And then there’s this question: In the midst of the severe backlash and threat against Muslim women’s bodies, how many companies claiming to represent Muslim women actually made statements in support of them? How many blogs celebrating modest fashion also covered our stories of discrimination?
Muslim women are hot right now. The thing is, we can’t be cool with society vilifying our identities while at the same time trying to profit off them. One thing became clear: Muslim Girl became a start-up because it had to. For us, entrepreneurialism is a means to an end. It’s survival.
On top of all this, law enforcement and the media are usually slow to consider obviously biased incidents as hate crimes. This results in frequent media misrepresentation of the severity of anti-Muslim bigotry, which has a profound negative effect on our community, especially on those Muslim women by whom they are so fascinated. Yusor Abu-Salha was shot execution-style in her Chapel Hill, North Carolina, apartment in February 2015, along with her husband and little sister. The murders, committed by their angry and admittedly anti-religion neighbor, were dismissed in the media far and wide as simply being “a parking dispute.” It pains me to think that people would have been more interested in how Yusor styled her scarf than in what caused the senseless violence that took her life.
Trump discovered that milking anti-Muslim sentiment, with complete disregard to the dangers it poses to our very lives, keeps him in the spotlight and gets him more airtime. Since his ascension to the national stage, I have been receiving press requests around the clock during his media circuses to explain, again and again, “the current climate for Muslim women.” By the time the Muslim-ban comments came, I had run out of different palatable ways to say, “Our lives are under threat right now”—ironically, not from ISIS extremism or the brown men that our society is raising pitch forks against, but from our own Western society itself.
Amid all the chaos, I witnessed one interesting development for the first time in my entire life since 9/11. When Trump’s words rang around the country, many Americans were roused to rise to the defense of their Muslim neighbors. Social and broadcast media highlighted heartwarming stories of extended hands between Muslims and non-Muslims, images popped up on my feed of non-Muslim Americans going the extra distance to make Muslims feel safe here in their own hometowns, and my Muslim friends from across the country recorded moments of increased acts of warmth and kindness towards them—seemingly as though our fellow countrymen were making an effort to remind us that this was our country, too. It was as if, through Trump’s outrageously hateful rhetoric, America had awoken to the reality that now was time to defend and protect a minority community that needed it. Even though Trump represented the racist underbelly of a nation, light rose to the surface, even through the most negligible of cracks, to resist it.
• • •
On September 11, 2015, I received a text message from my friend Hebah, Muslim Girl’s creative director at the time, that was just as much unexpected as it was totally natural.
“Dua” is the Islamic term for supplication.
“Yo should I be nervous to go to jummah? I can’t tell,” it said.
Jummah is the Arabic word for Friday, the Muslim holy day of the week. In this case, she was referring to Friday prayer, our weekly religious service. We regularly attended jummah prayer at the Islamic Center of New York University (ICNYU) under the leadership of Imam Khalid Latif. I credit him for making it cool to be tolerant and openminded in as institutionalized of a space as the ICNYU. You can go there for any given prayer service and find devout-as-heck Muslims who never miss a religious obligation performing salaat alongside Muslims who smoke and drink like it’s no thang whatsoever, because it isn’t. That Ramadan, I wrote a Facebook status—shared by Imam Khalid, subsequently gone viral—about a white, tatted-up Muslim convert I befriended at the ICNYU one night. As I walked to the subway station with my tattooed buddy, there wasn’t a piece of trash on the dirty piss-laden Fourth Street sidewalk that he wouldn’t pick up and hold onto until he got to the next wastebasket to properly dispose of it, nor was there a single person in need he’d pass by without stopping to offer them something. To a person who didn’t know any better, he didn’t seem to fit the stereotypical Muslim “type” from the outside, but we all had a lot to learn from him. Islam is intended to be our great equalizer.
I had come to love the ICNYU for the space it provided, and I saw it as a home away from home—and my fellow worshipers as a second family, even though I had never personally met most of the people there. That’s why, for a brief moment, I was confused, and I texted Hebah back, “Why?” I watched as the iMessage bubbles popped up. “9/11,” she responded.
I almost forgot that it was the anniversary of a tragedy that became one of the worst days of our lives—a tragedy not only for the horrible terrorist act on our soil that became a symbol of our empirical resolve and the lives lost on Ground Zero, but also for the countless people still paying the collective price for an action that had nothing to do with them.
“Oh yeah, I’m wearing a turban. #incognito,” I sent Hebah. For hijabis, we enjoy the privilege of being able to style our head-scarves like turbans, which evoke a kind of religious ambiguity for us—they’re seen as more trendy on women than religious, as they are usually expected to be worn by brown men. That’s a privilege Sikh men will never enjoy. They’ve been just as much victimized by Islamophobia for their publicly identifiable religious garment—whether or not people can tell the religious difference. Shame. I didn’t realize it until that moment that I had based my scarf style that day on the level of negative attention I would likely be subjected to in public. And it wasn’t until that moment, through Hebah’s texts, that I realized she had done the same—and verbalized a lived experience familiar to many Muslim women for the past decade. Our text conversation was the materialization of what goes on just beneath the surface of our everyday lives. This constant negotiation. These adaptations. The breathing, quivering epitome of the millennial generation of Muslim women. They are microdefenses, the conditioned changes we make for our safety on a day to day basis.
Another behavorial phenomenon that I’ve witnessed become prevalent among Muslim women is how we protect ourselves on the subway. It’s almost become inscribed among Muslim women to stand further away from the edge of the platform, for fear of getting pushed onto the tracks by some rabid Islamophobe. Any New Yorker is in danger of this happening, but we, especially those of us who are veiled, are increasingly vulnerable targets of this kind of crime and so have trained ourselves to take extra precautions. In 2013, a woman killed a Hindu man by shoving him onto the tracks of an oncoming train because, as she later stated, she hated Muslims ever since 9/11 happened. Think about that. It’s like the perfect perverted intersection of the typical American’s ignorance of those she mindlessly hates—in this case, conflating a Hindu, or oftentimes a Sikh, with a Muslim, because, you know, brown skin—and the collective blame and incitement of violence against a people as a whole.
Another form of a microdefense that has become innate among Muslim millennials is avoiding use of the slang word bomb, no matter the context. It’s been a really long time since I’ve exclaimed the common school phrase, “Man, I totally bombed that exam.” This applies in public so that we don’t cause any discomfort or alarm to the people around us hearing this word uttered from a Muslim mouth, as do the series of Arabic-speakers kicked off their flights after fellow passengers become suspicious of the use of their native language in such a hostile context. This also applies in private, given the invasive surveillance policies placed on Muslim communities that effectively kill our due process rights and have caused the type of language we use to come under bewildering scrutiny. In my case, I even get uneasy when my friends message me words that are on the NSA hotlist. One year, an article was published online claiming that the NSA has a list of words10 that, when sent in electronic form, automatically prompt surve
illance; one of my Muslim friends humorously Facebook chatted me a series of messages using those terms in all their glory. “Ha! Now I got the NSA on you!” he joked.
The youngins that we are, we have often turned to humor to help us cope with our mind-bogglingly ridiculous reality, though that doesn’t negate the treacherous threat that language really pose to our lives. At the very beginning of the Summer of Hustle, I had just finished grabbing coffee with two acquaintances that worked at Al Jazeera America. We were standing outside of a Starbucks in Manhattan, discussing the internal condition of the network, which was then only creeping toward its eventual demise less than a year later. My colleagues were both Arabs—one fair-skinned woman with straight jet-black hair, the other, a dark burly man with a thick black beard. Then, there was me, rocking a totally inconspicuous scarf on my head. This was after I had just been told, yet again, that my start date for the program manager job for which I moved to New York was postponed, and my acquaintances were advising me to forget them and do my own thing. “Your site gets more views than our network,” the producer told me. “Why would you want to work for us when you could be developing your own media company?” Good question.
As the conversation moved forward, the other woman and I noticed a blond, blue-eyed white guy hovering near us, almost eavesdropping, and acting kind of weird. Eventually, the producer said something to the effect of, “We have to hit the reset button on the entire thing,” regarding Al Jazeera America’s operations, and that was it. Weird White Guy abruptly interrupted us and jumped into the middle of our conversation.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m going to be super quick and I’m just going to get right to it: When you say ‘reset,’ does that mean, like, starting over?” We all gave him a New York stare, super confused and highly offended at his imposition.
“Huh? What are you talking about?” we all asked.
“You said you want to hit the reset button,” he continued. “Are you talking about a bomb? Are you planning to blow this place up? Are you going to kill me? I just want to know if I should call a police officer over . . .”
That was that. My colleagues both began to address him in their own assertive ways, the woman saying she’d worked for the government and was going to call a cop on him if he didn’t walk away and stop making her feel so uncomfortable, the man giving him an intimidating death glare and demanding that he get the hell away from us. But me? I was suddenly confronted by my own suffocating vulnerability: the intense self-realization that, among the three of us, I was the only one wearing a headscarf—the only one “visibly” Muslim, that was dressed like those people on the news, and thus would be a lightning rod of attention for someone inclined to make such an outrageously racist and horrifying assumption. In seconds, I saw an imaginary series of reactive events flash before my eyes: handcuffs, NYPD ransacking my apartment, my entire life dissected and twisted, the carpet of the judicial system ripped right out from under my feet at the conceivable threat of terror. I thought of the Patriot Act, of one of my friends saying that someone he knew in college disappeared, the illegal police surveillance compound that was secretly erected on our Rutgers University campus so law enforcement could surveil our Muslim Student Association. In the age of the War on Terror, due process is no right for Muslims.
I hadn’t realized the deeply subconscious reaction it would trigger in me. It was truly instinctual—the type of innate response that is ignited upon threat against one’s survival—and, while my friends could afford the time to respond and challenge, my immediate need was to get as far away from him as possible. “Please, can we please leave,” I begged them in a low voice between clenched teeth, so as not to panic. “Stop responding, please, let’s just go.” Finally, I took off, trying to put as much space between me and that individual as possible. It was so distressing that I kept looking over my shoulder, even across streets, expecting to see him following me. I was so shaken that when I finally felt that I was a safe enough distance away from him, I walked into the first café I could find and collapsed onto a wooden chair, where I would sit motionless for almost an hour.
I really don’t know why that prompted such an emotional reaction out of me. Actually, I wouldn’t even call it emotional—it was definitely instinctual. And I know what people would say: Well, if you’re innocent, you have nothing to worry about. That’s the usual response given to people who dare criticize the Patriot Act, legalizing an intrusion on our private lives across the board. But the thing is, this isn’t about innocence or guilt. This is about a government with absolutely no accountability, with the legal power to do what it wants with your body simply because of your religion, which it could hold against you as an inherent threat. Bodies of color are criminalized. Black Americans can be shot dead in the seat of their cars, with a seatbelt on, for reaching for their wallets. Undocumented people can be extorted with deportation for not complying with the smallest arbitrary assertion of authority. Muslims can face the threat of torture cells and prison compounds for, I guess, making the mistake of saying the word “reset” in public. Sometimes these identities meet at one treacherous intersection.It’s moments like these that compel our microdefensiveness at the most basic level.
• • •
Entitlement can manifest itself in a variety of ways. In 2014, I was invited to speak at the C3 Summit in New York City, which regards itself as a platform dedicated to exchanging best practices and knowledge transfer between the United States and the Arab region. The event is attended by ambassadors, CEOs, and even Arab royalty, and it was the most prestigious speaking invitation I had received up to that point. I was excited to share our vision for Muslim Girl with such distinguished company. In the hours leading up to our time slot, I had been preparing my remarks in a separate room, practicing in front of my friend Hadiya, making sure my timing was perfect.
When it was time for our panel, we situated ourselves on the oversized chairs onstage and positioned our individual mics. Hadiya and my parents sat in the front row, excitedly readying their devices to record the discussion. When it was my turn to speak, I invited the audience to join me in a collective experiment that I thought would demonstrate Muslim Girl’s crucial purpose. I asked everyone to whip out their phones, open up Google Image Search, type in the search term “Muslim women,” and hit enter. What would they find?
After a few moments, there were gasps and guffaws emanating from around the room. Everyone fell quiet as we momentarily scrolled through the bleak search results together: a wall of dark repetitive images of faceless women hidden behind veils, sometimes with only their eyes showing, sometimes not. The media and even the information reaching us straight to our phone screens had become saturated with the same monolithic stereotypical image of Muslim women. When we deny the robust diversity of Muslim women from their representation, it’s no wonder we are able to so easily smear, generalize, and sideline them.
This is where I started to open up about how Muslim Girl was born to take back to the mic, when it happened.
“Don’t,” interrupted a white woman sitting in the audience, on my time, with a haughty jeer. She leaned forward, releasing a sarcastic laugh. “Don’t say anything to offend people.”
I wanted to continue. “As I was saying—”
“I’m just saying—” she attempted to go on.
“Excuse me,” I said, stopping her. “I’m the one speaking right now.”
She receded—and later, during the reception, I wouldn’t be able to find her to let her know how rude and offensive her action had been—but not before my friends and family gasped, astounded at Entitled White Woman’s reaction. As the only veiled woman on stage, so too was I the only speaker who was interrupted at the entire summit. Even though I shut her down without a thought during the panel, I would feel remorse later that I hadn’t, in the moment, demonstrated to the audience that this was the perfect example of the type of silencing by the West that Muslim wome
n have been enduring for at least the past decade; the type of silencing that, at its core, Muslim Girl surfaced to defy.
It stunned me at the time, and it still pains and angers me to remember that moment, which became such a clear manifestation of the levels laid out by our society. Even when the veiled Muslim woman was the one on the stage, with the microphone, with the status of “speaker,” a regular attendee sitting in the audience whose only role was to listen still felt entitled and superior enough to dictate what the Muslim woman would say. At the most microcosmic level, it makes it easier to see how Muslim women as a whole have been talked over, imposed upon, and told what’s best for them by empire, much to their own detriment, sacrifice, and subjugation.
Similarly, at midnight on my twenty-fourth birthday, I found myself on a packed PATH train, beside one of my best friends, Shanzay. I was carrying a baby kitten in a kennel that I allowed to take up a seat next to me so that I could easily tend to him during our trip, given that the noise of his surroundings and the busy subway tracks below him left him terrified. It was an action not unlike that of the countless hipsters on the Williamsburg subways that I had witnessed treating their pets like people. As more people filed in, one woman stood quietly in front of us. Another white woman beside her with a British accent pointed at the kennel next to me and rudely said, “That’s a seat.” Even though it sounded like she was being unnecessarily hostile, I promptly obliged and placed the kennel on the shaky ground in front of me, to which the first woman standing in front of us politely responded with a “Thank you” before taking a seat beside us. And that was that. Or so I thought.
For some unknown reason, a white man standing beside the British woman joined in with a condescending laugh: “Yeah, that was a seat,” he said to her. She joined in a self-congratulatory conversation with him, and, I guess encouraged by the new ally she made, turned back to me, gestured at the kennel, and demanded, “What’s in that thing anyway?”
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