Baghdad ? It has been nearly 30 years since she got married, but Iraqi legislator Samira Musawi, a Shiite Muslim, still bristles at what she considers an ultimate indignity: a law requiring witnesses to certify the rite.

She and her husband-to-be grabbed a couple of strangers, gave them each about $10, and were legally wed.

“I didn’t even know these people; They could have been thugs,” Musawi said of the men who validated the 1979 civil ceremony in a west Baghdad court.

That memory is one reason Musawi, who heads parliament’s Women, Family and Childhood Committee, supports Article 41, a clause in Iraq’s interim constitution that supporters say will prevent state meddling in domestic affairs by giving Iraqis the right to marry, divorce, decide inheritances, and settle other personal issues according to their religious sect.

For example, under Shiite laws, no witnesses are required for a marriage, but Sunnis require two.

But a fight over the article’s potential impact has presented a stumbling block to lawmakers trying to finalize a constitution by year’s end.

Article 41 is just one line in the 16-page document, but to critics, it is the worst .

Opponents, including women’s activists and legal scholars, say the one poorly worded sentence opens the door to rule by draconian interpretations of Islamic law that could sanction the stoning of adulterous women, allow underage girls to be forced into marriage, and permit men to abandon their wives by simply declaring “I divorce you” three times.

In the southern city of Basra, there already are signs of religious extremism being used to rein in women. Police say gangs enforcing their idea of Islamic law have killed 15 women in the last month.

“There are gangs roaming through the streets … pursuing women and carrying out threats and killing because of what the women wear or because they are using make-up,” the Basra Police commander, Maj. Gen. Abdul Jaleel Khalaf, said in October .

Sometimes notes are left on the women’s bodies saying they were killed for violating religious law or social traditions.

“This is a mockery for us, when you speak about freedom,” said Hanaa Edwar, who heads the Iraqi al-Amal Association , a human- rights group lobbying against Article 41. “There will be no choices for women if a man makes a decision that he wants to live a certain way. Step by step, we will end up in a religious state.”

The controversy highlights the broader debate here over how large a role religion should play in Iraqis’ futures. It also underscores shortfalls of the original constitution, which was drafted in 2005 by newly elected Iraqi legislators facing a U.S.-imposed deadline. Redrafting the document is one of the benchmarks sought by the Bush administration to set the stage for an eventual U.S. troop withdrawal. But it has been delayed three times as lawmakers haggle over issues such as provincial powers, religious and cultural freedoms, and fair distribution of oil revenues.