Post 8 – Veiled Intentions: Don’t Judge a Muslim Girl by her Covering
Don’t judge a Muslim girl by her covering is written by Maysan Haydar, a feminist who chose to wear a Hijab (headscarf) at the age of 12. She talks about the “Seeming contradictions of my life” (Haydar). Haydar is a social worker in New York City.
Haydar talks about how she started wearing the headscarf, she tells the authors about her intentions to wear the scarf. She just started wearing the scarf because she wanted to get involved in the Girl Talk. This was a game when all girls got together and discussed all the private and embarrassing things in their life. Haydar wanted to be able to discuss those things too; wearing the headscarf was considered a sign of becoming a woman for a girl. She wanted to be able to receive that attention from others as she saw her friends receive when they wore it.
In this article Haydar reflects upon the changes she saw in herself and the way she started respecting the headscarf and the values that came with it as she grew up. The headscarf is supposed to be not to stop a women from living her life, but to be able to cover herself to men who would see her as a sex object rather than who she is as a person. She believes that when she moved to New York she really started seeing the advantages of wearing the head scarf. Here she used the example of construction workers who feel it necessary to comment on any girl passing and says how she prefers the comments she receives which are still more decent to the ones she has heard of from other girls.
She then talks about how she does not understand the view other women have of her, and how others believe that she is not living a full life because of having a headscarf. She recalls the time she sat in a bus and saw a girl staring at her as if she is trapped in her clothing. Haydar, on the other hand, felt that the girl sitting there with her tight jeans, styled hair and makeup, was more trapped than Haydar ever was.
This article is very interesting and coming from a Muslim country I could understand how she feels. I know that veiled girls don’t have a problem with their dressing and all they wish is that people could see them as normal as everyone else and not just as a different cast, someone who could not fit in because they can. Their lives are no different than ours, they do all the things we do, they eat, they go out, they travel, all we need to do is try and understand that just because they dress differently does not mean they are different.
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