Sheikh Abdul al-Bahadli, a firebrand cleric with an artistic bent, drew a tree on a notepad. It was not a bad sketch. After a pause his pen returned to the pad and drew a box around the tree.
"Is it not more beautiful if it is put in a frame?" he asked.
This was not an invitation to discuss esthetics, but an argument for women wearing the Islamic headscarf known as the hijab. It was also a justification for the transformation of Basra and southern Iraq.
Since the US-led invasion toppled former president Saddam Hussein two years ago, this city with a long liberal tradition and the surrounding provinces have fallen under the sway of conservative Islam.
Alcohol shops have been burnt, women have been encouraged to wear the veil and music has been banned in many places. Prostitution has gone underground. A student picnic was viciously attacked because the male and female undergraduates mingled.
Bahadli, an ally of the influential cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, said music and television must not excite the wrong emotions. "Mozart yes, Michael Jackson no."
Religious parties with links to Iran won the election in January and, by the admission of Basra's chief of police, their militias largely control the city, raising the specter of what has been dubbed "Shiastan," a swath of Iraq under the sway of Shiite clerics.
Repressed for decades, the Shiite majority is now ascendant and leads the government in Baghdad. Kurds are strong in the north and Sunni Arabs are strong in the center. But in the south Shiites are largely unchallenged and conservatives in parties like Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq think their time has come.
British soldiers who patrol the region enjoy relative peace, but critics say that tranquility has been bought by ceding authority to the religious parties. One senior Western official was sanguine about the south's prospects: "I don't think we will end up with Iran or with Dubai, it will be somewhere in between."
Keeping pluralism alive, say secular liberals, is now a battle for Iraq's soul. They ask to what extent tolerance has been eroded and whether the religious tide will rise higher. Basra's women are worried. Few now dare to drive.
"Anyone who tells you there is democracy and freedom here is lying," said Entisar, 45, a sales clerk, tapping her hijab. "I have no choice but to wear this. It is not safe without it."
Many wear the hijab voluntarily, but resent the fact that since the invasion it has become risky to wear make-up and high heels. Eman, 35, has perfect vision, but wears non-prescription spectacles to deflect men's gazes.
Dozens of students from Basra university were injured in March when their picnic was attacked by the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to Sadr. In a rare fightback the students marched on the governor's office in protest and enlisted public support. The militia agreed to withdraw its "morality police" from the campus and sent a bouquet of orange roses to the dean of engineering, Saleh Najim, in apology. But the militiamen were cowed only briefly.
"They are pretending to be nice, but I still call them the scaries," Najim said. "They are still an interfering and intimidating presence."
A group of students in the courtyard complained that they could not play music at parties and had to court members of the opposite sex under the cover of large groups.
"The authorities are afraid of the militias and so are we," one man said.
But many liberals are cautiously optimistic that the tide will turn, starting in December when fresh elections might dent the vote of the religious parties who have failed to lift a depressed economy or to deliver better services.
Eman said a post-Saddam surge of Shiite fervor was inevitable, given how long the sect was repressed, but it was already receding.
"Young guys got bored with religious music and are now back to listening to Arabic and Western songs," she said, adding she had been emboldened to get a nose stud.
A new British government-funded television and radio station, al-Mirbad, will play pop music when it launches later this summer, though that will constitute just 5 percent of the programming and be broadcast at midnight, its director, Nawfal al-Obied, said. Religious conservatives were part of the community and would be catered to with a daily hour of prayers and readings from the Koran, he added.
"This will not be a Taliban situation. We cannot just surrender. People here are open and want real freedoms," he said.
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