The list of recommendations for students attending al-Nidaa Intermediate School for Girls is difficult to miss. It's plastered on the gate.
Observe Islam's strict dress code, it says, and call on others to follow suit. Don't watch movies and TV soap operas. Make sure you pray and read the Quran every day.
Emboldened by Saddam Hussein's ouster last month, Muslim militants are wasting no time in exploiting the political void in U.S.-occupied Iraq to impose some of Islam's stricter tenets on this predominantly Muslim but relatively liberal nation of 24 million people.
The campaign is led by Shiite Muslim clerics who, since Saddam's fall, call the shots in most Baghdad neighborhoods and in Shiite-dominated cities across the country. While distancing themselves from violence, the clerics acknowledge that creating a purist Islamic state is their ultimate goal.
Beside exhorting women to take the hijab the Islamic dress code that requires covering the entire body except the face and hands Iraqis are told in flyers, graffiti and sermons to consult Muslim clerics on "everything, big and small."
In recent weeks, some liquor stores have closed after being attacked or threatened. Cinemas showing soft-porn movies have been told to stop or else. Some heeded the warning, showing action films instead; others just made their film posters less provocative with black paint.
Women not adhering to the Islamic dress code are sometimes admonished. Graffiti across Baghdad call for the creation of an Islamic state. "No Saddam, no America, only Islam," reads one scrawling.
"Iraqi society, by nature, rejects such social looseness," said Sheik Abbas al-Rabia'i, a senior Shiite cleric who runs a self-styled Islamic court at Hikmah mosque in Baghdad's al-Thawra neighborhood. "These are dirty films that pose a danger to our youths."
The campaign for a strict interpretation of Islamic laws is, predictably, accompanied by some anti-American rhetoric. At the heart of the movement, however, is the conviction propagated by clerics that al-Hawza al-Ilmiyah, the supreme Shiite learning center in the holy city of Najaf, is the strongest and most popular authority in Iraq today.
"No, no to America! No, no to Satan!" 25,000 worshippers chanted during Friday prayers last week at al-Thawra, a vast and poor Baghdad district once known as Saddam City that is home to 2 million Shiites.
Shiites make up 60 percent of Iraq's 24 million people and have a similar majority in Baghdad. Their political empowerment in the wake of Saddam's ouster has turned clerics into community leaders, taking charge of hospitals, schools, welfare, security and even creating an Islamic legal system.
Shiites had long complained of being politically sidelined by Iraq's Sunni Muslim Arabs. The Shiite rise raises the possibility of an Iranian-style clerical government in Iraq a prospect aided by the fall of Saddam, who persecuted Shiites and scoffed at fundamentalism.
The Shiite clerics say they will use all possible peaceful means to show the United States that the Hawza, rather than exiled opposition groups, wields the real power inside Iraq.
"America will not allow those wearing turbans to rule Iraq," lamented Sheik Abdel-Rahman al-Showeili, a senior Shiite cleric.
"But we tell America: Let the people chose," said al-Showeili, who insists that Iran's 24-year-old clerical rule will not be Iraq's model. "We want an Islamic state based on guaranteeing freedoms."
Most of the Shiite clerics leading the campaign to introduce Islamic laws are followers of Imam Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, killed by Saddam's agents in 1999. Al-Showeili, jailed for three years before Saddam declared a general amnesty in October, is one of al-Sadr's followers.
In a Friday sermon on May 23 also attended by about 25,000 worshippers in al-Thawra's popular Mohsen mosque, Sheik Kazem al-Abadi called for the formation of clerical committees to fight "corrupt thoughts" brought into Iraq by the U.S. occupation forces.
Al-Abadi, used by the Hawza to publicize its rulings to the faithful, returned to the Friday pulpit a week later to deny condoning the use of force.
"I indeed want immorality and decadence to be fought, but without bloodshed," he told worshippers. "There are many ways to deter such things without shedding blood."
He added: "Our voice is not the voice of terrorism. We just want to offer guidance to society."
Liquor store owners in Baghdad see such things from a different perspective of late.
They talk of unsigned, handwritten notes warning of "force" if they kept selling alcohol. Many stores have either closed or moved to locations known only to trusted customers.
One store, in Baghdad's upscale Mansour district, was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade last month, causing extensive damage. In nearby Zohour, another store was gutted by fire after the owner received a "final warning."
The most dramatic attack took place in central Baghdad. Raed Salem Abdel-Ahad said six armed men stepped from a sport-utility vehicle one afternoon in late April and shot his merchandise to bits. Three customers hit the floor to avoid being hit.
Abdel Abad has made some changes since then. Now he works from home secretly selling alcoholic beverages.