A new look in Baghdad: during the worst years of the Iraq war, Muslim clerics decided what women could wear. Now, with security improving, the fashion rules have begun to change.

• Author: Williams, Timothy
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

The young women of Baghdad acknowledge that there are more serious concerns for Iraqis these days than hair, clothes, and makeup. But they also say that there's nothing quite as exhilarating for them as stepping out of the house in a dress, with their hair flowing freely, behaving as if their country had not been shattered by war and dominated by religious fanaticism for much of their lives.

"For girls," says Merna Mazin, a 20-year-old engineering student at Baghdad University, "life would be tasteless without elegant fashion."

What Mazin calls elegant fashion bears little resemblance to the warm-weather clothes of the U.S. or Europe. It was 104 degrees in Baghdad, and Mazin wore a sleeveless dress over a pair of jeans, with a black long-sleeve shirt covering her arms.

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But her hair had no head covering--a small victory for Mazin, a Christian who was forced to wear a traditional Muslim woman's head scarf for two years to avoid being harassed, or worse, by Islamic militias.

Under the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein from 1979-2003, life was not easy for Iraqi women, or men for that matter. But during those years, women could work, attend college, and go out without a head scarf or an abaya--the cloak-like covering designed to conceal the shape of a woman's body.

AFTER SADDAM

When the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 toppled Saddam's regime, several years of chaos, lawlessness, and deadly violence followed. With conservative Islamic militias taking control of large parts of Iraq, women found their fashion Choices dictated by Muslim clerics and enforced by armed militiamen who would threaten, kidnap, or even kill women who were provocatively dressed--in their view, any woman who wasn't wearing an abaya. Women were often forced to quit their jobs or school and retreat home.

While there is still violence, often deadly, security has improved as Iraqi and American forces and the government in Baghdad have taken back areas that had been controlled by Islamic militias. (The progress on security led President Obama to announce plans earlier this year to withdraw most of the 120,000 U.S. troops still in Iraq by next August, leaving fewer than 50,000 to train Iraqi forces and hunt terrorist cells.)

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Today, some young women in Baghdad feel comfortable enough to shed their abayas and dress more like the women they see on satellite TV. They're mostly college students, and they still represent a small proportion of...