The hardest part about wearing a hijab, for me, is knowing that if I take it off, almost everyone would applaud me for being strong and courageous. No one would see that my willpower and pride had been broken. People would clap when I would actually need them to mourn with me and realize that the causes of that happening need to be eradicated.

I wear this scarf because when I was a child I was socialized to be embarrassed, even ashamed, of my religion and my culture. I was told that to be a Muslim was to be a terrorist and that to be outwardly Muslim was to endorse violence and oppression. I was told that I had more in common with the violent men on tv than with the other children in my second grade class. I understood that I would be unwelcome as long as I wore symbols of my heritage and chose to, in however modern a way, embrace my ancestors. I was told that to manifest my faith in this way, to dress like my mother as many young girls want to do, was to spit in the faces of “real Americans.” The day I walk out of my house without this scarf would not be a day to be celebrated. It would be the day that I decide that to be proud of myself is too much of a liability and that shame of my faith, my family and my heritage are easier to swallow than the dirty stares, abuse, misunderstanding and sense of alienation from those around me who do not and will not care enough about me or women who look like me to help alleviate it.

I wear this scarf because I could not see beauty in myself for 19 out of my 20 years of life. I idealized the white skin and colored eyes of my peers. I think I probably still do. I thought I looked like less of a child than my friends in old photographs- believing that my tan skin and dark eyes meant I looked less cute, less innocent, less lovable. It was made evident early on that women are valued almost solely based on their appearance in many societies— and unfortunately my merchandise was cheap. I devalued myself because I looked different. Other Muslims, Arabs or people of color only corroborated this price scale with their colonized beauty ideals— celebrating the beauty of their colonizers as opposed to their own features. Fighting this internalized self-hate took too much time and only recently have I come to appreciate the way I look. I safeguard this precious self-love, 19 years in the making, by rejecting any notion that my being can be reduced to what anyone, orientalist or not, perverted or not, racist or not, can see on the street. The day I leave my house without a scarf is the day my conviction that I am more than my appearance is finally crushed under the almost overwhelming desire to be appreciated and deemed worthy by this superficial society. It would not be a day to be celebrated– it would be a day to question when or why our obsession with appearances overtook our individual cultivated and nuanced moralities.

On this World Hijab Day, I wanted to make it clear, for my own situation, that if a day comes that I decide to take off my hijab, it will not be a day when I am “freed”- it will be a day I will have exhaustedly stopped fighting for my rights, my personal morals, and my individual convictions. I won’t have decided to take it off. Rather, I will have been deprived of my ability to keep it on.

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Touched by a stranger’s sincere and eager public Facebook post, on Wednesday February 1st I visited her house to help her and her non-Muslim friends style themselves in hijabs, in honor of World Hijab Day. Kim Mulligan’s World Hijab Day photo shoot was a beautiful, unique initiative by non-Muslim women to reach out and support Hijabi Muslim women. Upset about the Muslim ban and refugees’ plight, these women embraced me with hugs, smiles, and well-intentioned questions about my faith. They repeatedly thanked me for bringing hijabs and styling them, but it was I bowled over with gratitude for their support and courage. Their acceptance of the hijab warmed my heart. Their effort was reassuring and comforting, because typically it’s us Hijabis that have to overcompensate and reach out to others. This nonjudgmental group made me feel welcome and normal. We were a group of women having fun; enjoying fashion and getting to know one another as humans. It was not about lecturing one another.

The post Sisters in America: World Hijab Day Photo Shoot Supports Marginalized American-Muslim Women appeared first on World Hijab Day.

I wasn’t a born Muslim.  I was raised as a Christian, Seventh- Day Adventist to be exact. And some things in Christianity that I found to be very similar to Islam were: We preferred eating halal/kosher, valued modesty and stayed away from alcohol, unclean meats (pork, etc.) and these were very relevant to me.

So, as a practicing Christian, I had no intentions other than to please God. I abided by all of those morals.  One Sabbath morning, I came to Church with an ankle length dark purple dress accompanied with a simple tan colored scarf covering my hair which was my personal idea of what modesty was but to others, it seemed  way too extreme and offensive for Church.

Throughout the day, I endured comments from Church goers including children and adults; “ISIS has arrived”, “You know you look like that lady, I think she was Mahatma Gandhi’s wife”, “Hey! Salam alaikum – aaaah! just kidding with you”, all followed by playful laughs.  That day, my grandmother received several complaints from sisters in the Church. I even got into a huge verbal feud with one of the sisters in my Church on my views on modesty. I always made sure to tell people that I was only doing this because the Bible said so:

According to 1 Corinthians 11:  “that you remember me in all things and keep the traditions just as I delivered them to you… Every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, for that is one and the same if her head was shaved…For this reason a woman ought to have the symbol of authority on their head, because of the angels.”

After that encounter with my Church, my confidence in following what the Holy Bible had taught me eventually ended up diminishing.  Often, people said things like: “Because times have changed we don’t participate in things like that”, “Jesus died for our sins so we don’t have to do that anymore”, “That was the old ways of Babylon so we no longer do that”, “Wrap it another way and not like a Muslim”, “It’s not good to wear it like that. People will think you worship Allah instead of God.”, “There are others ways to be modest. Why do you have to dress like that?”, “You are beautiful just the way you are. Just take that scarf off already.” Their comments didn’t really affect me much, but it did make me wonder, as Christians, why are we not modeling what the Bible taught us when the Muslims and even Jews were doing it and they don’t even claim the Bible as their Holy Book?

Eventually months later, on October 25, 2016, I started wearing the hijab consistently. However, before leading up to that moment, a couple of people played a major role in my life, when deciding if I should even look into Islam or not.  They were the ones who often cleared up most of my misconceptions of Islam, exchanged phone numbers with me, got to know me over milkshakes, a quick sit-down in the park or even dinner and referred me to so many of the resources to learn about Islam which still currently exist in my life today.

But I was convinced that I wanted to wear the hijab by mid- August but I just wasn’t sure how I could actually go about doing it. I confided in my mother, but I feared the rest of my family wouldn’t approve of me adapting to these new concepts of modesty and almost a foreign lifestyle to them. Transitioning into wearing the Hijab while in high school, was a bit difficult for me but it wasn’t anything that I couldn’t handle. By the first month, my family, school, and Church buddies all got used to it but the remarks remained.

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