Political Mobilization and Family Reform in Revolutionary Iraq, 1958–63

After the Iraqi revolution of July 14, 1958, which toppled the British-backed Hashimite monarchy, the new republican regime instituted a range of family reform projects. These included a civil code that removed family laws from the domain of religious authorities and placed new restrictions on divorce, polygamy, and the Shi`i institution of temporary marriage; a range of laws regulating childhood and distributing child-development responsibilities between the state, the family, and civil-society organizations; and the relocation of peasants in model villages and urban slum-dwellers in new housing projects, both designed to foster nuclear-conjugal families and weaken extended family bonds and certain kinds of leisure habits. This paper examines such reforms in relation to the regime’s parallel attempts to neutralize the revolutionary movements that had brought it to power in the first place and thereby to stabilize Iraqi society in the name of rapid economic development. Efforts to remake public space and cultivate new familial sensibilities were linked to concerns about unruly, politically active youth and about existing spaces and networks of solidarity that had the proven capacity to facilitate political mobilization, including extended kinship ties and homosocial leisure practices and environments.