HIJAAB

Sister Zeba Khan   

Islam is a religion that is flexible in many walks of life and quite easy to implement in daily practices. For instance, Islam allows individual tastes and expression through dress. There are no prohibitions for women’s dress on color, cloth, or style so long as they fit basic requirements. Those requirements are: 

• That the body is covered in a cloth that isn’t see-through and won’t expose it when standing in the light. 
  
  
• That the clothes are not tight or figure-revealing. 
  
  
• That the clothes do not imitate the religious or national dress of people who aren’t Muslim. Islam is against wanna-be-ism in its followers. 
  
  
• That they aren’t a proud display of glamour or wealth. 
  
  
• That they cover the body even when the wearer is walking or bending over. 
  
  
• That the clothes cover everything but hands, face and feet. That includes the neck and ankles, and additionally the drawing of the scarf over the breast. 
  
  
• That they aren’t men’s clothes. 
  

Personally, I’ve never met a Muslim woman who wrapped her scarf quite like anyone else did. There are always minor differences, individual touches applied in the folding, the draping, or the styling. It takes a trained eye to recognize and appreciate these touches, so don’t be surprised if you have no idea what I’m talking about. 

I first took up Hijaab in America of all places, a country not famous for highly civilized notions such as modesty and dignity. Being a student in a multi-ethnic school in US, my wearing a scarf would not normally have attracted any attention. But, I was a novelty. For two years I was ‘normal’ and most people had no idea I was Muslim, let alone half-Pakistani. My outward appearance gave no indication of my faith, I couldn’t be told apart from any of the hundreds of white American Christians I studied with. For all public appearances, I was a white American, and when I started practicing Hijaab, it was a shock to those around me. Teachers and peers who noticed my transition and who were well-enough acquainted with the ‘normal me’ asked the ‘fundamentalist me’ what was going on. Fundamentalist me didn’t quite know what was going on either, but I started looking for answers to why Islam was big on modesty. The more people asked me, the more I was forced to look. The more I looked, the more beauty and logic I found in Islam. How I dressed had a great impact on my faith, surprisingly not vice-versa.

Before I actually researched the Islamic mandate for Hijaab, I was thoroughly brainwashed with the idea that modesty was oppression and man’s attempt to safe-guard his possessions, his women, from those who would seek to steal them. My idea was just slightly off: Hijaab is woman’s attempt to safeguard her sexuality against those who would seek to exploit it, visually or physically, or to misuse its power. It’s not because woman is weak, it’s because society is weak. Think about it, everyone knows that sexuality has power. Why else do you think sex-appeal is so successful in advertising? Sex appeal is frequently abused in all levels of society in much of so-called ‘modern’ civilization. Advertisers use a woman showering on TV to sell soap, to smile and wink and make us want to buy a certain brand of biscuit. In Western society, even advertising geared towards children is tainted with dancing girls and exposed skin, because the influential powers of sex appeal work on people of all ages.

One common misunder-standing that people have is that Scarifies are conceited and place excess worth on their looks. So much so that they cover it all up because no one is worthy of seeing it. In actuality, it’s Scarifies who are normal and non-Scarifies who lack self-esteem, who lack appreciation enough to guard their own beauty, to prevent it from being misused and overemphasized as their only quality that actually matters. It’s not that Scarifies are conceited, it’s just that everyone else has low self-worth.

Imagine being so scared of rejection that you refuse to show your real face in public, you cannot leave your house without painting on a fake one. Imagine being so scared of having your brain and personality being discovered as substandard that you squash yourself into artificial and projected garments that gives your figures extra oomph just so that the attention is painfully drawn away from your heart. Imagine feeling so worthless as a human that you have to try to sell yourself to the world, because unless you put on a show, they might not buy. I’m not saying that women who wear makeup and revealing clothes are substandard. I’m just saying that they think they are. A make-up wearing, push-up garments sporting woman who reads this will most likely be insulted that I tell her she has no self-worth, especially since she thinks she’s drop-dead gorgeous. The problem is, she only thinks she’s gorgeous when’s she’s made up, smashed in, or pushed out. Take it all away and this same woman refuses to leave the house. If that’s not low self-worth then I must not know what it is.

Now clear your mind, and imagine being so self-assured that you can wear a tent (a real two-poled, staked-out affair in olive drab) every day and know that people will look beyond the canvas and into your heart and mind to determine your worth. Imagine being so confident in who you are that you can come to work in a large barrel with eye-holes cut out, and your employers will still praise your work and men will still sheepishly ask for your hand in marriage with ever having seen into your barrel, without you ever putting on a show to sell yourself. The barrel and tent theory isn’t a joke, all you have to do is substitute the barrel and the tent for modest clothing and a Shara’i Hijaab.

There are two ways a woman can deal with her appearance. The first is to let herself be ruled by it, and the second way it to let the woman rule it. In the first instance, where the woman is ruled by her appearance, she cuts her sleep short for more time in the morning to put her makeup on before she goes to work. She purposely turns her skin cells cancerous for a ‘healthy’ looking tan, and lets her mental health be constantly under siege with questions about her self-worth and the stress of competing with other women. It’s no wonder that thousands of women in the West are bulimic or anorexic, or just obsessed about their looks. Does this make my figure look pretty? Oh no, my lips are too pale! Too pale for what? Allah makes no mistakes. I have to lose ten pounds, or else! Or else the men who stare recreationally at me will be grossed out and then no one will think I’m pretty! Then how will I get married? This business suit has to fit just right. Otherwise I won’t be in good standing at the office. Ugly emplo
yees might scare the customers away…….

In the second instance, where the woman rules her appearance, she puts her priorities in order and chooses much-needed sleep over the forty-five minutes it takes to get dolled-up in the morning. She decides not to put herself at risk for cancer by bleaching or tanning her skin, she doesn’t give herself anemia or anorexia trying to be visually pleasing to the thousands of men who see her every day and don’t give a damn (unless she happens to be bending over at time to time to give them a good show...which she isn’t). She wakes up one hour before work, total, and washes her face, gets dressed, eats breakfast and leaves. She eats to maintain her well-being, and has a healthy attitude towards food and also towards herself as an intelligent human. She knows that she has a right to be thought of as wonderful no matter what she looks like on the outside, and she’s in conscious rebellion against the eye-candy culture of the US and other ‘modern’ civilizations.

In a civilized culture such as Islam, the façade of unnatural beauty is seen as a lie, and natural beauty is seen as a private affair. Emphasis is placed, not on external beauty, but instead on internal beauty, of which all women have equal potential. (All men are created equal, why not, therefore, all women?) Where unnatural beauty is caked on, rubbed in, or drawn on, natural beauty is cultured by nobility of character, mercy, honesty, compassion, intelligence and other such Islamically recommended traits in Muslims of both genders.

Islam switches the gauge of woman’s worth from outer beauty to inner beauty and brains. How? Since sexuality is no longer a public affair, the yard stick has to be taped next to personality and intelligence instead. Anyone who doubts this has only to try and rate the anatomy of a bunch of Scarifies against each other on a scale of one to ten. It’s impossible. You can’t judge their physical attributes when you can’t even see them. A woman who uses Hijaab allows herself to be judged only by who she is, what she says and does, how she interacts, and not on what was allotted to her physically.

On the other hand, women who let their beauty and anatomy hang in the breeze can be easily compared, scrutinized, dissected and categorized. A ‘beautiful’ woman (with make-up, inadequate clothing, and mental complexes involving her self-worth) is a good woman regardless of whether she is a malicious gossip or a tyrant in her own home. An ‘ugly’ woman (with no makeup, modest clothing, realistic attitude about the impermanence and irrelevance of beauty) is a bad woman, no matter how kind, how intelligent, how compassionate she is. 

In all this, a ‘beautiful’ woman feels as though she somehow had a hand in her creation, is proud of her looks, acts as though her good features are the direct results of her hard work somehow, and not at all to a combination of genes completely outside of her sphere of influence. One wonders; what’s the point of turning yourself into a walking aphrodisiac to begin with? Why start the mower if you’re not going to cut the grass with every man on the street? It certainly doesn’t contribute to a woman’s dignity! If a woman wants her worth to be judged by internal merits, then she won’t over-shadow them with a display of flesh that historically, biologically, and inevita-bly arouses lust, and not respect. 

Islam frees women from being every man’s eye-candy, and clearly states that her appearance and sexuality are not public domain. They are a privilege bestowed upon only those who were worthy, and worthiness is determined by whether or not one is fit to spend a life-time with you. (That means your soul mate-your husband) The only other people who can see it would be those who were unaffected by it, like your brothers, father, blood-uncles, grand-father, and other women, lesbians obviously not included. 

Islam has shown itself to be absolutely the most uplifting religion for women. Given the right to vote, right to own, right to inherit, right to speak, right to be judged on internal factors. Islam rescues woman kind from being overshadowed by her sexuality and gives a woman back her humanity.

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