"Fitting In"

Why does anyone have to "fit in"? Aren't we, as a culture, striving to make a name for ourselves as individuals?

But beyond that even if we are not, why should I or anyone else attempt to fit into the tiny little box everyone else tries to put us in?

Recently my attention was brought to a post by Peaceful Muslimah in which she writes:

"I recently came across a discussion by an American muslimah living in the US lamenting her “homesickness” for an Arab country she visited. Another Muslimah
from that country questioned whether “homesickness” was the correct word/concept. This is just one particular thread but I have read many similar ones over the last year that express similar ideas. Many times Western Muslims glamorize the Arab world as a place where “real” Islam is practiced and often confuse Arab culture with Islamic mandates. I’ve written about this before with regard to converts taking Arab names, wearing Arab clothes and eating only Arab foods. I thought it might be interesting to share my perspective on the issue of Arabophilia."

Of course this is a reference to my post on missing Egypt.

Now I'm not even really upset and when I left a comment it was interpreted as being defensive, but honestly my only real issue with it is that she seems to have stuffed me into the same box as so many others who do legitimately romanticize the Middle East.

However I'm not one of them. I'm not going to Egypt to "get closer to God" or "become Arab" or even "find Islam."

I found Islam, and a more truer form at that, here in the US and I am content with it.

I'm content with who I am, I love to learn other cultures and I am certainly looking forward to getting to know Egyptian culture better but not with the intention of transforming myself into an Egyptian.

I am not obsessed with other, or otherness except in the form of discovering what the "other" believes and thinks and how they view the world. It's called discourse and its my absolute favorite thing in the world.

Today I was reading Artemisia Rants and I came across what I find to be the most brilliantly explained example of how I, myself, view the world and its "other" inhabitants (except in Artemisia's words):

". . . I can see past the surface appeal of this world of ‘otherness’ however, and I have never suggested that it is ‘better’! What interests me is the point where faith and culture meet. I am a strange creature in that I don’t really
trust anything. Only Allah. I can happily love people without trusting, I can
enjoy a culture without trusting, I can move between ideas without trusting.
This tasting of experiences from everwhre is interpreted as superficial, “not
knowing what I want”, but for me, the world is superficial. There are so many
ways of understanding everything. I draw the line at oppression and abuse that
can be quantified. This is where I will stand and judge.

Usually people want to rescue me from my “confusion”, situate me within a definite point of view. But they fail to recognize that I don’t want to be situated anywhere that is closed. My openness is what allows me to float. And I hope to move towards
Allah. I see though that at the moment I am drifting. I don’t need solidity in
my world view, but I need method."

I am not obsessed with "exotica," but I am obsessed with existentialism and I certainly refuse to be fit into a box or conform myself to wear the labels others would like to give me.

I have little to no desire to "fit in."

I need to what?

So alhumdulillah I've gotten so much done this morning, I took a half day off from work and went to the chiropractor- my back was so tight it barely moved- and then I went to the DMV to renew my license and to hopefully get a new passport. InshAllah I'll be 25 next month (egads!) and my license expires, I wish I could keep my picture from when I turned 21 (Hottie McSteam) but alas I could not, nor would I want to since me now= hijab and me then= none.

I renewed a month early because I wanted to, at the same time, apply for a new passport because I look very little like I did when I was 18 and took the picture, and also again because of the hijab.

And my hijab is the reason I left the DMV without a new passport but with a brand new chip on my shoulder. Apparently if I would like to keep my headscarf on in the picture for my passport I must write a sweet little letter to the passport authorities on why I'm wearing it.

Excuse me?

If an Indian woman comes in with a bindi in the middle of her forehead and a massively huge gold nose ring, do you ask her to write a letter? If a punk rocker comes in with bright green hair and 15 facial piercings, is she asked to remove them? Or write a letter stating her anarchist belief system?

What the #&^$ does it have to do with you OR the passport authorities OR the US government whether I wear this headscarf for religious or purely fashionable reasons?

What do they expect me to write?

Dear US Government,

I wear this scarf around my head because I'm a terroristic extremist who will stop at nothing to see the pigs of the kuffar goverment fall to their knees.

Sincerely,
Me

PS- I know where Osama is.

No.

I am an American who was born in a country where state should be completely separated from religion, and where my choice to cover my head DEALS DIRECTLY WITH ME AND MY PERSONAL CHOICE.

If I want to shave my head and tattoo it completely, do I have to write a letter in with my passport stating why?

Do Menonite or Amish women have the same problem?

Or is this hand-written permission from me for them to delay my passport process and mark me, once and for all in their big book of no-no, a danger to my society?

F**K THAT.

I walked out with my old passport, which is current through 2011, and left that idea behind.

And I wonder why it is that America is looking less and less American each day.

To Hijab or To Not Hijab

This is such a sensitive issue that I'm sure I'll get a flutter of angry comments regarding it, but I would like to preface it by stating that I am NOT God (in case anyone was confused) and I can NOT judge nor will I willingly judge anyone. There are pious women who do not cover, and completely black-hearted women who do. I have met both. If I offend you, this was not my intention. And if I offend you deeply, you might want to explore why the subject is so sensitive to you. I welcome any and all comments or discussions that this might bring up because I will attempt to outline my opinion while keeping both sides represented.


I am a hijabi. Does this make me a saint? Certainly not. Does this make me better than you? No, I would never be so vain as to ever consider it. I have my inconsistencies and my own sins and the fact that I cover my body and my hair does not automatically make me the best Muslim out of a group.

But every Muslimah who does not cover is submitted to a silent discrimination from the Ummah. It is assumed that they lack deen (faith) and are not good people. This is often ungrounded and unfair.

Or there are times when they actually suffer discrimination against the scarf from their families or their culture. I met one such sister whose husband refuses to allow her to cover although it pains her to not submit to what she considers the will of God. Or another Turkish sister I knew whose mother threatened to turn her out of their house if she took the hijab.

While I believe that every sister has her personal reasons for covering or not for covering, I can say that I, for one, don't agree with not wearing it.

Why?

Because its mandated by God. Simply.

Now, there are definite obstacles that many of us face. Like the sister whose husband doesn't allow it; I would absolutely not tell her to leave her husband in order to wear hijab. Why cover one bad by instigating another? Or the sister from Turkey who would have no place to live, and on her own with two small boys it would be a miserable life, what should she do?

Surely hijab is obligatory yes, but only God can judge their situations, and some are terrible situations, and then make the final call.

But the other sisters who are not in situations like these, I truly cannot understand what their motivation for unveiling is. What is in this world that can drive them to ignore something written in the Quran?

I am not saying that they are less pious for it, I'm just striving to understand why they make that decision.

And I have to be honest that, with the exception of a few convert friends- who deal with family issues that keep them from wearing the hijab- and a few sisters I know who are in similar situations to the two I mentioned above, most of the women that I know who do not veil do not pray as well or adhere to many other pillars of Islam.

While in Egypt, where wearing the hijab is as cultural as it is religious, I found many women who covered but did, said, and believed things that made my hair curl. I was sexually hit on by a woman who confessed that she ached to remove it but couldn't because her family wouldn't allow it.

But here in the US I have found that it is a different story. Many of those women, who are forced into hijab by society back home, take it off here and leave a religion they didn't believe to begin with behind in the process. While myself, and many other women, fight OUR society in this country to be able to wear it.

I have faced obstacle after obstacle. I have been shunned for it. I have lived penniless because of it. But, except for a miserable five week period, I could not bear the thought of removing it.

I'm not saying it makes me a saint, but I am using myself as an example. I have dealt with family shunning me, I have been without a job, I have been harassed, I have faced discrimination, but most of all I have taken pride in following my religion and, for me, wearing hijab was the easiest commandment to fulfill, second only to the commandment to believe that there is no God but God.

I am not saying that it is ok to judge someone's piety by the hijab because obviously this is both faulty logic and obviously not our place to do so. But I can honestly stand up and wonder what exactly is the reason that some chose not to.

Please, enlighten me. I am not here to judge, but to understand.

If you do not wear the hijab, why?

Because to me it seems like both the hardest and yet still the simplest decision to make.

I want to know, and I want to understand.

Three years and all my life

Its coming up on three years of being Muslim for me, only three years. See, I feel like its been my entire life already, like I was never anything else but Muslim. How is this that in three years I've lived one whole lifetime?

Maybe it was because I was half-Muslim for about 4 months before I took the plunge.

Maybe it is because the sleeping soul inside of me was Muslim long before I ever existed.

Maybe its because I really was recreated and born again the moment I took my shehada.

I don't know, but to me its been a lot longer than 3 years as a Muslim.

Its been my whole life.


* * * *


I don't remember the exact date I took my shehada, I think this is better and it may have been subconsciously intentional to not mark the day. I feel like to have marked it would mean I would have had to celebrate it every year that it came around. Like a birthay, I guess, which it is in its own right. But I don't think it is the day which is remarkable, but the event instead that changed my life.

As I said above, I playacted at being Muslim for about 4 months before I actually converted. It was like I knew I was, but my heart hadn't yet told my brain. I had never really been in denial before then so I didn't realize that while I was putting on hijab for an Islamic History class at the U I was really being who I was, and everything else was just an act.

I don't know how to explain it, its a singular insanity that is all my own.

I would be at halaqas in abaya and khimar and when other sisters asked me, "So, how long have you been Muslim?"

I would pause for a second and then answer quite matter of factly, "Well, actually I'm not."

What a strange creature I must have seemed.

And when that moment finally came where I realized that my thinking had changed from "if I ever became Muslim..." to "when I become Muslim..." it hit me like a bucket full of cold water. I probably even made a funny face.

I had denied it while living it for far too long.

I was reborn in my life the moment I took shehada. Wiped clean like a slate pockmarked with ground-in chalk. I swear I even felt like I sparkled from the inside. And thats when the real change began.

I made baby steps, I stumbled a lot, I never fell down but I emerged with the same scars an adolescent would carry on her knees. Bruised but still striving to become a fully-fledged adult. I even carried my Muslimness like the awkward limbs of a post-pubescent, unsure and wobbly, and not exactly comfortable inside her skin.

I grew and I rebelled, and I hit the point where it was fight or flight. I took off my hijab and tested the strength of my convictions, and in the end the only person I could rebel against was myself.

I put the hijab back on unhappy with the absence of what truly defined 'me' and I knew at that moment that there was nothing on earth that could make me return to what I had been. Not even the empty promises of a spit-shined dunya could tempt me away from the beauty of my religion.

And the instant I stepped out of my door and faced the world with my hijab again, the stares of my uni mates who had seen me with and then seen me without and then saw me again with, I grew up in my Islam. Like a graduation, I had passed.

I married my soulmate, possibly the only man who can tell me what to do and still have me love him for it. My patient teacher, my lover, my best friend, and my confidante.

With him I fulfilled the final half of my deen.

And in three years I find myself an adult in my Islam, having lived an entire life in so short a time.

So pardon me if, when asked, I reply that I have been Muslim my whole life.

Because in a sense, I truly have.

Making Nice With the Joneses

I'm getting a little bit tired of this situation with my hijab. Not with wearing the hijab, but with other people having a problem with me wearing the hijab.

As my grandmother once informed me, I am pushing my beliefs onto other people by covering my own head.

Seriously, how does that work exactly?

Three separate incidences this past weekend:

On Friday after work I went over to meet my mom and my aunt, who had gone shopping that morning, for lunch. Once my aunt realized I would be coming with them, and that I would of course be wearing my hijab, she found that she had an urgent matter she needed to attend to instead. My aunt loves me, I have no doubt about this, but she would prefer to never spend time with me rather than overcome her own narrow-mindedness.

On Saturday my father's side of the family threw a birthday lunch for my great-grandmother, but I wasn't invited. I'm still blood the last time I checked, but I guess when I converted my genes did too.

And the third incident was just yesterday when I went over to my grandmother's house for the Superbowl party. I had assumed it was a family-only party but I was anxiously informed by my grandmother that she had invited the next door neighbors as well. I'm fairly certain these were the neighbors she hates because they're bigoted and stuck-up and treat many of the people in the neighborhood badly. But she invited them, and on top of that she was so worried about what they would think that she demanded that I don't go downstairs with my hijab.

"You know, they're just so against this." (add in thick Minnesota accent as you please)

Well no actually, I didn't know that, but thats beside the point. I don't care what they think about it because I don't know or like them. I offered to leave and go home, an option I would have gladly taken her up on at that moment, but she demurred and I stayed, hijab and all.

If I'm not willing to take off my hijab to spend time with my aunt, who I actually love, I'm certainly not going to do it for some stuck-up neighbors that I'm not even fond of.

I'm getting sick of this, I'm covering my own head so GET OVER IT.

What kind of people get stuck on someone dressing modestly but are quite alright with people walking the streets and showing up on TV half dressed? What kind of people complain about teen-pregnancies and the hyper-sexualization of the world today, but can't get over a simple scarf?

Where do your morals lay?

I know where mine do, and its not in making nice with the snobby Joneses.

Sorry.