On Monday morning, May 4, 2026, the Center for the Revival of Arab Scientific Heritage at the University of Baghdad organized a scientific seminar entitled "The History of Women's Participation in Civil Society in Iraq." The lecture was delivered by Assistant Lecturer Zainab Khalid Muhammad, a faculty member at our center, and was attended by a number of professors and researchers. In the Nabila Abdul-Munim Dawood Hall, the researcher began her lecture by reviewing the early 20th century, considering women's education in the 1920s as the initial spark for their integration into modern institutions. She highlighted the pioneering role of Paulina Hassoun, who laid the foundations for women's civic awareness through journalism and public activism. She then analyzed the 1930s and 1940s, describing it as a period of "professional consolidation," citing the example of Sabiha al-Sheikh Dawood, who paved the way for women in the fields of law and medicine, thus moving their presence from the margins to the heart of state institutions. She also noted the maturation of this role in the 1950s through the flourishing of women's participation in organized political and organizational work. She emphasized that the feminist movement reached its zenith in 1959 when women officially entered the executive branch with the appointment of Naziha al-Dulaimi as the first female minister in the history of Iraq and the Arab world, which she considered a declaration of the complete integration of women into the modern state. In conclusion, the researcher stressed that the participation of Iraqi women was not merely a social activity but a structural component of the Iraqi society's transition from traditional frameworks to a modern institutional system. The seminar included insightful scholarly contributions from the attendees, who praised the researcher's methodology in linking the historical transformation of women to the comprehensive modernization process in the country.

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