An audio version of this post can be found here.
My essay closes the 2021 anthology Cut From the Same Cloth (ed. Sabeena Akhtar, Unbound). In it, I mention going to a conference at SOAS (some of you will already be worried about what’s coming next). I think it was about publishing in the Arab world. There was a panel of four writers from Arabic speaking countries. During the Q&A, I asked the panel a question about whether the Quran would ever be looked at as the Bible is, as an important inspiration for literature that novelists and poets can engage with freely. I was a student at the time and my heart was hammering in my chest. One of the panellists, a novelist, said he would answer my question. He paused to stare at me. And then he went off. He was livid. His eyes never left mine as he ranted that the problem was that people (by which he meant the religious masses) only read the Quran and that this was killing reading culture in the Arab speaking countries. He had misinterpreted my question and thought I was suggesting that the Quran was the only text worth reading.
My skin prickled with shame and embarrassment. No one wanted to look at me. The Q&A finished pretty soon after. A lecturer of mine, Joe Farag who specialises in the Palestinian short story, happened to be in the audience. He approached me and said, kindly and somewhat apologetically, that he wished that the author had understood my question. Right. The man hadn’t understood because all he could see was my hijab. This man was of a Muslim background. He had been surrounded by Muslims growing up. But still he couldn’t hear me at all.
I could stop writing here. Most decent people would be more or less supportive of the idea that this wasn’t very nice and that racists do the racism and that is bad. But a lot of us are unwilling to talk about how a lot of Muslims have internalised Islamophobia. I discuss this in the anthology but bring it up here too because it illustrates a central theme in the anthology: never knowing when you’ll be threatened or attacked, never feeling safe. Sadly, I’m used to this. I have many stories of showing up to Muslim-centred events (mostly art ones which are particularly pernicious) where the facilitators or speakers are openly hostile towards Muslims and Islam.
Hostility from unlikely sources is a theme, both while crowdfunding the collection and within the anthology itself. Many of the contributors received lukewarm responses to the premise of the anthology. This isn’t an anthology about Muslim women but about Muslim women with experience wearing the hijab. The pushback was surprising because, let’s be real, you’re treated differently when you wear the hijab. Point blank. Full stop. If you’re racially othered in your society, you experience racism. Wearing the hijab complicates your racial identity and it changes how people deal with you. People scream at you in conferences. People project their beliefs on you. People quietly exclude you. And when I say “people” I don’t just mean white people, or non-Muslims, I mean everyone, including Muslims. That’s the uncomfortable truth.
I should be clear that a lot of my non-hijabi friends, Muslim and non-Muslim, supported the anthology. It opened up space for conversation about wearing the hijab, particularly what it means to show up visibly religious in self-proclaimed secular spaces. Understandably, because this is about religious practice, you can be judged for not wearing the hijab in our communities. This is horrible. No one should be judged for what they do or do not do in relation to their spiritual life. We are all equally Muslim even if our experiences and choices differ. Some of us choose to wear the hijab. Some of us choose not to. It is normal and healthy to differ, to have some conflict. Some of us, unfortunately, are forced to by a country or by an abusive family and this too absolutely needs to be part of the conversation.
But we also have to make room for what happens when a person decides to wear the hijab. The hijab changes how wider society deals with you because it represents far more than a personal religious choice. The screaming man at the conference was angry because he desperately wanted to distance himself from what I represented to him: the primitive, the uncivilised, the illiterate and, above all, the past. He was The Writer Invited To The Conference, an elite intellectual who had, I suppose, made it. He was on a panel in SOAS. I can almost understand his horror.
Screaming strangers at conferences aside, I have a lot of personal sadness attached to this issue. I’ve had people (Muslims) really close to me admit to being ashamed of being seen with me, or feeling uncomfortable, because of how people treat them when I’m with them. And though I understand that this is more about their own insecurities, it still really, really hurts. I’ve had toxic friends who benefited from my being othered, with non-Muslims praising their being a “good” Muslim and my being a “bad” Muslim. And as much as I’m tempted to joke about how we’ve got to hand it to white supremacy, it’s rubbish seeing people in your life bend to its will.
“Lack of support” doesn’t really cover it. A wider media that constantly dehumanises us, angry men at conferences, writers who can’t imagine us as writers, and close friends projecting their issues with the hijab, it’s probably understandable that I have some issues with the hijab myself. Sometimes I struggle to imagine my own depths outside of other people’s perceptions. Sometimes I feel like I spend hours or days looking outwards in, struggling through the othering.
Cut From the Same Cloth contains many other anecdotes and stories relating to what it’s like to be Muslim in the UK, so do check it out if this interested you.