WASHINGTON – Iraq’s draft constitution is dividing Washington hawks, leading some to openly question President Bush, who has compared the drafters of the charter to America’s Founding Fathers.

Of particular concern is a clause in the document that would prohibit laws from contradicting the tenets of Islam, and the prospect that those making such evaluations would be clerics. The provision has raised sharp criticism from groups such as the Family Research Council and Freedom House.

The backlash among supporters of the Iraq war here may not only damage the White House politically, but could call into question Mr. Bush’s strategy to work with Shiite religious parties. Certain of those parties, such as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, maintain close ties to the Iranian regime.

In a series of meetings with senior officials here in the last week, including with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the director of Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom, Nina Shea, urged administration members to consider the possibility that Mr. Bush’s supporters could lose faith in the war if Iraq emerges as a Shariah state.

“I keep saying that the American people are not going to support a regime where rape victims are either stoned for adultery or forced to marry their rapists, where political dissidents are imprisoned for blasphemy, and where the court testimony of religious minorities is worth half of a Muslim male,” Ms. Shea told The New York Sun.”The American public is not going to sacrifice for such a regime, nor will it do justice for the promises and vision articulated eloquently by President Bush that Iraq be a new democratic model for the region.”

Ms. Shea said yesterday that aides to Secretary of State Rice and Mr. Rumsfeld have assured her that early reports on the draft constitution are incorrect and that most civil liberties will be protected. But Ms. Shea said she has doubts. “They should have been strenuously advocating religious freedom and advocating and persuading all along on these fundamental issues of rights and how rights can be negated by Shariah,” she said.”We red-lined federalism, even though the Sunni Arabs are opposed to it, because our friends the Kurds insisted. Why did we not red-line freedom from the beginning?”

A national evangelical Christian group, the Family Research Council, yesterday raised many of the questions voiced by Ms. Shea. “It appears that the final draft will make Islam the ‘main source’ of law, and state that no law can contradict the ‘fixed’ principles of Islam,” the group said in an email addressed to its members. “Who will determine which Islamic principles are fixed? Who will determine whether legislation would violate those principles?”

In an interview from Baghdad, a spokesman for the largest Shiite party in the Iraqi government, Entifadh Qanbar, told the Sun that such concerns were misplaced. “There are checks and balances. We believed that we should not offend the majority of Muslims in an overwhelming Islamic nation,” he said. “But the constitution also says no law should contradict the principle of democracy. Can a woman run for president or prime minister? Yes.”

Mr. Qanbar yesterday characterized politicians who have asked for guarantees of Iraqi secularity as “either former communists or former Ba’athists.” “Do these parties respect democracy and freedom?” he asked. “The word secular is too narrow. It offends many Iraqis.”

Some neoconservatives in the capital share Mr. Bush’s optimism about the constitution. The current Freedom chair at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Ledeen, said yesterday, “I think it’s a revolutionary document in the Middle East. It is imperfect like every other document. But the constitution does not say what some critics say it says. It explicitly protects minority rights, proclaims gender equality, and defends not only freedom of religion but freedom of conscience.” Mr. Ledeen added that the charter “vests authority in the Iraqi people, not in the Koran, not in Allah. That’s one revolutionary step.”

A columnist for Slate and Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens, yesterday said that reports of the draft constitution raised concerns for proponents of the war, himself included. “There is a war within the war. Some of our allies are fundamentalists,” he said. “It should not appear that the secularists and the Kurds are our clients and puppets. But at the same time, they should not have to wonder which side the United States is eventually on.”

Mr. Hitchens noted that the Afghan constitution also included a phrase that technically makes it an Islamic republic: “I did not like it there either. Civilization begins when democracy and religion are separated.”

The president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Clifford May, similarly said, “If it says Islam is a source rather than the source of law I am very encouraged. That is a huge and important distinction. I do not expect it to be substantially that different from the constitution in Afghanistan, which we all applauded…. I am cautiously optimistic because I am pretty confident that America’s close allies, the Kurds, will reject anything that smacks of radical Islamism or gross inequality for women and minorities.”

One of the most pessimistic views among the war supporters yesterday came from a former Bush speechwriter, David Frum. “I don’t know at this point that we have a lot of room to have Iraqis write the best constitution they can write,” he said. “Here we have a security problem that we are in danger of misinterpreting as a political problem. If we could put our hands on the finite number of insurgents and if we could break the will of the insurgent leaders, a lot of these other problems would work themselves out in a more or less acceptable way. But we are making a big mistake if we think a better constitution will help what is a security problem.”