A Young Muslim woman writes:
My Body is My Business
I OFTEN wonder whether people see me as a radical, fundamentalist Muslim terrorist packing an AK-47 assault rifle inside my jean jacket. Or may be they see me as the poster girl for oppressed womanhood everywhere. I’m not sure which it is.
I get the whole gamut of strange looks, stares, and covert glances. You see, I wear the hijab, a scarf that covers my head, neck, and throat. I do this because I am a Muslim woman who believes her body is her own private concern.
Young Muslim women are reclaiming the hijab, reinterpreting it in light of its original purpose to give back to women ultimate control of their own bodies.
The Qur’an teaches us that men and women are equal, that individuals should not be judged according to gender, beauty, wealth, or privilege. The only thing that makes one person better than another is her or his character.
Nonetheless, people have a difficult time relating to me. After all, I’m young, Canadian born and raised, university educated why would I do this to myself, they ask.
Strangers speak to me in loud, slow English and often appear to be playing charades. They politely inquire how I like living in Canada and whether or not the cold bothers me. If I’m in the right mood, it can be very amusing.
But, why would I, a woman with all the advantages of a North American upbringing, suddenly, at 21, want to cover myself so that with the hijab and the other clothes I choose to wear, only my face and hands show?
Because it gives me freedom.
WOMEN are taught from early childhood that their worth is proportional to their attractiveness. We feel compelled to pursue abstract notions of beauty, half realizing that such a pursuit is futile.
When women reject this form of oppression, they face ridicule and contempt. Whether it’s women who refuse to wear makeup or to shave their legs, or to expose their bodies, society, both men and women, have trouble dealing with them.
In the Western world, the hijab has come to symbolize either forced silence or radical, unconscionable militancy. Actually, it’s neither. It is simply a woman’s assertion that judgment of her physical person is to play no role whatsoever in social interaction.
Wearing the hijab has given me freedom from constant attention to my physical self. Because my appearance is not subjected to public scrutiny, my beauty, or perhaps lack of it, has been removed from the realm of what can legitimately be discussed.
No one knows whether my hair looks as if I just stepped out of a salon, whether or not I can pinch an inch, or even if I have unsightly stretch marks. And because no one knows, no one cares.
Feeling that one has to meet the impossible male standards of beauty is tiring and often humiliating. I should know, I spent my entire teenage years trying to do it. It was a borderline bulimic and spent a lot of money I didn’t have on potions and lotions in hopes of becoming the next Cindy Crawford.
The definition of beauty is ever-changing; waifish is good, waifish is bad, athletic is good – sorry, athletic is bad. Narrow hips? Great. Narrow hips? Too bad.
Women are not going to achieve equality with the right to bear their breasts in public, as some people would like to have you believe. That would only make us party to our own objectification. True equality will be had only when women don’t need to display themselves to get attention and won’t need to defend their decision to keep their bodies to themselves.
==================== (my response)
I approve of your freedom to dress Islamic
I am 50 yr old male, American born, of Dutch ancestry, who has been worshiping in Hindu fashion for some years now. And though I have made an effort to study every major world religion, and I have read the Koran in english cover to cover, I have the most difficulties viewing Islam in a positive light.
Never the less, I highly approve of your desire to dress in Islamic fashion.
Here in New York City, many many women have taken full, purdah, or wear the more moderate scarf which you mentioned, the name escapes me now.
Many times i enter a store to purchase something, and the cashier will be an Islamic woman wearing such a head covering (but with face exposed… i do not yet see cashiers with veil).
Here in New York City, no one looks twice or asks silly questions, because we are surrounded by various religious dress styles… the Hasidic Jewish men have their beards and forelocks of hair, with special hats, and long black coats, and tassels of prayer shawls showing.
And many many cab drivers are Sikhs with turbans.
And you see many Hindu women with Saris. You even see Hindu men with tilak, or sayndoor.
Each and every male, no matter how serious or religious, is tempted to stare when a woman reveals her body.
Our society in America is really too immodest and sexually oriented. Even every single advertisement, if it is only selling potato chips, must show a womans breast’s or her bottom or thighs. Things are really much better for everyone when women dress more modestly.
Legal enforcement of such a dress code of course would not be accepted outside of an Islamic country. So women must be free in USA to choose, and many will choose to be less modest.
But those who choose any religious form of dress or tilak, or turban, or whatever reasonable traditional outward sign of their religious beliefs, should be respected, and each educated citizen should take the time and trouble to learn enough about other cultures and religions, so that they may understand and respect the Islamic woman with purdah, or the Sikh, or the Orthodox Jew, or the Catholic Nun, or the Hare Krsna devotee with his shaved head and Sika.
I know an Irish American born man raised Roman Catholic, who became a Sikh, and wears a turban and beard to work. He drives a subway train. He told me that his appearance keeps him on the straight and narrow, because women will sometimes be so bold as to hand subway workers a slip of paper with their phone number, but if you are dressed in such a religious fashion, those types of women avoid you and choose someone else, so the temptation is avoided.
One Jewish man who always wears his Yarmulke head cap, told me that if he becomes angry in a public place, with a clerk lets say at the post office, he holds his anger because he is dressed as a Jew, and he realized that he will disgrace his people and his Religion, by acting inappropriately.
So, external signs of our beliefs and traditions of any sort help us to constantly remember importand spiritual truths and who we are in our moment to moment daily life, when we might otherwise so easily become distracted.
I once read, concerning Islam, that the underlying purpose of things is (now i am fogetting term , either Zikhr, or Dikhr)… anyway, constant rememberance of the Diety.
But this is the message of many religions. St. Paul of Christians says “Pray at all times, without ceasing”
Lord Krsna tells Uddhava his uncle, “Tapas and ritual is not necessary, if you can always constantly think of Me and see Me in all creatures and all things.”
Even in the writings of the most famous rabbi Moses Maimonides, in his “Guide for the Purplexed” he says.. “The one goal and aim of the pious Jew is to remember G-d with each of lifes waking actions.”
There is a story of a Jewish shoemaker who inwardly uttered praises to the Holy Name, Hashem, with each nail that he hammered into each shoe.
This is why so many religions have rosaries and prayer beads, whether the Islamic 99 beads for the 99 Names of Allah, or the Catholic Rosarie for Hail Mary’s and Our Fathers, or Saivite Rudraksha beads or Vaishnav Tulsi beads for repetition of mantras.
And Buddhists too, of different denominations, use prayer beads.
In Old English, the word BEAD originally meant “PRAYER”, and when you say I BID YOU TO HELP ME, a bid (sounds like bead) is a request. Also, in Old English, there was a person in the Church called a Bede. So the original function of beads, was to count prayers, and only later did they become ornaments.
The ancient greek word KOSMOS, originally meant UNIVERSE, from which we derive the word COSMOLOGY, but it came to have the meaning of ORNAMENT or Adornment, so we also derive the word COSMETIC.
But in the Gita, Lord Krsna says … “The ENTIRE UNIVERSE is strung upon ME as pearls on a THREAD (Sutra)”
So we see the enchanting relationship between the phenomenal universe, prayer, Divinity, adornment, prayer, continual remembrance of the Divine, and the Holy Names.
Vaiheguru ji ki Khalsa, Waheguru ji ki Fateh!
As the Sikhs would say, the People of God (who observe and dress and engage in Japa and Smaranam)… that pure people is the Strength of the Divinity…
I do not think this sentiment is unrelated to those pious Islamic women who take Purdah in some form.
NOW IF ONLY WE HAD TOLERANCE FOR ONE ANOTHER, and looked for SIMILARITIES, rather than differences, and prattling that each of us has THE ONE AND ONLY TRUTH,… and then try to shove that truth down everyones throat with a sword…
Well .. then we would really be a holy and enlightened and numinous race of beings, and the entire planet would become as luminous as Ayodiya on Deepavali.
Salaam Alehoum. Aham dulillah.