On removing an item of clothing: Part II

This is the second part of a series of posts about my experience before and after I stopped wearing a headscarf. Read the first part here.

About five months ago, I was flying from LA to Detroit and I experienced something I thought I had lost forever. I had resigned myself to never feeling like just another person that deserves to be respected and treated as such at an airport ever again. As I walked up to the security check point ... are you ready for this? ... they let me walk right through!

Forget marching for human rights and respecting civil liberties. Forget demands to repeal the Patriot Act. It's really quite simple. All you have to do if you appear to be obviously Muslim is well ... stop being obviously Muslim duh. Oh wait, did I mention this was my first time flying domestically in the US after I had stopped wearing my head scarf? Minor detail. Now I guess if I want this courtesy extended to me when I fly internationally I should white-out the "Islamic Republic" part on the front of my passport. And probably "Pakistan" too. Maybe if all they can see is "of" my boarding pass won't print out with "SS (special security)on it and I will slip through undetected.

Random check my ass. I mean I think a lot of Muslims/Muslim-looking/folks of color have figured out by now that nothing is random when it comes to Homeland Security. But sometimes, walking around Los Angeles without a head scarf, I feel like a social experiment testing out my perceptions of racialized Muslim identity, as my formerly head scarf(ed) self observes from the outside. Note made by former head scarf(ed)self: Homeland Security are indeed m'fuckas.

On a less sarcastic note though, I have had a bit of a time dealing with the drastic difference in how people racialize me and interact with me. Race and processes of racialization in US society are really unlike anywhere else. I remember getting my freshman class reading Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria in the mail the summer before I was about to start school in Southern California and I re-call very little of what I read because I din't really understand what was going on. Not to minimize ethnic/religious/color-based schism in Karachi, Pakistan but my understanding even a fraction of the full force of history and present of race-relation in the US only became possible for me by living as a racialized body in the US.

Living in post-9/11 USofA, my head scarf was the overwhelming indicator of my race. Yeah yeah I know Islam is a religion not a race, but remember that race is a social construct, hence we can even talk about racialization. There is a common narrative of a uniform terrorism loving, freedom hating Muslim group whereby perception of membership in said group is influenced by physical characteristics like brown skin, Arab/South-asian "features", beards, headscarves, accents etc etc Hence, use of the word race.

Anyway, in the last four years, perceptions of my Muslim-ness have been almost the entirety of my racialization. Of course I can't deny the intersectionality of my South-Asian heritage, my immigration status, gender et al. but I was always perceived as a Muslim woman first. So while my South-Asian friends were asked if they spoke "Indian" I was always asked if I spoke "Arabic" and once in a while "Islamic." I never knew what it felt like to be randomly approached by men wondering if I was "promised" to someone. I was confronted about why I was wearing that thing on my head, while looking around for that guy I must be walking three steps behind (I will talk about sexualization in more detail in the next part).

Within a matter of days though, I went from being perceived as a Muslim woman to an ambiguously ethnic, sometimes Latina sometimes Iranian, sometimes south-asian young girl (yeah I look a lot younger apparently). But that is not how I see myself. If I thought not wearing a headscarf would solve the problem of people not seeing me first, hah! I am always comparing how people react to me now, wondering if they would be running in the other direction or taking me as seriously or more seriously if it was me 8 months ago. If I was exactly the same person plus an additional item of clothing. One of my boo's pointed out that this not necessarily a healthy way to go through life. And I agree. But it is hard to get beyond the insecurity that comes from being reduced to one aspect of your identity for so long. I think that is why I am still most comfortable around friends and people that I knew before I graduated school. That doubt is not there as much. And it get's so much more fun when you throw in more-than-friendly queer interactions into the mix. Hang around for the next post, ill get around to writing about it eventually I swear.

On removing an item of clothing: Part I

This is the first part of a series of posts about my experience before and after I stopped wearing a headscarf. This is a primer to the series if you will.

I wore a hijab of sorts (a head scarf to be precise) from the day I turned 12 till the day I graduated from college, about 8 odd months ago. I say hijab of sorts because I want to differentiate between the concept of Hijab that numerous Muslim woman all over the world adopt as part of their religious spirituality. It takes different forms, as varied as the people that identify with the religion of Islam. My headscarf never really was about that. Not because it did not conform to a how people (Muslim and Non-Muslim) envision a Muslim woman’s hijab should look like. My sister wears her headscarf in a similar style and it is definitely a part of her religious spirituality. I wore it initially because it was expected of me by my family. Not forced but expected, like so many people everywhere take on roles just because that’s the way it is. I never thought to question that expectation, despite the fact that hijab wearing women were a minority in Karachi, Pakistan (at least when I grew up). No one in my extended family even wore a hijab for that matter, yet it was nothing out of the ordinary for me. I had bigger things to deal with, like fighting off the impending ban on my playing cricket in the street with the mohallay kai larkay (the neighborhood dudes).

Once I started entering the dreaded adolescence age (fifteen-ish to be exact), I now see that my hijab became a refuge for (not)dealing with my sexuality (hindsight is 20/20 huh?). Guys, and crushes and secretly talking to guys on the phone were the topic of every conversation. I din’t have any inclination to participate and my refusal to participate never raised any eyebrows because you know, I was “religious.” And I definitely believed it myself, despite knowing I wasn’t all that devout when it came to other things. I spent the first twenty one years (and one day but who’s counting) of my life (two in college faaar away from the parental’s) without ever having any kind of physically intimate interaction with anyone (man or woman). And I never questioned why that was, because if I would have the answer would have been as clear as a non-polluted day.

Back in those adolescent days, wearing the hijab and perceptions about me wearing one also gently directed me down two very important paths. People around me, family members, friends, teachers etc, covertly and sometimes overtly let me know that women wearing a hijab were doomed to one destination: the 18th century. Hijab wearing women don’t go abroad to study. They don’t play sports. They don’t study science. They get married and raise good Muslim children by the age of twenty. And mind you I grew up in a Muslim country, and most of these people share nothing in common with your stereo- typical Pakistani religious conservative other than a citizenship. Muslims that proudly claim the title of silent moderate majority while believing and perpetuating that shit need to be called on it just as much as orientalist non-Muslim’s. Back to the point though, for better or for worse, I am a stubborn ass. Because of this much needed motivation, here I sit today. A futbol playing, medicinal drug synthesizing, alone living, woman loving, Paki girl in LosScandalous, blogging about taking off my headscarf (the irony is not lost on me).

There was no Eureka moment, I think I gradually just realized that I din’t want to wear the head scarf anymore. Despite what my personal statement for law schools says, taking courses on Gender and Islam and learning how to critically question Islamic traditions wasn’t really the turning point. It definitely helped in easing my mother into the decision and convincing her I wouldn’t necessarily burn in hell (or trying to at least). I just slowly din’t see a need to continue fulfilling an expectation, especially letting that be the reason for something that should come from a deeper place. Maybe figuring out I was gay and “living a gay lifestyle” (rolls eyes) released one of the safety nets wearing a hijab had offered me. Maybe I just reached a point were I was tired of people seeing my headscarf first, and me later. And I would be lying if I denied that it is easier to stop wearing the headscarf than continuously challenging the stereotypes that people associate with it.

I took me two years to do it. Two years of trying to talk to my family, reaching a point where I was 90% sure my mother would not actually disown me (she did for two weeks though). Two years of worrying about playing into the oppressed-muslim-woman-saved-by-the-west narrative. Two years of trying out bandanas, hoodies, head wraps and anything else I could get to stay on my head. I finally took the comprised way out which was to wait till I graduated from my white sub-urban campus so I din’t have to deal with the stares and the questions and all that nonsense.

I stopped wearing my headscarf the day after I graduated. And if I ever thought that would be the end of it, the experience of the last eleven years has had something else in store for me. How complicated can it be to stop wearing one item of clothing? When that item has been assigned a history and a present and a symbolism that has and can define, control and liberate a whole religion worth of women, I guess the answer is very.

Coming up: Shifts in my racialized and sexualized interactions in Los Angeles.