From prostitution to “mini-jobs”.. What did the “morality police” do in Iraq?

Posted on[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] by [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

[size=52]From prostitution to “mini-jobs”.. What did the “morality police” do in Iraq?[/size]

[size=45][You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]
September 3, 2024
Iraq has had two failed attempts to establish a morality police. The first was during the monarchy and the second was during the rule of the Baath Party.
For two years, Iraq has been witnessing a campaign against what the Iraqi government calls “low-level content,” and the House of Representatives has approved amendments to a law called the “Law to Combat Prostitution and Homosexuality.” These amendments were seen by international human rights organizations as “a threat to human rights and fundamental freedoms protected by the constitution.”[/size]
[size=45]These steps brought to mind two previous Iraqi experiences of establishing the so-called “morality police.” The first was during the monarchy and the second was during the rule of the Baath Party. So what do we know about these two experiences?[/size]
[size=45]Morality Police.. The first experiment
in 1935, during the government of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, the prime minister showed great interest in imposing “public morals” in the streets of Iraq, and issued a decision to form what was known at the time as the “Moral Police.”[/size]
[size=45]One of the main duties of this police force is to “monitor brothels and eliminate prostitution in all its forms,” according to the book “Rashid Ali al-Kilani’s Movement in Iraq” by Nisreen Awishat.[/size]
[size=45]In his book “Baghdad as I Knew It,” Amin Al-Mamiz says that the goal of establishing this police force was not achieved after “members of this security apparatus abused their authority and began to blackmail the owners of brothels and the customers who frequented them.”[/size]
[size=45]The government failed to control the behavior of police officers, and the owners of “brothels” began to pay their officers more than they received from customers. When complaints about them increased, a decision was issued to abolish them.[/size]
[size=45]This experience was addressed by the Iraqi sociologist Ali Al-Wardi in his book “The Farce of the Human Mind” when he spoke about an experience that took place “during a bygone era in Iraq” for one of the ministers to reform people’s morals, so he established a morality police.[/size]
[size=45]Al-Wardi comments on the reasons for the failure of this experiment by saying that the person who made this decision forgot that the members of this police force also grew up in this corrupt society and must be reformed. Therefore, they need reform like everyone else, which led to the misuse of the method they were asked to use to “reform morals,” which led to an increase in problems rather than solving them, according to Al-Wardi, who says: “People now complain about the corruption of morals and the morality police at the same time.”[/size]
[size=45]Baath Party: Fighting “unveiled women”!
After the Baath Party succeeded in coming to power following the 1968 revolution, President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr appointed Saleh Mahdi Ammash as Minister of the Interior.[/size]
[size=45]Ali Sa’i says in his book “Iraq Officers 1963: From Dialogue of Concepts to Dialogue of Blood” that Amash was known for his conservative approach and religious extremism, to the point that when he temporarily took over the management of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs due to the travel of its minister outside the country, he ordered the cancellation of all women’s work in his ministry and their transfer to other ministries![/size]
[size=45]With the support of the then governor of Baghdad, Khairallah Talfah, Saddam Hussein’s uncle and the father of his wife Sajida, Ammash reintroduced the idea of ​​a morality police at the end of 1968. This time, its primary concern was to combat indecent fashion among young men. Naturally, the brunt of this fight fell on women, given that confronting “immodest women” was one of the biggest activities of the new security apparatus.[/size]
[size=45]Coinciding with this decision, the Iraqi press carried warnings that the police would take measures to combat “moral depravity,” stressing that wearing “mini skirts” would be banned in general, except for female tourists, and that the limits of modest women’s clothing allowed should not be less than one knot below the knee. Instructions were also issued to “arrest young men who indulge in sexual immorality and cut their long hair,” according to the newspapers.[/size]
[size=45]In his book “Baghdad - Biography of a City,” Najm Wali recounts that this security force used to chase after female students, employees, and other unveiled women in Baghdad, beating them and staining their clothes with dyes under the pretext of defending authentic values ​​and customs.[/size]
[size=45]In his book “The Hidden is Greater,” Jordanian writer Hashem Gharaibeh revealed that while he was traveling to Iraq in the early seventies to complete his university studies in medical laboratories, he was walking one day in one of the streets of Baghdad wearing “Charleston” pants, which were a popular fashion at the time, and the morality police attacked him and tore his pants.[/size]
[size=45]These actions upset the poet Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, so he wrote a poem criticizing what was happening, saying: “Do you see chastity as a measure of fabrics? … Then you have wronged chastity.” Mahdi Ammash, the Minister of the Interior himself, responded to him with another long poem that said: “Our youth are effeminate beetles … a lean frenzy / We want exploits, not short robes of sufficiency / We want women to raise buds and chastity.” A poetic debate took place between the two, which was published by the Iraqi press at the time.[/size]
[size=45]Ali Al-Wardi also had an opposing position on reviving this idea again, and during a lecture he gave at the Baghdad Municipality Forum, he directed sharp criticism at this matter, saying: “We are not lab rats for you to put us in a new experiment every day, so what is the meaning of you creating, for example, a (morality police), for God’s sake, do the police have morals at all?!”[/size]
[size=45]In the end, after many violations by the police, the order was issued to dissolve this security force, and this experiment met the same fate as the previous experiment... failure.[/size]
[size=45][You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]