Getting Over the Hump

What I've learned from perusing hijab blogs and tutorials is that I don't learn much from them, most of it is common sense, but the girls are cute and working out their hijab issues in their own ways, and I know they are like-minded folk in that their way of sharing their adventures and frustrations with life in general is to write about it on the inter-web. The last one I found plays the Willow Smith refrain "I whip my hair back and forth" as she demonstrates how to assemble the khaleeji (of the gulf states) style, which involves pinning giant flower poofs under the hijab to create mass volume. This is something of a controversy in the hijabosphere, owing to a hadith from the Prophet peace be upon him that "There will be in the last of my ummah, scantily dressed women, the hair on the top of their heads like a camel’s hump. Curse them, for verily they are cursed." [At-Tabarani and Sahih Muslim] At the least it has led to a mini-disclaimer in the hijab tutorials, whenever that step comes where the clip goes on- a nervous giggle or a knowing smile, and a "now this step is not necessary, but if you do it, this is how you do it."

Well, what to say? As my hair forms into a little hump all on its own without the help of a poof or a magic scrunchie, I'm not super concerned with this in relation to my own head, but I was definitely surprised by how many other girls changed their style to avoid the 'camel hump.' And power to them. If in the end its all about identifying what you think is wrong and then avoiding it, then yeah, this makes sense. If it's about avoiding deception, as some girls have mentioned, then yeah, let's not flaunt what our momma's didn't give us. But then what of heels and lipstick and all that crazy stuff we can do with our eyelashes? (My personal talent is to make myself look like a crackwhore.) And Spanx? Dare we ask.

Let's say we decide to ask. Next question: who do we ask?
An Imam, a scholar, other women, or random men to see what they actually find attractive... That last one seemed logical to the bloggers I came across, and in all cases they found that the men in their lives did not find the 'camel hump' attractive, a few find it alienesque.
Awesome, a decisive answer, problem solved. Okay so that means... hm ok wait, so, what does that mean? A falsely voluminous look is not attractive to men. So should we read that as meaning that it's okay because actually we're kidding ourselves we don't look any better, or that we still shouldn't do it and by following the rules, we're doing ourselves a favor aesthetically?

There are levels of naiveté but I think for the most part we know what we're doing and intention is everything. Hijab for a woman who is wearing it begrudgingly is obviously not as fun as the game I'm playing, (which I have named "OK. Let's Do This"), and for a defiant woman living in a country where it is imposed on her, it's the most logical medium of covert subversion. I do feel bad for those Persian girls in that one stock photo that is used online as a visual for any discussion of "improper hijab." At least for now they are the go-to image of 'scantily dressed women." I personally first found them when I was trying to figure out why Persian girls are so cute (still a mystery).

I think every woman who is making an effort to dress modestly and still look cute deserves a medal. It's not all fun and games. And even thought I already know most of your tricks, ladies, as a somewhat lonesome Buffalo hijabi, I have loads of fun following your adventures in modesty and it's comforting to know you're out there somewhere under the same sky struggling with your hijab pins having an ironic dance party to "Whip my Hair." Plus, I get to use words like "loads" because that's what the khaleeji girls say.

HERE'S AMENAKIN'S TAKE ON IT

The Chase

I see these great vintage shops with beautiful and reasonably priced dresses and I used to wonder why it doesn't feel right to buy them or even to venture into the store.

But I figured it out. I think most of the joy in getting dressed is in the chase. The looking for it and finding it and deciding what to make out of it and after lots of seam-ripping and background noise of the original Law and Order, coming out with some sort of finished product with crooked contrast stitching and asymmetrical curves. I usually wear it the next day or soon after, and fifty percent of the time I realize after a few hours of wearing it that I got a little too excited the night before and while it was awesome in theory, that Liz Claiborne dress that I was so pumped to wear can't really be rocked properly with a hijab.
And then there is the strange satisfaction of watching the slow decay of the clothes, where the seams rip open because I didn't reinforce them or I tailored them so closely to a temporary body with no room for adjustments for winter weight.
Sometimes I face the strange situation of discovering something on the article of clothing that refers to the living body that was once in it, like a stain or mending or a nametag. One of my latest sweaters turned out to have what looks like a bloodstain, and in the shape of a bird or the type of dinosaur that flies. Sometimes I can't resist googling the name on the nametag and then get super creeped out if they live close to Buffalo, as was the case here. What'd you do, Pete? A woodshop accident? Did you go and get yourself stabbed? Is is coffee? Did your future wife spill it on you and that's how you met?
Those stay at the bottom of the projects pile. Except this one, where I decided to make a bird-shaped hole and fill it with something else.
So this is where we find ourselves. And unless I someday become a businesswoman or a shepherd's wife or a farmer's daughter, this is where I'll stay for a while.

Modest Hangups

There were five girls, mostly in their twenties, that wore nikab during Hajj, and four of them wore it regularly in their respective homes in America. The other was a doctor who was just planning on going back to work after taking time off to stay at home with her two children. She explained to me how she went from wearing regular clothes to wearing an abaya to wearing all black with black hijabs. My mother always warns me against this and says it makes me look scary, and I tell her that it’s their fault if they get scared, and I say this knowing that no one is scared of me. I used to love being intimidating, but over the years my talents have dwindled and people tend to think I am a nice person and often approach me at the coffeeshop to chat about what I’m reading or what I’m wearing, or what they are reading or what they are doing that day or something they are irked about or something about the weather. Yesterday was the first snow and we all took pictures of it. I’m excited to wear my new winter hat which is mostly fur and which seconds as a hijab since it covers all of my hair and even if part of my bangs peek out they look like part of the animal the hat came from.

It’s looking like it will be an advantage to always have a head-cover and a neck-scarf all rolled into one, and appropriate for the Buffalo weather. The hardest part of looking cute in the winter is that the first thing people see when you enter a warm or heartwarming place is a cold, wet face, and you try to balance it out by being overly cute and fuzzy in boots and blankety jackets and long coats and shiny boots like Paddington bear. And I’m sure I will have the urge to rip the cold wet scarf off my head and shake out my hair like I used to, which also sort of looks like a coat. I had a dream last night that I was out and about just minding my business when I realized that I forgot to put a scarf on that morning, and to top it off my hair was all matted to my head and looking just awful and nothing like what you would want your hair to look like after having it all tied up and hidden like it holds an especially seductive power and needs to be reigned in. Maybe a punishment for my forgetfulness. When I asked the people around me in the dream why they didn’t mention it they said they thought I did it on purpose.
The girls that wear nikab told me how they hate those moments where it’s all women and someone asks if they can see what their face looks like and they unveil themselves, after a day of having cloth over their face they look just awful and unkempt, makeupless and nothing like what you would want to look like in an unveiling, because let’s face it, everyone expects you to be hiding some sort of toxic beauty under there.

And sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t. A girl told me about her teacher, who was being harassed by a guy yelling at her that she must be hideous under that veil and that’s why she wore it, and she happened to be beautiful and lifted her veil and said, “call me ugly again.” It sounded to me like a story of defeat on the part of the woman, that she let that guy make her angry enough to unveil herself and share her secret, but it’s understandable. Even for those of us that aren’t flawlessly beautiful, it’s something of human nature to want to look beautiful in a culture where it is so highly prized, even if we know better.

The girls told me I should wear nikab because my eyes are “captivating,” and I explained that everyone’s eyes are captivating and also, that what I should be wearing is the opposite of a nikab because all it would do is serve to cover the ugly part of my face. They didn’t have a response to that and I didn’t push the point, but I did wear the nikab for a day and disappointingly, it really didn’t make me look all that great or like I was hiding a toxic beauty. I looked tired and old and scary, and kept forgetting to lift it when I took sips from my waterbottle. I don’t think they understood that I was doing it as a social experiment and they asked me if I was sure I was doing it for the right reasons, and I said no I was doing it just as a “thing.” And they asked me how it felt and I said it felt fine.

Winter in Buffalo is a great time for some heartwarming headgear. I'm going to aim for a different animal each week. And dinosaur heads? Dare I? I think I do. Crazier things have happened.

I performed the Hajj this year and instead of posted about it here, made a little offshoot recounting of the sacred journey at

http://thetinypilgrim.tumblr.com

As soon as my mother and I got home from our summer in Kashmir I was going through an old drawer of special things so I could add to it, and I found an old 3-D viewfinder with slides of the Hajj. I can’t remember where I got it but it’s one of the most beautiful things in the drawer, along with my 3-D viewfinder of dinosaurs, and my illustrated book about birds. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that my father announced that he would be taking my mother for the Hajj and my brother suggested that I go with them and I agreed that I should go because I had a dream about it a few months before, and also several daydreams after I found that old viewfinder.

We left for Medina on October 24th, 2012 and completed the pilgrimage on November 7th, 2012.

GRIN AND BEAR IT

When I was an intern in Tangier my boss bought me a poster from the Turkish pavilion of the Venice Biennial which said in big block letters, DON'T COMPLAIN. She picked it out especially for me.
I had to leave it in my house in the Kasbah of Tangier, but I will picture it above my bed in Buffalo.

What would it feel like to spend one day without complaint?
Why do I look for reasons to laugh when I am supposed to concentrate?

On the nightly ride to the masjid with my brother we are both reading different prayers silently to ourselves on prayer beads. I used to be impressed that he could count the beads and control the steering wheel at the same time but it's actually not hard to do and I realized that after I started doing it myself. There are probably a lot of things like this that will remain impossible to me because I like knowing that everyone I meet knows how to do a bunch of things I don't, even if I don't like them. It makes the world bigger.

There are a lot of things I want to say to my brother when we spend time together because there is so little of it, but the car ride is the perfect length for 786 repetitions of a small prayer of Dhikr, remembrance. You whisper the words and count them with your fingers so your extremities are involved and it becomes an action of the whole body. It helps to concentrate.

Genessee is a long and quiet street but sometimes when we stop at a red light the car next to us is blasting music. We can whisper the prayers louder and emphasize the "s" sounds and try to make them ring out over the rhythm and bass but it's hardly worth it. My brother rolls up the windows to keep out the sound and it stays just as loud I almost laugh out loud but he stays so serious that I try really hard to keep it to myself and keep saying my prayers under the thick layer of Rihanna.

The masjid can be equally as awesome, mostly seeing the young children engaging with the adults and with the prayer, knowing I was doing that when I was their age with no real idea of what was going on. My most vivid memory from the Parker St. mosque growing up was when a woman converted over the loud speaker, and I leaned over to my friends and whispered- "My mom said that when a person converts, it's like they start over like a newborn baby!" And I was thinking I couldn't even imagine what that would be like and wishing I could do that, and plotting maybe converting and then converting back, then deciding that it was best to wait and see how the rest of my life generally went.

I stifle a laugh during prayer when the little six and seven year old girls line up with us to pray, with their amira hijabs and tank tops and ruffled lace socks with monkey faces on them like the ones the elderly women in Tangier would wear. Sometimes they spontaneously break away from the line and begin to chase each other or run through the curtain partition to the men's side and then back again. The line is not supposed to be broken but we aren't allowed to move, so I stand there uncomfortably and get distracted by the movement and try not to laugh at the children struggling to keep their oversized hijabs on their heads when they bend in prostration. One girl kept bumping her head as if each time she was falling without knowing she was about to go down.

My own wardrobe is gradually finding its inner self somewhere between here and Narnia. My mother gave me a pep talk that made me realize that she actually does realize that we have the biggest noses we have ever seen and maybe she was actually acknowledging that mine is her fault. But it's a lost cause and we don't complain about it out loud but try and act casual and concentrate on trying to guess what is in that mysterious fourth of our field of vision blocked by little overlapping mountains like the ones in Doda leading up to the bigger ones. And now the hijab shapes my head and the mound of roped off hair becomes the biggest mountain. It's all a very clear path upwards.

The two hundred scarves I collected from Casa Barata will finally go to a worthwhile cause instead of just making everyone think I have a hickey I am trying to hide or trying desperately to look French. It's all in preparation for Hajj even though we are supposed to leave in 9 days and still don't have our visas. But one can only hope that things will fall into place and we will have the chance to get to Arafat and the chance to, as the Hajj is meant to, return home anew with a clean slate like a new-born baby.
Can you imagine?

(more) dress patterns

A late bloomer, I took the plunge. My lion's mane had a good twenty-seven year run out on the streets and I can't say it brought me anything but trouble so I guess it's good riddance. But it's there, just hiding.

I am used to wearing costume-like attire and named them all: pirate-outfit, clown dress, Alice-in-Wonderland, sailor 1-3, tina turner, french maid, old maid, librarian 1-17, bee, gramma, grampa 1-3. Years ago I invested in a mannequin which my mother tried to dispose of in parts, one leg at a time.

The hijab names sound sort of like ice cream flavors or OPI shades of nailpolish. Palestinian servant girl, post-Hammam, Erica Badu, nun, rebellious nun, Chiquita Banana lady, Iranian tween, hijab hair, bloods, crips, turban, gramma, fabric braid, amelia earhart. towelhead, cancer patient, etc.

If anyone can, I think I can have fun with this. And in anticipation of any curious minds of distant relations, people are way nicer to me now. Maybe I used to be unapproachable and now an extra barrier from the world is somehow inviting people in. A barrier against my hair and also against my old costume-outfits. And all the nice boys talk to me to make me feel good about myself and boost my confidence. I am hyper-aware that anyone that knows me is sure it is a passing phase or a desperate attempt at an escape from moral bankruptcy, so it makes the most sense to add this to my list of personas and see how many people I can alienate.

The key to "in with the new" is out with the old, so there will soon be lots of dresses nailed to my wall. I did this my freshman year of college but with baby clothes and since it looked like a shrine of a dead baby I had to disassemble it in favor of Bjork posters.

Let's be open to purging old habits! Thinking up new ones! Sewing new pants to accommodate a new sense of comportment and then step into them one leg at a time.

With some sewing and mending and elongating I am confident that I can successfully hijabize my old costumes at least in time for Halloween to try them out, except that inshaAllah I will be across the world then and
far far away from where I am now.

HEAD-GEAR

I never wrote my post Ramadan thoughts because then it would mean it was over. A blessed month is time for house cleaning. I rearranged my lists of things to do that I haven't done and reorganized my boots according to the probability of slipping and falling in preparation for November snow.
Buffalo is brilliantly autumnal and jobless and when the sun sets its like a hole-punch. Days are spent at a local coffee-shop that constantly reminds me that it is not the Hungarian Pastry shop. I have been watching reruns of Law & Order and they always place the scenes in actual shops in recognizable intersections in the city, so now I feel free to drop the names of my favorite places in my writing. I like to think it also proves that I am real.

Ideas about routes and streets and places have been blowing off steam around the corner and I'm starting to round them up from off the bathroom floor. I think they are all just sleeping but some of them look like they might be dead. They are blueish and don't move when I poke them with a stick.
These are ideas about places I've had and emphasizing that I feel displaced from them and probably replaced by another introverted foreigner who wanders the streets and befriends cafe waiters. They are an easy target because they always work in the same place and I always know where to find them, and I have never been one so I can't gauge how creepy it is. The recent place where I used to take up space is still there, maybe two sizes too small for me now.

I wear my old dresses as A-line shirts.
I hid all my stockings.
I look at all the books on my shelf and can't help but fantasize that all those spines that say SPACE were attached to books about blacks holes and meteorites and using the word fantasize makes me wish it didn't sound so much like "infanticide."
It's a form of worship to study the stars. From my rooftop I can watch them as I drink copious amounts of coffee to try and get work done at night to make up for my lethargy in the holy fasting days of the mid-month when it is recommended to fast. I do it if I stay awake until the morning meal but usually fall asleep an hour before after watching consecutive reruns of Law & Order and think about those places where they are solving their crimes and how they aren't just spaces used by criminals to commit brutal murders, those places actually exist and there are people crossing those streets right now, just like all the people and places in Tangier that I write about from here.

Under the stars we feel more clarity knowing our names are written up there somewhere
along with our loves and losses and lives in general.
Makes you feel more confident about your abilities in general.
Thinking about pluto and space, it's the appropriate place for that. Curiosity, asking why we are where we are in life and why the stars look like they are blinking like they are watching me too.
Pluto is tired and the stars are looking back at me, and God knows that if I can pull off the old wardrobe, I can pull off the new. And He knew that if I can pull off the nose, I can wear a hijab without causing a commotion. But can't promise I won't stop traffic. Because I already promised so many people that I would stop traffic.

Heartfelt

In honor of stegosaurus month, I have decided to re-evaluate the kind of person I am and the kind of person I want to be. I think the best way for anyone to to do this is to ruminate for hours on what a horrible person you are, and then feel really bad about it for a long time. This is the only way to completely come to terms with your douchebagery. One misstep and you might go through life thinking that you are a good person. Don't be fooled. Thoughts like these can only be from the devil. And no, Mr. d, I won't capitalize your name even if it is your real name, although I will acknowledge your title because you are older than me and I am a very polite person.

The first step is to control one's anger. They say that if you can do this for forty days, it becomes a real part of you, the same way doing anything for forty days straight forms a habit.
This means you, Stego. Why are you always screaming?

The second is to ask for forgiveness, in which one's douchebagery comes in handy. Go on. Do it.

The third would be controlling desires. Not all of us have a second brain down there, Stegster. Stop rubbing it in my face.

So no, I won't marry you. And I won't move to Colorado. You punctured my heart with your tail spikes and I didn't see the wisdom in it then.
Now my heart has spikes and a second brain, and can defend itself better than if it was wrapped in barbed wire.

Wishes

It's hard to know where home is.
We took the high road over the mountains through Kishtawar to get back to Srinagar. There was snow on the mountains and horses drinking water from small puddles. I took pictures of all of the sheep. They were either sleeping or running away from me and many of them looked genuinely offended that I caught them off guard.

Whenever we go through Kishtawar my parents have to visit the shrine or they have bad dreams. We stay in the same bungalow every time and sit and have salt tea and pastries. In the shrines there is a small closed room with what I assume are the coffins of the saints, and we give our salaams and pray for them. There are tiny colored rags on a large stick and around other places in the room that represent prayers of people that pass through, like a wig of wishes. I didn't wish for anything but there are a lot of things I could have wished for.

I wish I could learn about ships and dinosaurs and birds and planets. In Doda the sky looks like a planetarium. I wish I could spend time studying the stars, those tiny hole punches in the sky piercing through dark matter, maybe halfway between the earth and the spiritual realm. My brother says shooting stars are huge balls of fire aiming for the djinn hovering over the earth trying to overhear the angels talking about us and that's how fortune tellers know what is going to happen. Like a video game. I like this theory and so I believe in it.







I can see myself building a house here. With a swingset just like this.

all of the things

When I blink it looks like taking pictures with an old camera where the shutter closes each time, or what it looked like when I had my pupils dilated. It must be the light from the month of Ramadan. I can't remember feeling it before because I wasn't paying attention. Purging distractions should be mandatory.

I'm going to a new mosque for Tarawe prayers this year, down near the airport. It used to be a church and was converted to Islam a few years ago. It randomly happened to already be facing the Kibla so the rugs didn't have to be placed diagonally. I have always been distracted by the designs on prayer rugs, which generally look like magic carpets. I collected some wild ones while I was in Brooklyn, most of them have a picture of the Kaaba in Mecca on them. Even with the ones with random designs I manage to find some sort of image that distracts me. The one I have at home has a screaming man. The one in the masjid has a waffle. My brother found an eagle. It's not recommended to close your eyes and if you do, you should open them every once in a while. So my eyelids flutter and I take a stream of photographs in my head of Mecca and waffles and eagles and a screaming man. At home I have three prayer rugs layered over a blanket. Women receive the same award for praying at home in the "masjid of their home" as men do for going to the mosque, and for staying there overnight for a spiritual retreat. Mine will be in my own room which I have deemed Dar-ul-Shifa, the house of healing, complete with a sewing machine, typewriters, tea light candles and a ship lamp. I had to inspect every corner and get rid of all of the pictures of faces so there are a lot of picture frames turned upside down as though I got into a fight with someone and don't want to have to look at a picture of the two of us together smiling next to a waterfall.

When we go down in sajda (prostration), if I keep my eyes open my hands with next to my head make the floor look like a butterly. So I keep them closed, then remember to open, then closed. So I have one picture of a butterfly. Twenty raqas of Taraweh prayer means forty butterflies. Identical ones with different shutter speeds. And for every extra prayer I pray I get to make four more.

There are only ten or twelve women that come to the night prayer and they bring colorful sheets to cover the rugs so our foreheads can touch something soft. They are mostly pink and have flowers in them. I found a small man in the flowers.
There is always at least one small girl wearing a tiny djelleba and headscarf, or wearing a t-shirt and capri pants and a tiny headscarf, and they go back and forth between praying and running around the empty space because ten women don't take up too much space. Long black djellebas and abayas overlap from the fan blowing on them and when we sit down the woman next to me sits on mine so I can't get up until she does, and since the Imam is on the other side of a partition, most of the women take their time before they get up.

Dhikr is remembrance of God and we repeat short prayers in phrases as a way of keeping our thoughts away from worldly things or trying to find the eagle in the carpet. Usually a Sheikh will tell you what to recite daily and you do this daily for the rest of your life. I like the idea of this and so I wanted to construct my own wird, the same way I was a special major in college. Pick and choose certain prayers and tailor to yourself. Except I soon realized that there is a reason people don't assemble their own prayer schedule, and so I'm adopting the one that the rest of my family does and hoping that if I do this I will be more like them and that I will do this for the rest of my life.
These are big words. Promises can be terrifying.

These are holy days and holy nights and sometimes I'm not even sure what to do with myself, so we read the Qur'an and recite our prayers while baking bread and embroiding dinosaurs, and always making the intention that I am doing it for God. Because I think God likes bread, and I think he loves dinosaurs.

As a sidenote, the month of Ramadan is also Stegosaurus month in Dar-ul-Shifa.