Baghdad, March 31, 2005 - JENAN AL-UBAEDEY peers over her half-moon glasses, waving her black-gloved hands between repeated tugs on her long, flowing abaya to pull it closer around her face.
"If you say to a man he cannot use force against a woman, you are asking the impossible," she explains. "So we say a husband can beat his wife, but he cannot leave a mark. If he does that, he will be punished."

On the subject of polygamy, the former paediatrician turned politician says: "If you don’t allow your husband to take another wife, he’d have an affair anyway . . . I’d rather know my husband has another wife that I know about."

In fact, Dr Ubaedey’s husband is back home in the Shia holy city of Najaf, looking after the couple’s four children while she stays in Baghdad to take up her duties as one of Iraq’s new parliamentarians.

As a devout Shia Muslim and one of eighty-nine women sitting in the new parliament, she knows what her first priority there is: to implement Islamic law. When Dr Ubaedey took her seat at last week’s assembly opening, she found herself among an increasingly powerful group of religious women politicians who are seeking to repeal old laws giving women some of the same rights as men and replace them with Sharia, Islam’s divine law.

Among the new laws that they are pushing for is one allowing men to marry up to four wives, one awarding women half the inheritance given to men and another denying women custody of children over the age of 2 in the event of divorce.

This is not what the American administrators imagined when they pushed for a quota of nearly one third of women in parliament in the hope of protecting their rights.

More than 50 per cent of female parliamentarians belong to the cleric-backed United Iraqi Alliance, which won the election in a landslide with just over half the seats. It has called the implementation of Sharia "non-negotiable".

Secular women fighting the conservative religious agenda say that women such as Dr Udaedey make their job harder. "It’s weakening our position," Nada al-Bayiati, of the Women’s Organisation for Freedom in Iraq, said. "How can you argue for women’s rights when the women are undermining you?" Other critics also contend that the quota has worked against women’s rights because the male leaders of the Shia parties stacked the list with women who had few qualifications or political ambitions of their own but who would blindly support their agenda.

Dr Ubaedey cannot be counted among them. Her views are her own and her ambitions cannot be doubted. But she admits that the same cannot be said of all her female colleagues. "It’s true that many of them — maybe a third — have just been put there by the men. They are not aware and don’t come to meetings, so they don’t know what’s going on," she said. "About 10 per cent of them are learning, but the others don’t really care." Under Saddam Hussein, Iraqi women were among the most free in the Middle East, with many rights equal to those of men. Conservative Shias say that the code that ensured those rights is an alien secular one that belongs to the old regime and should be dropped.

Early last year, women’s groups were treated to a taste of their vision of women’s rights in the new Iraq, when the Shia-led governing council issued a resolution cancelling the old civil code on family law and referred all cases instead to the religious courts — a de facto imposition of Sharia. That resolution was cancelled by Paul Bremer, the former US administrator. With such external regulation gone, secular women say that they fear for the future.

Dr Udaebey is not for turning. "Look," she says, as she explains why she would be obliged to give up her job in parliament if her husband wanted her to, "I didn’t make the law, God did, so it can’t be changed. This is the way things are."