You cannot drive half a mile in Dearborn without seeing a woman who dons the hijab. Fellow Muslims may even deem it ordinary to see a little girl wearing the headscarf as well.
Courtesy of Ismail Suayah
But what if you were a non-Muslim woman whose little girl wanted to wear the hijab? What if you were Krista Bremer, an American Christian, who married a Libyan Muslim man and agreed to let their children "choose" which faith they would follow.
Bremer writes a detailed story (a Must Read!) forThe O Magazine sharing her initial thoughts regarding her 9-year old daughter's decision to wear the hijab. The little girl's choice was made without any coercion or encouragement from either of her parents. "Not once did I imagine her falling for the head covering worn by Muslim girls as an expression of modesty" Bremer admits.
One day while Krista Bremer and her 9-year-old daughter, Aliya, were attending an Eid festival, Aliya asked her mom if she could have a hijab. "She riffled through neatly folded stacks of headscarves while the vendor, an African-American woman shrouded in black, beamed at her. I had recently seen Aliya cast admiring glances at Muslim girls her age."
Initially Bremer wanted to disallow her daughter from wearing hijab. She recalls feeling pity for hijab-ed females and, like all parents, she wanted to protect her child from any potential difficulty she may encounter from covering her head. Ultimately, Bremer remembered the deal she had made with her husband and saw how self-assured her daughter was about the hijab and let her wear it.
The Bremer story is an awesome tale of struggle and of acceptance. The mother to this little girl clearly expresses the range of emotions she experienced regarding her daughter choosing hijab attire. She shares many of the same negative thoughts that most non-Muslims seem to have about the hijab and describes how she was able to get over them.
The article as a whole is a must-read, but here are some snippets to whet the reader's appetite:
- I quietly pitied them, covered in floor-length skirts and long sleeves on even the hottest summer days, as my best childhood memories were of my skin laid bare to the sun: feeling the grass between my toes as I ran through the sprinkler on my front lawn; wading into an icy river in Idaho, my shorts hitched up my thighs, to catch my first rainbow trout; surfing a rolling emerald wave off the coast of Hawaii.
- In the past, my excuse was that they were hard to find at our local mall, but here she was, offering to spend ten dollars from her own allowance to buy the forest green rayon [headscarf] she clutched in her hand. I started to shake my head emphatically "no"
- She stared out the window in silence, appearing as aloof and unconcerned as a Muslim dignitary visiting our small Southern town
- We must have looked like an odd pair: a tall blonde woman in a tank top and jeans cupping the hand of a four-foot-tall Muslim.
- I suddenly understood how it must feel to have a child with an obvious disability, and all the curiosity or unwelcome sympathies from strangers it evokes.
- I watched a girl only a few years older than Aliya play Ping-Pong with a boy her age[...] It was easy to see why she was getting demolished at this game: Her near-naked body was consuming her focus. And in her pained expression I recognized the familiar mix of shame and excitement I felt when I first wore a bikini.
- In spite of a strange and mounting sense of shame, I was riveted by [the men's] smirking faces; in their suggestive expressions I thought I glimpsed some vital clue to the mystery of myself. What did these men see in me—what was this strange power surging between us, this rapidly shifting current that one moment made me feel powerful and the next unspeakably vulnerable?
- Sufis believe our essence radiates beyond our physical bodies—that we have a sort of energetic second skin, which is extremely sensitive and permeable to everyone we encounter. Muslim men and women wear modest clothing, she said, to protect this charged space between them and the world.
- I'd spent years learning to swim in the turbulent currents of attraction—wanting to be desired, resisting others' unwelcome advances, plumbing the mysterious depths of my own longing. I'd spent countless hours studying my reflection in the mirror—admiring it, hating it, wondering what others thought of it—and it sometimes seemed to me that if I had applied the same relentless scrutiny to another subject I could have become enlightened, written a novel, or at least figured out how to grow an organic vegetable garden.
Read the full article, Cover Girl, here: http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Choosing-to-Wear-the-Muslim-Headscarf/1
