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Yanar Mohammed is a prominent Iraqi feminist who was born in Baghdad. She is a co-founder and the director of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq, and serves as the editor of the newspaper Al-Mousawat (Equality). She is one of the most prominent women's rights campaigners in Iraq, and received the Gruber Foundation Women’s Rights Prize in 2008.
Yanar Mohammed was born in Baghdad, Iraq. She was raised and lived in the city within a strongly Muslim family, and it is within this family that Yanar was first exposed to the Islamic customs that she would campaign against in later life. Yunar notes that her grandfather was a respectable man in the community, who ‘prayed five times a day, gave money to the poor, was a good judge among his community to solve disputes, and definitely deserved the honorary title of Mullah because of all his pious and devout work and also because of his extensive religious knowledge. Despite all this, Yanar explains, her grandfather married his ex-wife's fourteen year old younger sister and in the process was content to ‘rape, horrify and torture the innocence of a girl, a kid in her early teenage life’ Yunar claims that it was these discussions with her grandmother on this ‘forced union’ that first spurred her to take up the cause of women's rights.
Yanar attended
Baghdad University from the age of 21, graduating in 1984 with a Bachelors degree in Architecture. Little is known of her life between this period and her leaving Iraq, but references have been made to her career as being an ‘architect’ prior to her work on women's rights. This would indicate that she not only trained but practised as an architect. Yunar went on to graduate from Baghdad University in 1993 with a Masters in Architecture.
Little is known of her political activities between her undergraduate and postgraduate studies. Yanar was, however, active in the Iraqi Communist Party during this period. This is not incompatible with her later political beliefs as the Iraqi Communist Party is both secular and pro-women's rights in outlook.
It was in 1993 that her family decided to leave Iraq and move to Canada. Yunar herself refers to this as her family 'going in to exile. However, the reason for this exile is not clear. What is clear is that events in Iraq has been persistently negative for some time, with the Iran-Iraq war, first Gulf War, and ongoing UN sanctions and bombings in Iraq over no-fly zone breaches. It is not possible to say with any certainty if these events contributed to her family's decision to leave Iraq.
It would not be until the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq that Yanar would return to Baghdad, to campaign directly for women's rights in the country. On her reasons for returning to Iraq, Yanar says ’I see Iraq going back to the times of my grandmother. I see all women in the streets wrapped up in the veil and ugly, long and shapeless dresses’ .
This return to Iraq was funded by other feminist and women's rights groups in the US and UK, notably the New York women's rights group, ‘Working Committee in support of Iraq’s women’.
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