Secular Iraqis may have lost the battle to keep religion from dominating the new Iraq constitution being hammered out in advance of an August deadline.

Washington Post reporter Ellen Knickmeyer writes that the head of the drafting committee, Humam Hammoudi, issued a statement apparently supported by Kurdish representatives saying there will be “a significant role for religion in the state.”

Although long foreshadowed by the dominant influence of Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani and the overwhelming success of his largely religious Shiite electoral list, the influence of religion over civil law will be a major blow to the rights of women in Iraq. The secular consitution of Saddam’s Iraq guaranteed equal status for women in matters of civil law including marriage, divorce, inheritance and other areas.

Reports of intimidation and attacks on women who do not dress traditionally or who work outside the home have increased steadily since the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, particularly in the southern provinces but in Baghdad and other cities as well. Among the more widely reported incidents, which isn’t saying much, was an assault last March on picnicing engineering students at a park in Basra during which a number of students were beaten and at least two were shot.

Far from disavowing the attack, senior al-Sadr loyalists said that they had a duty to stop the students’ “dancing, sexy dress and corruption”.

“We beat them because we are authorised by Allah to do so and that is our duty,” Sheik Ahmed al-Basri said after the attack. “It is we who should deal with such disobedience and not the police.”

After escaping with two students, Ali reached a police station and asked for help. “What do you expect me to do about it?” a uniformed officer asked.

Religious reactionaries have also firebombed liquor stores and barber shops, in some instances killing the proprietors as well. With the force of law behind them and the apparent impotence or unwillingness of the occupying armies to interfere, such attacks are only likely to spread and intensify.

Former Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman and professional moron Dan Senor, writing in Slate last week, responded to scholar and sane person Larry Diamond’s concerns about the slippage in the freedoms of Iraqi women — Diamond noted they’ve been protesting the intimidation and lack of respect they’re seeing — by saying ” I am encouraged by something you point out: Iraqi women are responding by publicly protesting the government—something that they are not allowed to do in almost every other part of the region.”

And something that until now they didn’t have to do, and something they may soon lose the right to do. It’s an extraordinary exercise, first creating the conditions under which women in Iraq begin to lose their rights and then celebrating the fact that they haven’t yet lost the right to protest about losing the rights they have lost. We can only hope the Bush administration don’t succeed as well at bettering the lots of women in this country (although it’s probably too late).

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