the Iraqi Ministry of Education last week banned mixed classes for pre-college students across the country. A statement by the ministry said that all boys and girls in intermediary and secondary schools in Iraq will now be separated.

Ministry Spokesman Kareem Al-Sayed said the decision was taken to improve the quality of education, provide a suitable atmosphere for study, and prevent students from becoming distracted.

Both Iraq’s Kurdish and Sunni politicians bear a large part of the responsibility for the sharp Islamisation of the country, and they have contributed greatly to the democratic impasse through their silence and their push instead for uneasy power-sharing pacts among the country’s oligarchs.

The Kurdish parties, whose leaders are liberally inclined, have not made any public announcement on the new personal status bill or on the country’s broader Islamisation drive.

Resorting to their deal-making strategies with their Shia counterparts, the Kurdish parties have apparently used their non-stance, or fence-sitting, on the Islamisation drive as a bargaining chip in negotiating their long-standing demands on oil and gas exploitation and disputed areas.

Iraqi Kurdistan leaders often claim that democracy in Iraq is under threat but accuse their Shia partners of abandoning communal consensus only when it could diminish their autonomy from Baghdad.

Indeed, like many other developments that are not directly related to Iraqi Kurdistan, the rise of Political Islam and the growing theocracy in Baghdad tends to be a non-issue for the Iraqi Kurdistan leadership.

These leaders have always worked on the premise of two systems in one country in the hope that this will increase the gap with the federal authorities in Baghdad and pave the way for the Kurdish region’s independence from the rest of Iraq.

Meanwhile, the country’s Sunni Arab political groups have been working according to a narrow and self-serving agenda and have shown little interest in resisting attempts by the ruling Shia Islamists to reshape cultural and political life on a national scale.

As has been evident in the debate over the personal status bill, Sunni politicians are eager to strike a deal over an amnesty for Sunni prisoners in Iraq in exchange for their support for the new law.

Iraq has been in a phase of democratic backsliding for nearly two decades, exacerbated by the rise to power of the Shia Islamist groups. It is now steadily descending into a theocracy under their rule.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 12 September, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly