There are a thousand ways to feel small and I thought I had felt them all.
I was born 5 pounds and 19 inches. My mother would wash me in the hotel bathroom sink during vacations, cupping water over my head; a newborn baptism. During a field trip in 5th grade, my classmates threw me into a bed sheet and tossed me up like a crouton, chanting my name. In college when we’d hunt for a midnight snack, I’d hide in the space below a car’s glove compartment, ready to scrunch up even tighter if the cops pulled us over. It was in my freshman year of high school that I virtually disappeared. In my Texan suburban school, there weren’t enough minorities to even get us confused with each other, and I was the sole hijabi out of ~2,600 students.
I took my smallness and hid into it, caving into the halls, standing on the furthest corner of cement, waiting for the school bus to take me away from homogeneity.
After 7 years of living in Texas, my parents moved us to California. I expected to see Leonardo DiCaprio walking outside our block and was startled to see plazas with Charles Schwab written in Chinese. Soon, my expectations were upended in the most magical way. I found diversity, without knowing what that word meant or the imprint it would leave.
In my new high school in the Bay Area, I slowly formed a circle of friends who were all different from me. Different in ethnicity, thought, socioeconomic status, or upbringing. My school was all-girls, which meant no cheerleading team and no boys to determine our social hierarchy. I no longer had to fear being the only hijabi at the table.
On the cover of the brochure for my Catholic school was a hijabi I would later befriend. She was student body president, planned to be pre-med and a lighting bolt. As a hijabi, I stuck out, and unprepared for that type of attention, I cowered. She, on the other hand, extended into the edges of the universe which bowed down to give her more light. She gave me the nickname ‘skinny’ and though I had felt that up until this point inside my very being, it was in my new environment that I began to expand.
As the world and I grew older, together we faced the tide of empire: two major wars killing nearly 400,000 people in Muslim countries, the rise of ISIS, and mass shootings in America. I escaped woundless until one Saturday afternoon while walking to a Muslim panel, when a man swerved dangerously close to me in his truck shouting:
“Is that a bomb in your pocket?”
My hands automatically went to my pockets as if I was questioning my own integrity.
After the 2016 presidential election, a reported 400 hate incidents in one week hit the news. The night following the election, a 19-year old woman reported her hijab was ripped off at San Jose State University in California. I know that school. When I was 15 I would ask my mom to pick me up late from school so I could hang out at that campus. My friends and I would stop by McDonald’s and then walk to the quad and prance around like grown-ups. Now it had become a crime scene for a coward, who waited for a woman to turn her back before ripping off a part of her identity he claimed for himself.
Eight days later, I read about a woman who came back from a hike in Fremont, CA to find her car window smashed, purse stolen, with a note on the windshield saying “hijab wearing b*. This is our nation now. Get the f* out.” Ironically, she was not Muslim.
It was like the last two decades had not passed, and I was once more that girl in the corner, trying to disappear. But before I could retreat, the texts and calls came in. Friends and strangers following the news reached out to me to ask me how I was doing, if anything had happened to me. They asked if I had pepper spray, if I knew self-defense.
I told my protectors, alhamdulillah, I am so far fine. But tomorrow I could be the latest news story, recounting my hijab being pulled off. I must shake away any naiveté I have and wall myself with the shield of understanding.
In this Trump era, I, like many others, fear this eruption of hidden hate and feel the deep need to act. As people march across their cities to support a better nation, it has become clear we are not just shifting the gear back to automatic, we’ll stay full-swing in drive. And so I will not let the cowards make me small again; I will rise above the smallness they have forced on me and my fellow hijabis and we will soar above the blood moon into the cosmos of light.
On President Trump’s inauguration day, we implore you, our compatriot of humanity, to stand with us. How?
- Just as vividly as I remember feeling numb on election night, I remember the positive texts and calls from people after. Reach out to a Muslim person you know or even someone you don’t know well and lend him/her your words of support. As we’ve seen from the smashed glass and note left behind, words matter.
- Learn about CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and donate if you can. They are the leading civil rights organization for Muslims in America and are on the front lines battling discrimination. We need them more than ever and your financial support means they can do more work.
- If you don’t know someone who is Muslim, get to know someone. After I moved to California, I put myself in situations to meet global citizens from the Middle East, South America, Asia, Europe, Africa and beyond. I would not have learned nearly half of what I know if it hadn’t been from personal truth-telling. If you ask how, if you live in Southern California and are female, attend the Women’s Mosque of America, which welcomes women of all faiths to its services or listen to their services online.
- Many amazing people have creatively stood up. High school student Rana Imtiaz organized a day for students to wear hijab in solidarity in Duluth, Minnesota. 30 students signed up. Filmmaker Joshua Seftel premiered his docu-series “The Secret Lives of Muslims” after developing the idea for quite some time. George Takei, whose family was detained in a Japanese internment camp in WWII, started a petition to stand by Muslims in America. Support them or surprise us and do something awesome.
Let us continue to get up and do the work. As you hear the clamor around you, let this be the time we break free of our daily routine to support the wild winds of activism and our shared roar for dignity.
Thanks to Jeanne Jo for inspiring me to write this.
