"What is Acceptable to You is Not Acceptable to Us"

Shatha al-Musawi ... has become one of the Shiite alliance's more visible members. A divorced mother of three, she worked for a decade selling clothes in a market while raising her children in Baghdad as a single mother and putting herself through college.

"To tell you the truth, I am not a feminist," Ms. Musawi said in a recent interview, speaking in English, and dressed in a black abaya. "I don't want to commit the same mistakes Western women have committed. I like that family should be the major principle for women here."

Some liberal assembly members say women who talk like that are just taking orders from the assembly's Shiite clerics.

But that hardly explains the passion and eloquence with which Ms. Musawi, 37, speaks of the need to bring Iraq's laws into line with its Islamic traditions. She is not timid: during the first meeting of the National Assembly she delivered an angry speech demanding that the politicians who were holding up the formation of the new government be held to account.

Asked about her belief that men should be allowed to have four wives, she shot back, "Have you heard of Nasreen Barwari?"

Nasreen Barwari, the Harvard-educated minister of public works in Ayad Allawi's interim government, led the delegation of secular women to Dr. Jaafari's office last week. She is also the third wife of Ghazi al-Yawar, the assembly member and former interim president.

Ms. Musawi can defend her views about Shariah in terms the secular can understand. She points out that after three recent wars, Iraq's women account for more than 55 percent of the population by some estimates. In a culture where relationships outside wedlock are frowned on, many women are living lives of lonely misery, she said.

In the same way, Ms. Musawi explains that Iraqi men - not women - are expected to help support their poorer relatives. So, she argues, it is fair to grant women a smaller share of inheritance by law.

"We have different traditions," Ms. Musawi said. "What is acceptable to you is not acceptable to us."

-- The New York Times (Registration required.)