“It was a revelation to me,” Sahar says. “I was trying so hard to fit in with the rest of the world.” So despite being afraid of being labeled “different” from the other university students, Sahar donned a hijab. And she says she discovered the warm intimacy of such a shared culture.
Mohiaddin Mesbahi, an associate professor of international relations at Florida International University, offered some insights on this developing trend among American Muslim women while I was working on a Miami Herald story. “They are returning to their identities, to spirituality, but they are feminists,” Mesbahi said. “It’s difficult for Western people to understand, but a woman putting on a hijab is not a sign of repression, like what they see on television with the women in Afghanistan. Although there is no data available, a significant number of American women are doing so.”
These veiled feminists believe Islamic traditions have benefited women. Passages in the Quran, for example, promote educating women, emphasizing education over physical looks, says Stephen Sapp, chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. “Islam, from the very beginning, emphasized the importance of having women be economically secure in their own right,” he adds. “The Quran gives them the right to own and manage their own property. That is spelled out in great detail.”
Indeed, the veil, or some sort of head covering for a woman, predates Islam. Ancient Greeks, Jews, and early Christians included head coverings as part of a woman’s wardrobe. In some ancient societies it was a status symbol: Only slaves and prostitutes didn’t wear them.
Today, it is true, many women wearing their Islamic covering believe they pay a heavy price for their spirituality. Many of the youngest feel lonely as the only girls to wear head scarves in middle or high school. (More Muslimah tend to wear some sort of covering in college.) Meanwhile, many older women who wear the hijab feel they are discriminated against at their work place. Others say they are singled out for harassment on the streets or in the mall, in misguided retaliation for the terrorists who kill in the name of Islam. As a result, some avoid going out in public, except to go to work or the mosque.
Still, most say such harassment could be much worse—and is—in other countries. France, for example, bans school girls from wearing a hijab. For the most part, Muslimah say Americans are accommodating, even curious about Islam.
Sakeena Mirza found that she is more comfortable in the United States than her father’s native Pakistan. She now lives in Las Vegas. Meanwhile, her older sister, Haseena Mirza, discovered that she could wear her hijab while working at a predominantly Orthodox Jewish facility and be accepted. The American Muslimah feel so at home that they have developed their own couture with a “Western feel,” says designer Michaela Corning of Seattle who caters to the growing number of women wearing the hijab and other traditional Muslim women’s clothing. Indeed, if you look beyond the exotic apparel, you’ll find the New Traditionalists, profiled in the following pages, could be your next-door neighbor, your doctor, or your lawyer.
1
ZARINAH: AN ISLAMIC-STYLE HIGH SCHOOL QUEEN
WE ALL HAVE FELT the terror of being alone in a crowded school hallway, of somehow being different. We’ve felt the humiliation of not fitting into the tribe, of being uncool, whether it was for a few hours or our whole school career.
Imagine the plight of Zarinah Nadir, a second-generation Muslim who wore the hijab in school when no one else did. Zarinah was one of the relatively few African Americans in the overwhelmingly white state of Arizona. In addition, she had to wear an odd-looking scarf—years before 9/11 at a time when there wasn’t much awareness of Muslims in America.
Now twenty-four years old, she recalls, “I was the only one in my elementary school through high school to wear the hijab. I have worn the hijab since sixth grade. I knew I looked different.”
Other Muslim girls have bewailed this kind of experience. Zarinah’s mother, Aneesah Nadir, for her doctoral dissertation, interviewed some girls who were traumatized during their public school years when their parents, many of them immigrants and unfamiliar with American customs, sent them to school wearing the required scarf, a symbol of Muslim female modesty. “I had a very difficult time,” one girl told Aneesha. “I was the oldest in my family so I didn’t have anyone to show me around. I didn’t know what to expect. My parents didn’t know what it was like for me. They’re from a different culture. They’ve never been in my situation. They had sympathy but not empathy.”
Zarinah didn’t have an easy time, either. She didn’t want to be the only one wearing a hijab. Occasionally, she was called names and singled out for being “different.” On the other hand, though, she didn’t want to turn her back on her faith. She could not wear her scarf. Naturally outgoing, and proud that her parents converted to Islam, she decided to tough it out. She concentrated on what she had in common with the other kids at school. “I wore jeans like everyone else,” she says. Plus, everyone wants to have fun, right? To have loyal friends? “I saw it as an opportunity. I didn’t walk around with my head held down. I had lots of non-Muslim friends and we had common ground. I enjoyed having fun with them. We went to the movies. I wasn’t able to do all the things they did—I didn’t drink, I wasn’t able to go to parties where there would be both boys and girls present. They respected that.
“But, to be honest,” she adds, “there sometimes were difficult times.” Some guy would make a dumb remark. A girl would stare at her.
In response, Zarinah and some other Muslim girls from the mosque started their own group. “For example, we started our own graduation party,” Zarinah says. “Our philosophy is: We can do it—but in an Islamic way. I have my kicks, my fun. I didn’t go to the high school prom or to pool parties or barbeques. I did, though, go to the homecoming football game—just not the prom.”
Then she corrects herself. She did, indeed, go to a high school dance. Once.
It turns out that some of her friends nominated her as a candidate to be Junior Class Coronation Queen. Coronation was the last big dance before prom. Zarinah was touched but asked her friends to nominate someone who attends dances.
“But,” she says, “they wouldn’t hear of it, and a couple of days later I heard my name mentioned among other nominees. I wound up participating in the Coronation assembly during school hours.”
The assembly turned out to be a highlight for Zarinah, who acknowledges she “was not the slender, blond cheerleader type.” Then she had to grapple with whether she would be allowed to go to the dance. She and her mother came to the same conclusion: She could, but only to hear the election results. Still, what would she wear?
“I often dressed up in prom-like gowns for our ladies-only parties, but I never attended a mixed-gender formal. This was one of the hardest shopping trips I had ever taken!”
She ended up finding a cool—but modest—evening gown.
Zarinah asked her older brother to escort her to the dance, as Muslim boys and girls do not date. He had graduated from the same high school a year before, and thought it would be fun to return to his alma matter and see old friends.
“But, this being high school,” Zarinah adds drolly, “the inevitable was bound to happen. The rumor spread that I would be going to the dance with my older brother. When friends came to me to check out what they heard, I confirmed it without hesitation.”
So Zarinah went serenely to her first high school dance—with hijab and brother. Unusual to say the least but, then, Zarinah had adapted to being different.
It was almost an anticlimax when Zarinah was announced Coronation Queen, the school’s first hijab-wearing queen—and, no doubt, its first to wear a gown buttoned to the neck.
“I believe that this event serves as a testament to my life and what I stand for. While there were some days, as the only ‘hijabbed’ Muslim girl in school, I felt noticeably different, for the most part I used it as an opportunity to build bridges and form bonds—from cheerleaders and football players and those i
n the band to all students in between.”
In retrospect, she feels her experiences forced her to mature, to tough out difficult situations. She now attributes her poise and confidence to overcoming the fear of being different.
“I had, fortunately, what other girls didn’t have: a focus.”
Some years later, Zarinah was accepted as a law student at Arizona State University, where she started the Muslim Law Students Association as an anchor for young Muslims trying to make it through law school. She has since worked in a family law office and wants to work as an intern in immigration court. She’s not timid about trying out various legal areas until she finds her niche.
She feels her other Muslimah friends are equally strong and goal-oriented. One, she predicts, will break into broadcast journalism—hijab and all—and anchor a newscast. Another, she feels, could become a United States senator.
“The sky is the limit,” she says. “We are coming of age. I see good things. I see hope.” She believes there has been a disconnect between how Muslim women are treated in predominantly Muslim countries and how they once were. “Muslim women were once teachers, scholars, leaders on the battleground, and naval commanders. I feel our generation and the next generation will be reclaiming that history,” Zarinah says.
Living in the United States, Zarinah feels she has enjoyed the best of both worlds. She’s an American woman—with all the freedom that permits—and she’s part of a closely knit Muslim community.
“I love this sense of community that Islam gives,” she says. “Everyone is included. We address each other as brother or sister. If they are elders, they are aunties or uncles. We have this strong bond as a family. My extended family doesn’t live in the same area I do. That’s kind of hard. But we have built kind of an adopted family through our being Muslims—our own aunties and uncles who have seen me grow up and who have been to all of my special events.
“I appreciate the boundaries that Islam sets,” she adds. “I believe in a higher power. Believing in that power really frees you from the burdens of the world. Oftentimes, people judge one another, and people make their own lives difficult by worrying what others think. But the weight goes off your shoulders if you remember that you are judged only by your Lord. No one can take that away. If God has not written something for my life, then it was not to be. That frees me from any burden. I try as hard as I can but if, for example, I don’t get that job, then I don’t worry.”
“I am a second-generation Muslim,” she continues. “I love that I am a link between American culture and Islamic culture, that they can coexist within me. Our parents didn’t go through what we did. We were raised strictly on American soil. Second-generation Muslims, the children of immigrants, have a connection to America our parents don’t have.”
Zarinah feels a distinction between Muslim African Americans and the children of Muslim immigrants. The latter know where they come from, she says; they have a sense of their history. African Americans know, of course, that their forebears came from Africa, but most don’t know anything more beyond that. Slavery took away much of their past, their heritage, she observes.
It has been estimated that from 10 to 30 percent of slaves brought to the Americas were Muslim. Although slaveholders suppressed Islam, some slaves refused to give up their faith. They carried the words of the Quran in their heads and secretly wrote down the holy passages in Arabic once they were in their slave quarters.
“Fortunately,” Zarinah says, “now we are having our history unveiled. We need to carry on, to continue to explore our legacy. It helps when individuals know their history, that African Americans severed from their history learn about their legacy. We came to America as educated princes, as scholars.”
Zarinah herself wants to become as educated as she can.
“I like law school at ASU,” she adds. “I know it has a reputation as a party school, but it’s a small and close-knit community. All the activists know each other.”
Still, she admits, there have been some scary incidents, one of which involved her and a friend shortly after 9/11. “A guy tried to run over one of my friends with his bike,” Zarinah says. “We were walking on the sidewalk. I pulled her out of the way. ‘Do you want to die?’ he shouted at her. “Can you believe that? We didn’t believe it at the time. Someone reported it as a hate crime.”
Zarinah was relieved that the police took this and subsequent incidents seriously. Her mosque was attacked in 2004 as the war in Iraq continued; a swastika was painted on the front door. In response, Tempe, Arizona, police scheduled a joint press conference with the Council of American-Islamic Relations to denounce the hate crime. The media covered it, and a suspect was swiftly arrested—a man who sported a swastika tattoo.
Those incidents don’t stop Zarinah from going about her normal life. Nor has she considered moving to a safer community.
Vandalism would not deter Zarinah from staying in Arizona. “I am more resolved. I feel invested in this community,” she says. “We have a large Muslim population here and it’s growing. I would like to improve the conditions in Arizona. Of course, everything depends on my future career or when I get married. But I feel Arizona is my home base. I would love to see our community advance.”
She adds, “When people ask me if I would ever consider removing my scarf or leaving my faith, I think about the time I was crowned Coronation Queen in full Muslim regalia, and I think that if I were to succumb to such pressures, to denounce my faith, I would be betraying my friends who were not Muslim and were of other faiths, who loved me, cared for me, and defended me.”
Not wearing her scarf, something she believes in, would be a betrayal of herself, she adds.
“And that,” she says, “is the ultimate betrayal.”
2
WHY SIREEN’S SCARF MEANS SO MUCH
SIREEN SAWAF’S UNCLE was a taxi driver starting an early shift, just after five in the morning in sleepy West Covina, California, a mere two days after his forty-ninth birthday. Like so many other Syrian Muslims who emigrated to the United States in hopes of a better life for himself and his family, he worked wherever and whenever he could. He didn’t care how many hours he worked; he just wanted to provide for his five children, the youngest only a year old. But his shift had hardly started before it ended. He was murdered, shot in the back and in the head.
More than a year later, his family—which includes Syrian Americans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and Anglos—still grieves at the loss and cannot understand why anyone would have killed him.
For his niece, Sireen, twenty-three at the time, the murder was a shocking eye-opener, a reminder how precious and brief life is. She made up her mind to do the things that were important to her, no matter how inconvenient or hard they appeared to be.
“I didn’t want to live with regrets,” she said. “I realized that silly excuses and procrastination should never stand in the way of actions driven by understanding and deep conviction.”
At her uncle’s funeral, Sireen decided to don a hijab over her luxuriant hair, something she had been wanting to do but somehow had always found an excuse not to. One of the things that had kept her from wearing a scarf was the tendency of other Muslims to use it as a litmus test for piety. In the end, she says, “I realized that people’s standards and expectations were irrelevant in the broader scheme of things.” More than a year afterward, she could say proudly, “I’ve adopted it as part of my attire ever since.”
Some of her family objected—or at least questioned why she kept wearing it. Many women in her extended family do not wear any head covering.
“They thought I was being emotional and subconsciously reacting to my uncle’s tragic death. They thought I was going through a phase. They didn’t realize I had been seriously considering making it part of my daily routine in an attempt to enhance my modesty and to support a concept of feminism through my actions. But I had already shared my thoughts with my mother.”
Sireen’s mother, who
wears a head cap in public with her bangs showing—her own adaptation of a hijab—supported Sireen’s decision.
So did her fiancé. “He had the best response,” she said. “‘Sireen,’ he said, ‘if you do [wear hijab], I would be your number-one supporter, and if you don’t I would still be your number-one supporter.’”
Despite the September 11 terrorist attacks and all the adverse publicity to Muslims, Sireen finds herself every day putting on an item of clothing that clearly marks her as a Muslim. She hasn’t noticed too many hostile reactions except for the stares on the train as she goes to work at the Los Angeles office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
“I try to keep to myself but I do notice a lot of people staring,” she says. “One man kept staring at me, so after trying unsuccessfully to generate a smile from him, I ended up staring back.”
She has only had one comment—and thankfully she didn’t hear it. She was going up in an elevator when a man mumbled, “My God, she’s got a bomb.” Another man on board, a Latino, reproved him, saying, “Look, man, that’s not appropriate to say.” Sireen had to ask him what the other man had said. She was grateful that the Latino stood up for her on an occasion when she missed the chance to do so for herself.
Sireen was born in Tokyo, where her Syrian-born father was working at the time as an importer and exporter. By the time she was two, her family had moved to southern California, where she, her older brother, and her younger sister grew up.
On weekends, they went to a special school to learn about Islam and the Quran, and to learn Arabic. Her parents wanted to make sure they were formally educated about their culture and religion. During one of her last classes, Sireen remembers learning the special rhythm and grammatical rules of reading the Quran.
The Face Behind the Veil Page 3