Riam Salaam Sabri, 16, wore more conservative clothing while security in Baghdad was poor, but now feels safe in Western clothes.

By TIMOTHY WILLAMS and ABEER MOHAMMED


BAGHDAD - The young women of Baghdad acknowledge that there are more serious concerns in Iraq these days than hair, clothes and makeup.

But they also say that there might be nothing quite as exhilarating as stepping out of the house in a pretty dress, hair flowing freely behind them, behaving as if their country had not been shattered by war and dominated by religious conservatism for much of their lives.

“For girls,” said Merna Mazin, a 20-year-old Baghdad University engineering student, “life would be tasteless without elegant fashion.”

What Ms. Mazin calls elegant fashion bears little resemblance to couture or to the skin-baring summer street clothes of the West, of course.

It was 40 degrees Celsius in Baghdad on a recent day, but Ms. Mazin was wearing a multicolored sleeveless dress over a pair of jeans. A longsleeve black shirt covered her arms.

Her black hair, with subtle blond highlights, was free of a head covering, however - not a small victory for Ms. Mazin, a Christian who wore the traditional Muslim woman’s head scarf for two years to avoid being singled out by Islamic militias.

In Baghdad Ms. Mazin is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young women whose freedom to develop a personal style is a signal of a thawing in Iraq’s cultural conservatism.

After the United States-led invasion in 2003, women here found their fashion choices largely dictated by clerics during Friday Prayer and enforced by armed militia members who would threaten, kidnap or even kill those who were provocatively dressed. That was defined for quite some time as any woman who was not wearing an abaya, the cloaklike covering meant to conceal the shape of a woman’s body.

Women who were threatened for wearing Western-style clothes were often forced to quit their jobs or school and retreat home, sometimes for years.

But now that security has improved in Baghdad, the capital, some young women have begun shaking off their abayas and started dressing more like the women they see on satellite television channels.

Sitting in a student lounge at Baghdad University recently, Mais Mowafaq, 20, was wearing a head covering. But the rest of her outfit, though quite conservative, could have gotten her killed a few years ago: an anklelength black skirt, a long-sleeve black shirt and a long silver necklace over her shirt.

“Militias did not want women’s bodies to be visible, because they thought it might charm men,” she said. “Charming men is a sin? And it deserves being killed for?”

Ms. Mowafaq said she had also stopped using cosmetics, which many young Iraqi women regarded as a necessity even during the most dangerous period.

“All my rouges and other makeup stuff expired, and my mother refused to accompany me to shops to buy more,” she said. “She told me, ‘This is not a time of makeup. This is a time of bombs.’”

Dua’a Salaam Sabri, 23, and her sister, Riam, who is 16, remember when the only real danger associated with dressing in the fashionable clothes they favor was the aggressive flirting they encountered from boys on the street.

But in 2005, two carloads of militia members drove up as Riam was walking home from school with her father. The men tried unsuccessfully to kidnap her as punishment for not wearing what they called “respectable clothes,” she said. At the time, she was wearing her school uniform, a long skirt and a T-shirt. The next day, her mother, Bushra Khadhom al-Obeidi, bought the daughters their first head coverings and abayas.

Riam dropped out of school, and the sisters said they began to suffer psychologically.

They have recently started going out again, but typically only in the company of their mother. And they have reverted to their old styles. For now, their abayas hang in the closet.

At Fashion Away, a shop in the Karada neighborhood that sells women’s clothing, the owner, Hussein Jihad, said he sold only traditional garb until a few months ago.

“We are adapting to the situation,” he said. “When the situation was bad, we offered only long skirts, and when the situation improved, we started bringing in modern clothes.”


Muhammed al-Obaidi contributed reporting.