Muslim Girl Page 4

  One night, during a dinner party we were hosting for our relatives, Tamara decided to disappear. Immediately upon discovering that Tamara was nowhere to be found, everyone concluded that she had a boyfriend pick her up in his car. Serein and I assumed she was out on a joyride. But, just like that, the entire conversation at the dinner party shifted the central focus to Tamara. Everyone was upset, everyone was talking about her, everyone was sharing their contempt for what they quickly assumed was inappropriate behavior. After being gone for what seemed like hours, Tamara casually strolled in through the front door without her usual headscarf, walked past the dining room full of family who watched her with their mouths agape, and took a seat on a floor cushion in the living room like nothing had happened. When we all rushed to ask where she had been, she expertly said, “What are you all talking about? I was hanging around the house the entire time.” She grabbed her crumpled-up black scarf from a nearby cushion and held it up to us. “Look! My hijab was still here.” Serein and I later learned that when Tamara came back from wherever she had gone, she took her headscarf off before reentering the house, and threw it into the room through an open window to plant her evidence. She knew the game all too well.

  During my stay in Jordan, especially at the young age of thirteen, the culture shock compelled me to seek the easy security of wearing social expectations like a jacket. When Tamara drew the ire of our family, I often blamed her, questioning why she had to behave in a way that upset everyone around us. Did she really have to attract everyone’s unwarranted and often destructive attention? Yet, at the same time, her presence became my escape. When I wanted to play soccer with the teen boys in the field behind my house, which, in our conservative neighborhood, might have been seen as inappropriate, she would come with me, befriending the entire neighborhood team. Everyone would fall in love with her from the moment they met her, magnetized by her intentional abandon of gendered propriety. She made crude jokes that automatically afforded her an “in” with the guys and she had a boisterous laugh that became a calling signal for the rest of the neighborhood kids to join us whenever we went to the soccer field. It eventually became so that the soccer field was at its most crowded and excitable when Tamara was around, and when she wasn’t, all the boys stalled their desultory game, hoping she would show up. Being around Tamara allowed me to come alive and be myself again, to do what I wanted outside the constraints of the cultural expectations that made adjusting so difficult for me. I happily discovered that Tamara hadn’t changed when I reunited with her again years later, on one of my college research trips to Jordan, when I wanted to sneak away from her father’s household and meet a visiting guy friend from New Jersey at a restaurant on the other side of Amman. As soon as our fathers left her house for the day, we did our makeup and got dressed, called a taxi, and, just like the old days, went to meet up with the boy. Our fathers inevitably ended up returning home before us, and, upon discovering our absence, called Tamara’s cell phone in total confusion about our whereabouts. As I grew older, the way that I became socially conditioned to see Tamara transformed into not just appreciation, but also deep admiration of her strength, resilience, and defiant assertion of the power of her womanhood.

  Upon starting school in Jordan and meeting the other girls in my grade, I found they were curious about me, too. “You’re from America? Aren’t you supposed to be wearing a miniskirt?” was one of the first questions I was asked. They wanted to know how many Muslims were in my town, if I prayed or went to the mosque, and assumed I didn’t fast during Ramadan. They wanted to know about boys and my experiences, an area in which I’m pretty sure I disappointed them. Actually, many of these girls were much more experienced than me in a lot of things. I found that many of them eagerly sought the type of lifestyle they imagined American girls lived, while I, a real American girl, was eager to experience an authentic culture I’d never had. At the same time, many Jordanians cared deeply about the “opinion” I would deliver of their country back to the United States upon my return. “Make us look good!” they would tell me, making me feel quite sad. “Let them know we’re not like what they think we are!”

  Jordan made me acutely aware of the privileges I had in the United States, and, even more so, the liberties I took for granted. I had a harrowing experience one day in school that I believe had a tremendous impact on the way I would use my voice upon my return to New Jersey. Our class leader, a super abrasive girl with long tight black curls, was standing by the bookshelves at the front of our classroom one morning, unraveling a large poster that was the portrait of a man. From afar, I could see that he was wearing a normal-looking jacket and had an unkempt beard and grown-out hair. To my thirteen-year-old self, it didn’t look like a very flattering picture. From my seat in the back of the class, I exclaimed, in Arabic, “Ewww, who is that?”

  In that moment, it seemed like side conversations, note reviewing, and doodling came to a screeching halt, and every single girl stopped what she was doing and turned back to look at me.

  The class leader held up the poster and said in a horribly offended tone, “That is KING ABDULLAH!”

  Damn. I guess he was going for the whole “of the people”–type of look in that one.

  King Abdullah II bin Al Hashemi is the monarch of Jordan, who married a Palestinian commoner who became known to the world and her people as the beloved Queen Rania. King ­Abdullah succeeded his father, King Hussein, who was wildly popular among Jordanians. I used to think it was cool to see Queen Rania as an elegant, eloquent, and seemingly “modern”—for Western tastes—Muslim woman leader in the media, championing women’s rights, until I started learning more about the many issues of inequity that still pervaded our country. Many years later, after the Arab Spring—the series of uprisings that flared up across the Middle East after the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions in 2011—took off at the beginning of my freshman year of college, I would return to Jordan annually, eager to conduct independent research on the ground for Rutgers University. I wanted to explore the Jordanian youth and underground resistance movements and their demands of their government, and the more I learned, the more I resented the monarchy for the ways it suppressed them.

  Immediately, all the girls in my class concluded that I would be kicked out of the school, and the class leader clamored to report me to the principal. What I said was perceived among these young girls to be an insurmountable offense, even though I had merely insulted authority in the most innocent, superficial way. It was through this interaction that I became awakened to just how privileged I was and how deeply I took my freedom of speech for granted living in the States. Upon my return to New Jersey, that was definitely a right that I planned to use fully, if only in response to the threat of me being deprived of it in Jordan.

  Our stay in Jordan—which was supposed to last until I graduated high school—was fatefully cut short. My mother had caught E. coli. Unbeknownst to us, during the days that I was running around with Serein and Tamara, she was lying immobile with sickness on the floor cushions of our new home, her kidneys slowly failing her and she was dying. It wasn’t until she was rushed to the hospital that we discovered something was terribly wrong, and my father felt it necessary for us to return to the States for my mother to be comforted by her relatives in New Jersey as she recovered. By then, the E. coli had eaten away at two discs in her spine, subjecting her to a decade of painful surgeries that almost cost her the ability to walk. For years after our return, my brothers and I would debate whether our trip to Jordan was really worth it.

  On my last day of school in Jordan, I decided I wanted to say good-bye to all my new peers in front of the entire school during the morning lineup. That morning, my dad helped me write out a short speech in Arabic, and then transliterated it for me into English letters so I would be able to read it at a fast enough pace for my schoolmates to understand. (I was still slow in my Arabic reading, at that point.) I went to the front of the school, with all of th
e students from all the grades standing up in front of me, waiting to hear the one last thing that American girl had to say, and swallowed the lump in my throat. I told myself to just go. So I did.

  “Thanks to you all, I’m leaving here having learned a lot of new things, and with a lot of new experiences,” I told the overwhelming crowd before me. “And one thing that I’m taking back to America with me is something no one can take away. My hijab.”

  • • •

  I was lucky in that my decision to wear the headscarf was a deeply personal and independent one. Up to that trip, I was so fractured by my Muslim identity and Western society that I was completely lost in this weird enigma of awkward girl puberty and unbearable racism that emerged as a total disconnect.

  Being in Jordan was the first opportunity I had to learn about Islam in an accurate historical context among the people who practiced it. One of the classes we took in our public school was deen, or religion. When my tutor would come over after school, she would translate into English that day’s lesson, filled with honorable battles and inexplicable miracles that reaffirmed my conviction in Islam. The culmination of my experience in Jordan, where I heard Muslim and Arab people’s narratives and diverse stories in their own voices, reignited my pride in my heritage and religion and prompted my desire to finally reclaim my identity.

  In one tutoring session after school, we were learning about the heroic Battle of Mu’tah. The battle was named after the city (coincidentally in Jordan) in which it took place almost 1,400 years ago, and had been immortalized as a tale of blind courage, cunning determination, and an almost unreasonable amount of faith. Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, sent his army of three thousand men, led by his dear companions, to confront the Byzantine ruler who killed his peaceful messenger. Upon arrival, the companions discovered they were facing a Byzantine army of 100,000 soldiers. They hesitated, considered returning back to the prophet to report the impossible numbers, but then fearlessly chose to stay the course and move forward against all odds. A battle ensued that was decorated with moments of unlikely valor. The leaders of the Muslim army took turns carrying the banner of Islam and refused to drop it at any cost, while the Byzantine fighters aimed to cut it down. When the first leader carrying the banner was killed, the second leader instantly caught the banner before it fell to the ground, raising it back up into the air. As he fought, his right arm was cut off, but still this did not deter his resolve: he carried the banner with his left hand, until it, too, was cut off, at which point he used both of his upper arms to defiantly hold up the banner until he was killed. Then the next leader caught the banner and carried it to a similar fate.

  One of the most famous fighters in Islamic history, Khalid ibn al-Walid—I learned that one of my Jordanian cousins was named after him—repositioned the Muslim army to attempt to trick the Byzantines. He ordered his forces to retreat behind a hill at night and return during the day, kicking up as much dust as possible to create the illusion that Muslim reinforcements had arrived. His idea worked, and the Byzantine army retreated, allowing the remaining Muslim soldiers to safely return home. Even though the battle wasn’t considered a victory, it was far from a loss: in fact, it showed both the Muslims and the rest of the region the unimaginable force of faith.2

  Listening to my tutor tell me the story, I was overwhelmed with such pride in my history that I decided in that moment that I wanted to wear a headscarf, as a public marker that I belonged to this people. I wanted it to be so that before people even knew my name, the first thing that they would know about me is that I am a Muslim. I told myself that upon my return to the States, I would wear the headscarf with pride as my outward rebellion against the Islamophobia that had seized me and suffocated me for most of my life. With that decision, I inherited the entire history to which the hijab has been tied, and carried it on my head like an issue for public debate.

  Throughout time, the headscarf has evolved to symbolize autonomy and control over Muslim women’s bodies. An empowering rejection of the male gaze, colonialism, and anti-Muslim sentiment, it can just as easily be twisted into a disempowering tool of subjugation and repression through its forced imposition. In any given time period, the headscarf would be at the center of a tug-of-war between people and their governments, between colonizers and colonized people. During the French colonization of North Africa, the veil became an object of extreme sexualization, with white men writing literature fantasizing about ripping the scarf off sexy Arab women’s heads—an act that became, in their minds, the most gratifying assertion of power. Edward Said taught us of the orientalized depiction of Middle Eastern women as seductresses hidden behind fictionalized harems—forbidden spaces kept for women only—that were a figment of the white man’s imagination, an imagery that colonizers would stage for postcards to send back home to Europe. Today, some governments are just as eager to mandate its wear in public as others are to forbid it. In all cases, any decision to intervene in how a woman dresses, whether to take it off or put it on, is just the same assertion of public control over a woman’s body. Iran’s honor police enforce that all women wear a headscarf in public, while today’s French laws forbid the veil in public schools. It’s funny how, in our patriarchal world, even two entities at the opposite ends of the spectrum can be bonded by their treatment of women’s bodies. Sexism has been employed in many ways throughout history to uphold racism.

  Different cultures across decades and countries throughout the Muslim world treated the headscarf differently. Some of us have grandmothers who wore swimsuits to the beach in Egypt. Others of us, like me, might have been the first in our immediate family to put one on. It seems as though whenever there is a major attack against our identities, we see the pendulum of our generational relationship with the headscarf swing back toward reclaiming it. If this is the case, then it is evidence that the headscarf is not only intertwined with our respective cultures, but it has also become the strongest emblem of our distinct identities as Muslim women. And how could it not? It is hyper-visible and unmistakable.

  In 2015, Chicago police attacked a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf and a face veil, suspicious of the food she was carrying in her purse to break her fast during Ramadan. They ripped the hijab off her head and strip-searched her, on video, which they then later released to the public. This wasn’t just a random act of security. There is a feeling of entitlement to brown women’s bodies, and her strip search—already an exertion of power over women—was compounded not just as an act of sexual humiliation, but also a racial one because of her ostensible religious identity.

  Similarly, it is this exertion of power over our bodies that motivates TSA patdowns of headscarf wearers at airport security checkpoints. Think about it: We already have to walk through what is pretty much an X-Ray machine that allows you to see straight through our clothes. It is a monstrosity so invasive that, in 2011, there was a public outcry over a TSA whistle-blower’s blog post in which he detailed how agents would ridicule the rolls of fat on passengers’ bodies as the agents watched from their screening rooms.3 Surely the headscarf is not made of some fabric that can defy such a machine, but nonetheless we are always, always, ­always stopped for an extra patdown, with TSA hands invariably laying claim to our bodies. The search isn’t about security, but rather about hitting us where it hurts. As one TSA agent let slip to me during one of these encounters, “We have to check you if you’re wearing that,” and as another said on a separate occasion, “You’ve traveled with headgear before, right? So you know how this goes.”

  As a millennial woman in the post-9/11 era, I have truly felt that our generation has been the first to navigate this new plane of evolving Muslim identity and the unique issues we must face today. Growing up, I was a child with one foot in each door. I was born and raised within a diasporic culture that is not only detached from but warring with the region from which my parents hailed. In our home, my father did his best to envelop us within our native cultur
e, maintaining the language and customs with which he himself was raised. I had to grow up with this hybrid sense of identity that’s always somehow hyphenated. My responses of “I’m from New Jersey” are met with “But where are you really from?” Being bullied in school commonly made me resent parts of my heritage that other kids found weird, only to see them culturally appropriated a decade later as suddenly “cool.” On top of it all, 9/11 happened when I was a child, and so I went through puberty at the height of modern-day Islamophobia. I was indoctrinated into a world of war from an early age: 9/11 happened when I was nine years old; we were well into the Afghanistan War when I turned ten; and by the time I was eleven, we had entered Iraq. I still remember Mrs. Rabii challenging our fifth-grade class with a trivia question in 2004: “What countries are we at war with right now?” Everyone knew we were at war with Iraq, but my classmates and I were stumped as to what the other country was—it turned out to be Afghanistan—and what exactly we were doing there. It is not an overstatement to say that 9/11, one of the worst attacks on our country in recent memory, for which followers of Islam were generically and collectively blamed, spawned a new age of double consciousness that impacted young American Muslims at a sensitive and vulnerable time in their developing lives.