Love in a Headscarf (20 page)

I worried about the stereotypes of Muslims that were being perpetuated. Emma’s idea that those who wore black coats and black headscarves would be seen as terrorists was one of those stereotypes. I was deeply touched that she was worried on behalf of my safety. And I understood her dilemma about whether to convey the stereotypes that other people might have of me. But by conveying those stereotypes, she was in small part accepting them and even reinforcing them. How was I to change the world if even the good people who were concerned about me couldn’t help me reject the prejudice that was out there? Accepting the inherent prejudices that people had would make me live my life in fear, constantly worried about how people were seeing me. I needed to be brave and shatter those ideas.

It wasn’t easy. Fear and violence were affecting all of us. One of my headscarf-wearing friends was punched and her nose broken as she sat quietly on the train home. Her aggressor muttered profanities about her faith and her “terrorist activities” as he went on to terrorize her himself. He inflicted shattering pain on her face and then walked off at the next station. Even when he was gone, the other passengers left her to bleed.

As a Muslim who believed in peace and dialogue, I had to face fear and aggression from several quarters. Those who had conducted the attacks on the Twin Towers had attacked the very core of Islamic belief that we should be working toward peace. They claimed aggressively that people like me were weak “moderate” Muslims. Paradoxically, as had been my experience over the previous weeks and months, I was associated with those who had perpetrated the acts, labeled as “violent” and “extremist.”

In among all of these stark opinions were the ongoing discussions about the position and treatment of Muslim women. The views that I had seen on television as a young child, painting Muslim women as oppressed and abused, had changed very little in the intervening years. Islam was held almost entirely responsible for all the violence conducted in non-Western countries against Muslim women, even though such horrible acts were usually driven by culture, the cycle of underdevelopment and a lack of education. The suffering that women in these areas had endured was compounded by wars that left them in poverty, barely able to survive. As for me, even though I had chosen to wear the headscarf, the public discussions about Muslim women—which rarely included the voices of Muslim women themselves—identified me as too repressed to know my own mind; so repressed, in fact, that I wasn’t allowed to speak for myself in these debates. By wearing the headscarf, I was said to be participating in my own oppression.

So many labels were stuck onto me:

Oppressed, repressed, subjugated, backward, ignorant

Violent, extremist, hateful, terrorist, jihadist, evil, radical

Weakling, moderate, sellout, self-hating, apologist.

Labels and boxes, I hated all of them. I was none of the above.

My search for love offered me no escape from the boxes either:

Nice Asian girl

Overly pious, sour-faced Muslim
hijabi

Smarty-pants bossy-boots

Boring, always praying, stay-at-home dullard

Non-traditional, modern rule-breaker, independent, unsuitable, unmoldable.

I was weighed down by expectations and labels from so many cultures and narratives, each trying to tell me what I should or should not be, each pretending to speak on my behalf. As just one person, how many stereotypes could I shatter?

I resolved to create a voice—my own voice—that would stop people speaking on my behalf, and that would be dedicated to answering the questions: Where does the truth lie? What is the right thing to do?

I broke all the boxes that people wanted to put me into with one simple statement:

I am me.

The different cultures, histories, religions, and heritages of being a British Asian Muslim woman had made me who I was. Those different strands were not burdens, but instead gave me a unique perspective so that I could see things from many different angles. I could bring together my cultures, my faith, and the clear vision that Islam offered to start building a more hopeful future.

I felt abandoned trying to deal with these huge questions on my own. My heart was disintegrating in the solitude, in my increasingly lonely, empty inner world. Would I be able to find a man to share these questions with? Where was the one who could empathize with me on this journey, who was also determined to throw over the stereotypes and live his own path?

I am me
, I reflected again,
but who is he?

SIX
Semiotic Headscarf

What Is It Like Under There?

T
he events of September 11, 2001, put Muslims under a global spotlight. The Qur’an shot to the top of the best-seller list, with more people reading it than ever before. “To find out who Muslims were,” they said. I could sense that people at work wanted to know what I thought, and whether what they heard about Islam was true or not, but they seemed afraid to ask. I heard their whispers, trying to unravel the different ideas that were portrayed about Muslims on television and then trying to reconcile them with their experiences of me, the resident office Muslim.

As the days passed I was surprised that they did not approach me with their questions. I wondered if it was fear of breaking the jovial façade we had created between us. Did they feel that they would be invading my privacy? I
wanted
to talk to them, I
wanted
to explain the context of what was happening in the news and share information I thought would be useful to know about Islam and Muslims, but I didn’t know how to do it without appearing to preach. What should have been an easy conversation discussing the news coverage and what it was like to be a Muslim turned into a wariness on my colleagues’ part of bringing the personal into the workplace, and a disappointment on my part that no one seemed to want to discuss the huge world issues that affected all of us—but very visibly affected me. The violent acts of September 11, then July 7, 2005, and other attacks, injected fear into the most critical of activities: we were frightened to talk to each other.

Despite the fact that all the terrorist acts were carried out by men, it was the Muslim woman’s headscarf that turned into one of the targets for attack, both verbal and physical. Suddenly, this scrap of material on our heads was the focus of attention. Many Muslim women wore the headscarf like me and went about their daily lives quietly and peacefully. We considered it a matter of faith and personal choice to dress this way. For me, wearing a headscarf was not a political decision, nor a form of public statement; it was just one part of my everyday clothing. “It’s just a little piece of cloth,” I mused. “It’s not the end of civilization as we know it.” I underestimated how upsetting my headscarf could be.

“WHAT IS YOUR HAIR LIKE?”

All eyes were on my hair.
It’s my hair
, I thought.
I can do what I like with it. It’s not any of your business to look at my hair if I don’t want you to.
Again, it seemed I was wrong. The public demanded the right to see my hair. My lovely hair, that was part of me, that was part of my physical being as a woman, was now public property. Whatever happened to a woman’s right to control her own body?

Before the events of September 11, it was the men, colleagues, and peers who were curious about my hair; the women never asked. I wondered if this was because the men found it hard to comprehend my femininity without my hair. I had withdrawn one of the visual cues by which they could define and categorize me. I didn’t find their questioning offensive, in fact I found their curiosity both innocent and amusing. I could tease them and they would never really be able to define me on their terms. They would have to accept what I wanted to tell them about me. I could tell by the feigned reluctance to ask the question that they had probably been thinking about it for quite some time.

“It’s a blond Mohawk,” I told the curious men, straight-faced. They nodded, acceptingly.

“Doesn’t it get squashed?” they asked innocently, avoiding looking at the top of my head. Then they realized that I was Asian with brown skin and dark brown eyebrows and eyelashes.

A grin spread across my lips, but I kept looking them straight in the eye with seriousness. “I actually don’t have any hair.”

Now they were skeptical. They realized that I was deliberately confusing them.

“So what is your hair really like?” they asked again.

This time I was more serious. I felt very protective. I didn’t want to be imagined. “I feel it’s my private space. I’ve covered my hair, because I don’t want you to see it. What would be the point of telling you what it looks like?”

What they didn’t realize was that Muslim women were as preoccupied with their hair as everyone else. We kept it styled, trimmed, and colored, just like women who didn’t cover their hair. It might be covered up out in public, but it was just as much an object of feminine attention in private. It was part of feeling womanly. Wearing a headscarf didn’t mean denying your physical femininity; it just meant celebrating it in the private sphere.

“Wearing a headscarf” wasn’t just about hair either, despite the emphasis on the “headscarf” part of the dress code. It was about a whole way of dressing based on being “modest.” Many Muslim women did not wear a headscarf but still observed modesty in their dress and behavior, and that was the most important part. With all the focus on hair and the head, the philosophy of modesty that lay behind the headscarf was overlooked.

“DOES YOUR HUSBAND MAKE YOU WEAR A HEADSCARF?”

I sighed wistfully. “If only I had a husband.” It seemed the greatest irony that as a Muslim woman it was assumed I was under the thumb of my husband, and yet here I was, unable to find my Mr. Right.

Before anyone else pursued this line of questioning I would add, “My father hasn’t forced me to wear the headscarf either.”

For Muslim women, wearing the headscarf landed us right in the middle of a double whammy. It polarized feelings with passion and intensity. Traditional Muslim men insisted that Muslim women
should
wear it in order to defend Islam. The voices in the media that hinted that Muslims were to be feared as stuck-in-the-dark-ages-violent-terrorists insisted that Muslim women
should not
wear the headscarf.

Could I say something, please?
I thought.

I opened my mouth to speak but a Muslim man stepped in to defend me: “Islam has given you Muslim women the headscarf as your right, can’t people see that? Of course you are proud that you are liberated.” I agreed with his statement but felt annoyed that my right as a Muslim woman to defend
myself
had been taken away from me.

I’d really like to say something for myself
, I thought again.

Once more, before I could speak, I was preempted. “Muslim women have been brainwashed. You think you want to wear it because your religious leaders tell you that that is what a good Muslim woman should do, so you’re complicit in your own subjugation.”

“Complicit in my own subjugation?” I reflected. That sounded complicated and slightly kinky.

I was cross. How dare other people speak on my behalf? If I have been liberated by Islam to be fully human, with full rights, then I am liberated enough to speak for myself. If you think I am oppressed then stop oppressing me further by telling me what to say and think.

I had spent a lot of time considering how I wanted to dress and what impact I wanted to make on the world around me. Wearing a headscarf was not an easy thing to do, as I looked immediately different from everyone around me. With the tense political and social climate, it also made me more vulnerable, more stigmatized. In choosing to wear the headscarf it meant being willing to address these difficulties and tensions because they were worth bearing, in order to practice my faith and try to make the world a better place by challenging stereotypes of women, Muslim women in particular. As a woman, I had a choice about what to wear, and I fully exercised that choice. It was my decision.

I was hopeful that asserting my own decision would add my small voice to the calls to change the lives of women who were oppressed in the name of any religion. I had made my own choices, but there were Muslim women who were forced to dress and act in a certain way, and that was wrong. Some were forced into marriages, and that was wrong, too. Others were denied education, healthcare, or the right to work, or had violent cultural customs forced upon them. It was the same words that had to be said again: wrong, wrong, wrong. Any kind of coercion was absolutely forbidden and utterly opposed to the spirit of Islam. Those who perpetrated such horrible acts of violence and oppression ought to be exposed for what they were really after: power and control. They should not hide behind their false claims that it was in the interests of women, Islam, or humanity. The actions of a Muslim always had to be taken with free will, otherwise there was no point. The Qur’an is very clear, “There is no compulsion in religion.”