Even before she was born, being female meant trouble for Halima Hemadi.
Years ago, Hemadi's grandfather killed a man. Under a tribal custom, her family compensated the man's clan with four virgins. One was her mother.
"Because she was the daughter of the one who killed, my father didn't treat her very well," said Hemadi, 35, a diminutive woman with a broad, friendly face. "He was always reminding her that she was the murderer's daughter. We are still ashamed."
A newspaper reporter, married with four children, Hemadi wants to stamp out forced marriages like her mother's, and other social injustices facing Iraqi women. Her solution: Let women study Islam.
"One of the basic rules in Islam for marriage is acceptance and agreement, which means both sides consent," said Hemadi, a devout Shia who wears a hijab, or headscarf. "But our parents are simple, rural people. They grew up ignorant of true Islam. This ignorance caused the injustice that women have suffered."
In December, some members of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council tried to replace Iraq's civil laws with sharia, or Islamic law. Women's groups protested that the move would allow arbitrary divorces and forced marriages.
But Hemadi and other women from a Baghdad-based group, the Islamic Women's Movement, note that Islamic scriptures accord women considerable rights - inheriting property, for example, or declining an unwanted husband. They say it's the way male authorities interpret those writings that keeps women from exercising them. To address that disparity, they want a hawza, or Shia religious academy, of their own.
Teaching women their rights under Islam, they say, is the way to end injustices against them. "If we go to hawzas or religious classes to learn that this is not right - that it is forbidden, that there is a penalty - then [men] will change their actions and follow the straight path," Hemadi said.
Female experts on Islamic law could pose a powerful challenge to male dominance in Islam, experts said. "If they can proceed to do what they're proposing, then they would have done a huge service to the Islamic world as a whole," said Amira Sonbol, a Georgetown University professor who specializes in women and Islamic law. "Give them a chance to talk from within Islamic culture, and we will have real reform."
In Iraq, as throughout the Islamic world, interpreting scripture has almost always been the exclusive province of men. The idea of women deciding what is permissible under Islam and what isn't - acting as religious authorities - is unheard of.
Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, barred public schools from teaching the doctrines of Islam according to Iraq's Shia majority. While Shia men were allowed to study in hawzas, the women had to try their luck with Sunni-run seminaries, which rarely admitted them. "For years, I went to the sharia college and tried to apply, but they wouldn't let me study," said Bushra Abed Ghareeb, 34, a soft-spoken poet.
When the regime fell, Shia women eagerly joined the national religious awakening. Mothers began teaching their daughters at home. Prominent clerics began sending imams to mosques to lecture women. Gradually, mosques began offering introductory religion classes for women.
At a class in the Baghdad slum of Hurriya, a woman named Umm Ali, or Mother of Ali, raised her hand. "A friend of mine, her husband is always arguing with her," she said. "She wants to go pray, to read the Quran, and her husband is not allowing her to do that. Is that permitted under the Islamic religion?"
No, her husband may not prevent her from performing her Islamic duties, replied the instructor, Hayriye Misht, 33.
Hemadi and her friends, however, want more than just the ABCs of Islam. They want to study sharia and Islamic jurisprudence, just like men, and earn advanced religious degrees. And they also want a share of the alms left by pilgrims at Shia religious shrines, which feed the small stipends male seminarians live on.
Sonbol was deeply skeptical that the women would be allowed any real authority in the Shia religious hierarchy. "If these women are promised a real role, I think we are looking at Iraq becoming a real center for greater democratization," she said. "But if they're going to be used as pawns by the Shia mullahs, then it's going to be a disaster."
To issue legitimate religious degrees, a women's hawza would have to be affiliated with Al-Hawza Al-Ilmiya in Najaf, the 1,300-year-old seminary widely regarded as the pre-eminent center of Shia learning. Essentially, they need recognition from male religious authorities.
Iraq's largest Shia political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, supports religious education for women. But Sheik Hamid Maalla al-Saedi, a spokesman for the group in Baghdad, was quick to draw the line between such a project and the hawzas that produce Shia scholars: "There should not be a mix between the projects that are related to the scientific hawzas, and the women's project," he said. In other words, the women should not expect to become ayatollahs any time soon.
For now, Hemadi's vision of an Islam that lets women control their rights remains a long way off.
After class at the Hurriya mosque, Umm Ali collected her notebooks and wrapped her long, black abaya around her chin. "I finished high school, and I wanted to finish college," she said. "But my husband wanted me to quit. Because the Islamic religion requires obedience to my husband, I did."
For her, the religious classes were simply a chance to go back to school. "My husband is very religious, and he doesn't allow me to do very much," she said, laughing wryly. "But when he heard about this, he approved."