We have created and absorbed a portrait, tapped out and beamed across the media in hyperbole. It is of the oppressed women of totalitarian Islamic states and nations, their humanity shrouded, their role in society made servile and secondary by the dictates of their various mullah classes. It is a homogenized cartoon that has been increasingly delineated and reworked since September 2001.

During the American spearheaded campaign against the Taliban and al-Qa’eda the pale blue shuttlecock burqas of the women of Afghanistan became an international symbol of repression. Each throwing-off of hijab, of a veil, an abaya, a chador, or a burqa, was carefully captured on film a symbol of the liberation of the oppressed.

‘Why do you always want to know about the thing that covers us?’ A Kashmiri woman replies to a female journalist’s question.

The journalist is wearing army fatigues, her t-shirt shows more of her upper arms than is advised, her blonde hair is neither tied back nor covered in the Friday market place in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir in North India.

Behind the journalist men and women stream out of the great wooden Jama Masjid, the Friday mosque.

‘You are no different. You only see the veil.’ The woman turns away leaving the young journalist standing in a sea of black, grey and white burqas, and bright patterned headscarves over abayas. She looks unsettled by the response.

As power shifts within these societies, propelled along the road maps being charted for them, the role of their women continues to be etched as that of a subjugated class. As these countries re-open educated women begin to emerge from underground networks that they have risked their lives to run, or they return from exile to work again among their countrywomen.

It does not automatically follow that they are held up as role-models for the future by the women they work among.

Tamara Chalabi travelled to Tehran in January this year, and from there she crossed the border into Northern Iraq, into the area that had been the Iraqi National Congress’ base before her father, Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the INC, had been forced to leave Iraq in 1996 following the Iraqi Army’s suppression of the INC in their stronghold of Abril.

Tamara travelled with her father, members of the INC, and other political parties, through Iraq leading up to the war, arriving in Baghdad as the statues of Saddam Hussein fell.

‘I did not think that I would be away for so long, nor that I would be travelling as part of a delegation. That only really became apparent as we crossed into the north from Iran. I did not realize I would be among 800 men and more, the only women, prominent simply because of my sex.’

Tamara’s education has been the veil she has worn, her Harvard Ph.D protecting her from being dismissed by the politicians-in-waiting with whom she lived in the INC compound in Baghdad.
When she had contacted her father about joining him in Tehran there had not been a particular plan. Her graduation had been approaching. She had neither packed nor planned to be away for five months.
‘Of course I am a political animal. My father has been my greatest influence and I come from a family where the pursuit of education was never questioned, but I am also from a Middle Eastern background with its concept of not being raised to earn, an almost 19th century English view of education as a means of betterment through knowledge rather than as a path towards employment.’

Tamara was born in Lebanon in 1973, her mother’s homeland, and where her father taught mathematics at the American University in Beirut. The family left during the civil war and Tamara was educated in Jordan until her family was forced to leave in 1989 foll