Further to my last post, some interesting polling data:
As to the question of Islam being a main source of legislation. 42% support having Islam being the main source of legislation. 24% support having Islam be the only source of legislation. 13% support not having any law which conflicts with Islam. 14% support having Islam being only one of many sources of legislation, not the only one.
As for women’s rights and women’s representation in the legislature. 84% support giving women full rights and benefits as men.
The difficulty being that shari’a law treats men and women quite unequally when it comes to family law, and these inequalities damage the status of women wherever they obtain, whether women have formal political equality in the sense of voting rights and so forth or not. So did Iraqis who preferred a stronger role for Islamic law in the constitution than it currently has simply think they were being asked a question about equal voting rights and the like, or do they really think shari’a law as it stands can be characterized as creating “equality” for women? If the latter they in effect must be thinking of “private” life as separate from “public” life, or buying traditionalist arguments about how Islam already protects the rights of women completely, etc. etc.
References in the draft constitution to international commitments and human rights could be read as a commitment to CEDAW and other human rights conventions, and several provisions of the international rights treaties to which Iraq is a signatory were included nearly verbatim in the draft constitution. However the guidelines on equality in family law found in CEDAW were not.
Inclusion of a specific formulation promising equal rights in family law for women would have gone a long way towards clarifying the issue of women’s promised equality within a legal regime that recognizes Islamic law versus women’s actual inequality in marriage in Islamic law. Though given the apparent contradictions in public opinion as reflected in this poll, perhaps they can’t be clarified except to the detriment of women at this point in time.