The Iraqi government's attempt to change what is often called the most liberal personal status law in the Middle East has been met with protests and social media outrage.

"Here is Baghdad," Ali al-Mikdam, a journalist and human rights activist, wrote on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend about a demonstration in the Iraqi capital attended by about 500 people.

"The capital of our Iraq was not and will not be Kandahar!" he said, referring to drastically restricted women's rights in Afghanistan.

Personal status laws, or family laws, govern marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance. In the Middle East, many of these are based on religion, but Iraq's Personal Status Law No. 188, passed in 1959, is less so. It basically replaced Sunni and Shiite Muslim religious courts with a civil judiciary and more liberal interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence.

But now, Iraqi politicians affiliated with conservative Shiite Muslim parties want to try and change this. Their draft bill to amend Law No. 188 was read in parliament on August 4. In response, a coalition of activists, politicians, and human rights organizations formed Alliance 188, named after the law, to organize protests all around Iraq last weekend.

"We have a civil law, and we should be changing it for good, not bad. We should not be going backward," Rasha, a local who attended the protests, told DW. The 53-year-old didn't want to give her full name because some of the protesters had been harassed. In the central Iraqi city of Najaf, police had to separate angry groups of demonstrators.

"I don't even know why they want to do this,"........

© Deutsche Welle