I thought I would repost this video & article from today's Toronto Star. Enjoy!
Women in hijab say it completes their identity
A thin, blond woman with a sharp face is shouting across the aisle in southbound a University line subway car.
Three hijab-clad girls sitting across from the angry woman look puzzled as they lean forward to hear her. They cannot make out what the woman is saying. “But I do not think it is polite,” one of the girls whispers.
This is what the woman is saying: “You need to challenge the men in your religion and the imams to respect women.”
One of the girls demurs: “But we are respected in our religion.”
The harangue continues ferociously. “We don’t put up with that crap.”
By wearing hijab, these girls are identifiably Muslim and, whether they like it or not, find themselves defending their faith — as the three friends did on the subway last week.
Women wear it for reasons as varied and personal as the patterns woven into the head scarf fabric.
To some it is effortless but as essential as “putting on a pair of shoes,” as a hijab-clad woman walking along the waterfront said recently. Others do it unwillingly to appease families.
But most hijab-wearers, it seems, are moved by faith or motivated by political ideals. And some are grateful for the desexualizing effect of hijab and loose clothing. It makes them more untouchable.
Those who make the choice as adults say they are surprised at the response. “It blew me away how positive my co-workers and students were,” says Mississauga middle-school teacher Sophia Siddiqui, who put on hijab when she was 25. “We don’t hear enough about how accepting Canadians are.”
Three young women explain why they are hijabis.
It had not been her family’s tradition for women to cover their hair. Yet Ambreen Syed, daughter of immigrants from Bangalore, India, thought about hijab throughout high school.
“But I was scared,” recalls Syed, now 24. “How would people react? Could I live up to it? I wanted to love it.”
When she was 18 she enrolled in Ryerson University’s social work program — a course of study she chose and introduced to her parents, who weren’t aware of the profession — she felt renewed.
“Freedom!” she says. “It was a time for me. I really felt confident about myself and for the first time was making decisions for myself.”
That first semester, she signed up for the annual GTA Muslim convention, Reviving the Islamic Spirit. “It was at SkyDome — to me that’s the symbol of Toronto — and it was full of my own people and people from all over the world speaking different languages, and for the first time I thought, ‘Hijab is cool.’
“There were so many people doing it. What’s stopping me?
She had trial runs: three days at the convention, once to the grocery store and once on the TTC. She liked it. Hijab felt like an act of worship.
And when she read about families returning to the U.S. from the convention being interrogated and fingerprinted and having their cellphones confiscated, she found deeper layers of conviction. Hijab now spoke to her sense of social justice.
“I felt it was a form of racism. It was only Muslims they were checking. I decided hijab would be my form of resistance and freedom of expression. I wanted to be identified as a Muslim.”
There were also unexpected benefits. “I grew up in Scarborough and got hit on just waiting for the bus from when I was 14. By men, twice my age.” Now, there was a new distance.
And for her, a new experience of her beauty framed in a simple scarf. “That was surprising and pleasing. It wasn’t a struggle. It actually looked very nice.”
On the downside, some of her university friends stopped taking to her. One stopped sitting beside her in class.
Syed, now 24, lives in Redmond, Wash., with her husband and newborn baby boy. She recently helped start a small Islamic school.
She’s in Toronto for an extended family visit. “Hijab is part of my identity,” she says in her cousin’s condo in Don Mills. “It opened the door to self-discovery.”
Like other hijabis, she says, she’s weary of justifying the garment. “We need to stop explaining why we wear hijab and say, ‘It’s cool.’ ”
In high school Sahar Ammor, who lives in Oakville, admired the two or three other girls who wore hijab. They were brave, she thought.
On Jan. 1, 2009, when she was 17 and in Grade 11, she joined them. She picked the date because she was sure to be able to remember it.
What spurred her was a speech by actress Hanan Turk at the December 2008 Reviving the Islamic Spirit convention. Turk had started wearing hijab two years earlier.
“I was curious,” Sahar recalls. “She was very famous in Egypt and gorgeous and had it all — husband, kids and did all these movies. She didn’t make excuses for herself. It made me think about my situation. What’s stopping me from putting it on?”
She found another role model in her mother, Sanaa, who at 40 started wearing hijab.
The head scarf made Sahar more attentive to her faith, she says. “It reminds me that since I don’t live in a Muslim country, I have to keep my mind on my faith and that I’m representing Islam.”
Moroccan-born Sahar is an active teenager. Now 18, she goes to McMaster University, where she studies kinesiology. She also teaches piano, tutors French, snowboards, practises taekwando, plays soccer and works at an electronics store.
She wants to be a doctor.
Sahar says hijab is about her relationship with God. “I feel closer. We put it on to pray and when we wear it all the time, it keeps me aware he’s everywhere and all-knowing.”
She believes women are honoured in her religion. “Women are like diamonds . . . You can see them in the glass case, but you don’t get to touch every one.”
With, her heart-shaped face and dark eyes, Sahar gets lots of male attention. Hijab offers some protection. “I felt it would be a lot easier if I had it on and I wouldn’t have to explain to everyone why I can’t have a boyfriend.
“I always wondered what it was like to have a boyfriend, but I don’t think I ever would since I have seen what all my friends go through. I don’t want that.”
Instead, she attends all-girl events where she can wear party dresses — and release her long, dark hair.
Gehad El Sayed declared in Grade Six, when she was 11, that she was ready to wear hijab. Her parents worried she’d be harassed at school or change her mind later. Was she sure of her decision?
Yes, she said. Looking back, she says she may have been impressed by her hijab-wearing friends at Sunday school, where she was studying Arabic. But she also recalls feeling a spiritual tug. “For me at first, it made me feel closer to God.”
Now 22, she was born in Cairo and came to Canada when she was six. Her mother, trained as an engineer, wore hijab. Her grandmother started wearing the scarf only after her mother did.
Her family is religious. They pray five times a day, fast at Ramadan and attend Friday prayers.
When family discussions turn to moral quandaries they look to the Qur’an or Hadith for resolution. “It is the final ruling in our house,” El Sayed says.
A recent debate was on what you should do, as happened to a family member recently, when you come across a $50 bill at the train station — keep it or turn it in to lost and found?
She is a dignified yet approachable woman, studying to be a pharmacist at the University of Toronto. She has already had five marriage proposals, but is not ready to wed.
Wearing hijab reminds her of her obligations as a Muslim, she says. “Not only because other people will judge me, but because it makes me ask: am I doing the right thing?
“I feel (hijab) part of who I am,” she continues. “If I went out without it, I’d feel that something was off. I would feel like it’s not me.”
She says she has not had any hostile encounters on the street over her choice to cover her head.
Not her, but it is only moments later, while El Sayed is on her way to a class, that the brutishly angry blond woman condemns the three young hijabis in the subway car.
Sophia Siddiqi started wearing hijab at the age of 25. Her mother and younger sister do not wear it. Nor does her mother-in-law, who lives next door in a new Milton housing development.
At 30, Siddiqi is an extroverted mother of three — a 2½-year-old boy and 4-month-old twins of both genders — on maternity leave from Homelands Senior Public School in Mississauga, where she teaches Grade 8. Her husband, Yelman, is a chartered accountant.
“I was born and raised in this culture and grew up in the school system where I now teach,” Siddiqi says. “I am Muslim and Canadian.”
She was brought up in Mississauga. Her father told her she could be anything in life she wanted.
“Back then, in the 1970s, maybe we didn’t have enough confidence,” says her mother, Alia Khan, who is 50. “The hijab wasn’t so much known. The generation now is more confident. We were praying and fasting, but we tried very hard to fit in.”
A pilgrimage to Mecca in 2006 with her husband and in-laws was a turning point for Siddiqi. “We were away from superficial things. Our life for three weeks revolved around prayer and goodness. It was a beautiful thing, the most peaceful place in the world.”
It captured a way of thinking and living she wanted to continue at home. She went back to work for two weeks without the scarf, but was yearning for something more, a greater closeness to God, which she believed could be expressed by wearing a scarf.
“When I had it on I thought, ‘This is me. This is what I should be doing.’ But I was conscious of how people would react. At our school, there are 400 kids who knew me a certain way.”
But the response was affirming. Students, she recalls, looked at her in her new garment and said, “Oh, people who wear scarves are normal. They are just like us.”
While she says wearing hijab may lead to assumptions that she isn’t a native speaker or well-educated, overall she has not had a hostile experience wearing the head scarf.
“It blew me away how positive my co-workers and students were,” she says. “We don’t hear enough about how accepting Canadians are.”
Now her sister, who is starting university, is occasionally wearing hijab to school.
And her mother: “I have in mind that one day I will wear it.”
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