One summer day between eighth and ninth grade, I went to the mall with my sisters and their friends. Both of my sisters wear the hijab, a traditional Muslim headscarf. One of my sister’s friends asked me if I was going to start wearing it, and I said yes, when the summer was over and high school was starting. She agreed that it would be a good idea and rejoined my sister ahead of me.
Behind me, I heard my sister say, “Yeah, she’s not going to wear it.”
I wanted nothing more than to prove her wrong and show her that I was just as strong as she was. Her comment fueled my determination to wear the scarf. In my head, it was a win-win situation: I made my parents happy and defied my sister. I never took into account what I actually felt about wearing hijab.
Rebelling against something that is being forced upon me has always been easy. All I have to do is create a scene with my parents. I tell them that I am my own person and I can make decisions for myself. If they don’t agree, I find a way to do what I want, which usually involves lying and sneaking out.
But there are always those moments when I have a choice—those moments where my parents tell me I am my own person. They tell me that they raised me to know right from wrong and they will support whatever decision I make, even though they have preferences. But most of the time, the decisions aren’t about what’s right and what’s wrong. They are about who I want to be, and those are the hardest choices to make.
I had my first encounter with one of those choices when I was fourteen years old. It was the weekend of my sister’s engagement party, and I became a woman. This was an especially big deal for me because I’m Muslim, and when a girl starts her menstrual cycle for the first time, the hijab (a headscarf) is mandatory. In my community, you are not looked down upon for not wearing the hijab, but you are praised for wearing it.
All of my siblings attended private Islamic Schools for a portion of our elementary school education, so we were educated on at least the basic knowledge of what is religiously acceptable. I knew that hijab was mandatory and that my family wanted me to wear it, but I wasn’t ready to wear one just yet. I announced to the family that I would wear one when I started high school.
The end of the wedding festivities brought the beginning of high school, and the start of my wearing hijab. I was the only person at my high school to wear hijab, but it didn’t seem to matter. Instead of being victim to racism, as I expected, I encountered ignorance. Nobody seemed to know what Islam was and instead thought I was making a fashion statement, which was not uncommon at my high school.
Soon enough, news of my decision reached my community. Every time I went to MCA, my mosque, new people would congratulate me on my courageous choice. They would all say, “Mashallah. Your parents raised you right.” Each time someone complimented me, I found myself feeling uncomfortable instead of proud.
My freshman year came and went, and sophomore year brought about significant changes. All of my friends seemed to be having the time of their lives—getting their first boyfriends, dancing in the Homecoming and Battle of the Classes skits, and starting to get creative with clothing choices. I couldn’t do any of that. I was a hijabi, and I was therefore held up to a higher standard of modesty than they were.
I started to withdraw from everyone around me. My relationship with my parents went down the drain because I started looking at everything my parents said as a trap. I felt that they weren’t giving me any options, and were boxing me in and molding me into what they wanted me to be. Most of all, I felt my faith slipping. I had never been as religious as my family, but my faith decreased even more when I started wearing hijab. Even though people that wear hijab are supposed to represent modesty and devotion to God, I started to stray away from my religious duties. I stopped praying, reading in the holy book the Qur’an, and I started to question everything I learned in Islamic school. The hijab was bringing me further from God instead of closer to Him.
I felt an overflow of emotion and I finally decided to write it all down. The words came out like word vomit. I started writing about feeling hypocritical because I put on the façade of being religious by wearing the hijab, but on the inside I was a worse Muslim than many that didn’t wear it. I decided to talk to my mom about it because she was the one who would understand the most, being the only woman in our family to not wear a hijab.
I initially decided to wait until the end of the year to talk to my mom, but with mother’s intuition, she knew something was wrong and questioned me about it. Tears and words came pouring out. Instead of yelling at me, she took me into her arms and told me that it was okay. She said that she always knew I had doubts and all she wanted was for me to be happy. She added that the entire family shared her views and would accept my choice to stop wearing hijab.
She was right. With her help, I told each family member. Even though they had questions, they were ultimately accepting. I decided that the first day I would leave the house without a hijab would be the last day of school—also the last day of high school. I would be joining the ACCEL Middle College program at the local junior college that fall: a fresh start in a new place where nobody knew about my past.
The morning of that last day of school, my best friends came to pick me up. They held my hand as I walked on to campus, shaking with both excitement and nerves. When I was saying good-bye to all of my friends, they had to do a double take to recognize me. I felt like a celebrity with cameras flashing all around me. Most people were just shocked that I was showing my hair and said that I looked beautiful. But a few of my close friends came up to me, gave me a hug, and told me that they were proud of me.
Life after taking the hijab off has been completely different. There are negative aspects—like I gradually became more comfortable with showing a little bit more skin in public. I am more comfortable using profanity. I am also more comfortable getting a little bit closer to boys. I’m not happy with the changes, but I trust myself to know where the line is.
The positives outweigh the negatives for me. I no longer feel that people look at me and see a lie. I am more able to practice the religion in the way I want to practice it, and not the way I am expected to practice it. I’m generally comfortable with who I am, even though there are always improvements to be made. My relationship with my family has also vastly improved because I now realize how willing they are to listen.
The biggest lesson I learned through this experience is to make decisions for myself, not for my family. Even though I love them, sometimes what they want is not what I want, and it’s important to recognize that fact instead of mold my own thoughts into theirs. Being yourself takes more courage than being what other people want you to be because it involves actually thinking for yourself, which is especially scary for a teenager. But however scary that is, it’s necessary to be an individual and an adult.
-Samah Pirzada
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