Scholar Manal Omar Recounts Time in Baghdad

by Susan Douglass

Manal Omar, an American Muslim scholar, presented her book, Barefoot in Baghdad, on Sept. 16 at the Edwin Meese Conference Room in Mason Hall. Omar has worked in humanitarian aid and development for more than 10 years with the World Bank, UNESCO, Oxfam and currently, the U.S. Institute for Peace. She has lived and worked in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan and Afghanistan. Her presentation was part of Fall for the Book.

Omar’s book is a memoir of the period between 2003 and 2005, when she lived and worked in Baghdad. The central theme of the book is the growth of the author in her work as regional coordinator for the non-governmental organization Women for Women International and the difficulties of navigating her job and her multiple identities as an Arab-American Muslim woman of Palestinian background. She humorously refers to these identities not as a hindrance but as “superpowers” that allowed her to hold multiple perspectives at once and granted her entry into the parts of Baghdad where ordinary Iraqis live.

Omar devotes a major part of her narrative to self-critique. She describes her interactions with real women in Iraq challenged her preconceived notions and firmly held ideas. In the book, she comes to understand the diversity of Iraqi women's political and religious views, and recounts how many Iraqi women saw the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s regime as an opportunity to assert their rights and take their rightful places in Iraqi society.

A poignant part of the book is Omar’s description of how mistakes in the American occupation led to Iraq’s descent into chaos. Omar watches and tries to help as the dreams of Iraqi women give way to the urgent need to survive and salvage what is left for their families and communities. She expresses frustration at outsiders’ preconceptions about what would serve the needs of Iraqi women and at the faulty institutional responses that brushed women’s needs aside in favor of “more urgent matters.”

Rather than seeing women as victims of warfare, Barefoot in Baghdad highlights the need to see women in war-torn countries as survivors and sustainers of the fragile continuity of their societies’ values and cohesion. Omar carries this lesson through the work of Women for Women International, and she continues to promote this message in her subsequent work, encouraging military leaders, NGO administrators and the general public to view women’s condition as a barometer for the society rather than as one element in a list of urgent problems for triage in crisis situations. Women, Omar argues, are both agents of reconstruction and indicators of the welfare of their communities. Her book is a warning about other conflict areas, including Afghanistan, which responsible planners and the public ignore at their peril.