I do not want to wear Hijab! I will look Ugly!

Dedicated to my dear friend, Kawthar, and my favourite author all at once, the only person who understands my sense of fashion!

I used to refer to my journals as articles until I read her book and decided to stick to hubs. I like to blame school for rusting my creative spirit but this friend has shown me that the act of putting ink on paper is a sacred ritual that only few have been gifted to master.

For more on our sense of fashion, please read “Why do I wear Hijab? Is it just modesty that I attain?”

It was a rainy summer back home when family decided to spend Friday evening indoors. And as much as I love the blessings of the rain, deep down I cursed the fact that any sort of worldly communication had to be turned off.

After playing every board game on the planet including my least favorite, Monopoly, boredom started to fatally get on our nerves. Eventually and after a zillion random activities, we abruptly settled to go over family photos.

Being the eldest, more than half the photos were mine which was enough of a reason to get my baby sister to throw a tantrum. Attempting to convince her that she was not adopted was certainly not my choice for a Friday evening, where was fatal boredom when I needed it most?

The only way to prevent her from drying her eyes out was to recall enough cute incidents to outnumber my cute photos. A good lesson for me to document every little thing for all my future children.

When she finally calmed down, it was only smart to hide my 12 other albums and jump to more recent pictures, hopefully pictures of her. I knew that our trip to Toronto was well documented and if anything my sister posed for most of the shoots.

And though going over that album certainly brought her spirits up, it dragged mine down. Up until this point, I was proud of my Hijab but looking at the pictures, my pride bubble was violently burst.

The only thing that distinguished me from any other non-Hijabi was a piece of scarf covering my hair and perhaps the fact that I had longer tops or baggier pants. Other than that, my dressing violated 50% of the Islamic teachings.

I tried to make myself feel better by recalling that the majority of the 17 year olds I knew did not even wear Hijab abroad.

Obviously, attempting to legitimatize my faults using external comparison others only made things worse for I knew that judging others was even a nastier sin.

I now faced two options, either abandon Hijab altogether or wear it properly. The part of me that got obnoxious with the semi-hijab recited

“Whoever gives up something for the sake of Allah, Allah will substitute him with something better”.

On the other hand, the silly me insisted that Hijab was technically in vain when it came to unattractive ladies. To be honest, the temptations holding me back were nothing but shallow. I had severe low self-esteem and if plastic surgeries were not a prohibited option, I would have jumped under the knife cold-heartedly.

So adding yet another layer of ugliness to what I considered as existing ugliness was not the most appealing option.

But then the internal conflict, that nagging remorse, & feeling like a hypocrite outweighed any self-consciousness enormously.

My limited mentality was not able to envision the reward, how was more modesty supposed to make me feel better in a place where wearing less, showing more curves and wearing more makeup equated beauty.

My restrained brain did not realize that my self-consciousness was not an issue of aesthetics but rather an issue of shallowness and lack of confidence.

Praise to Allah, after giving up the semi-hijab, it was not long before my confidence got boosted.

I even found the idea of ‘plastic surgeries’ extremely pathetic not because I had to but because I actually thought so.

It was not long before I realized that putting more layers only liberated me. The layers broke the worrisome I had for looks and replaced it with higher serving concerns.

It liberated me when I realized that beauty is a subjective opinion and is not equations that one derives from magazines or celebrities.

Thanks to Hijab, I have the privilege to draw my own definition of beauty !