Women in Basra

(January 30, 2014)

An Iraqi man shot a video of two of his friends in Basra. Basra is the southern-most city in Iraq. After shooting the video of their travails, they sent it to the BBC Arabic, and all of us got to see it!

These women are university students, and they say they get a lot of flak for not wearing a hijab.

If you don't wear a hijab, people think you are rich and stuck-up.

Of the harassment, one of the women says: there's no law, that's the problem. There's no constitution or law to defend me, so I can't complain to anyone.

One day a man came up to her and told her she was behaving against God. She told me: are you God? He said, well, no, of course not. She said, then you can't judge me and I am going to go complain about you.

But, she added, of course she did not complain because there's no one to put the complaint to.

Then she said: the guys take pictures of us and pass them around, and sit and look at us. 

This lady in pink says: every time I have a marriage prospect, the guy tells me: I am going to need you to wear a hijab, and you can't wear pants, and this and that. So she asked one of the men, do you want me to wear a tent?

 She concluded thus: so there's no guys in my life, and thank God for that, I live well without them. Everyone just judges us based on what we look like, they think we have ten boyfriends on each side (if I understood that last sentence correctly!)

You can watch this clip on the BBC Arabic's YouTube channel here.