Adventuring Afar

This blog is currently on hiatus. A lot has come up that I need to deal with. It might be a month or two before I post again.

When my social justice project ends on Friday, so will my wearing hijab. It is a concession to my parents. Maybe when I’m at grad school and 100s of miles away I will be able to wear it again.

Last night I was confronted by my parents about the hijab and Islam. It turns out my parents were only “okay” with the hijab when it was just for a class project. As soon as I said I wanted to continue to wear it, it was no longer “okay” in any way. I was forced to listen while they ranted for twenty minutes about how horrible Islam was and how horrible it was for me to wear the hijab. When I told them I may as well convert then, they freaked a bit. My mom went to “well you aren’t a ‘born’ muslim and so you shouldn’t wear that headdress.” (Yes, she calls it a headdress.) I was in tears for most of this. I tried to argue why I want to continue to wear it and why Islam isn’t that bad, why Islam makes sense to me. They didn’t get it. I have discovered that my parents believe everything the news media espouses about Islam, my father especially. It was hard and I’m almost in tears as I think about it right now. I honestly don’t know what is going to happen. My mom goes “you aunt said there are going to be ‘true’ muslims at your cousin’s wedding who will take serious offense if you are just ‘pretending’ to be muslim.” Little does my family know that I converted a while ago. My mom’s whole argument really revolved around how, even if I converted, I wouldn’t be a ‘true’ muslim since I wasn’t born a muslim and wasn’t muslim by blood so I shouldn’t wear the ‘headdress’ because only ‘true, born’ muslims wear that. My dad tried to convince me to stay Christian but he didn’t get my argument: “if I don’t really believe it and I am just pretending, I’m a hypocrite.” It was really a horrible discussion with my parents telling me I’ll never find a job if I’m wearing the headscarf. They basically told me that they will never accept the ‘new’ me because they knew the ‘old, original, and true’ me. They don’t care that Islam makes sense to me and that I feel at peace with it. They only care that I’m ‘rejecting’ them and that I don’t seem to care. They told me they will never accept that I am no longer Catholic even though they will always love me because I am their daughter. I can’t wait to leave for graduate school in July. If I have it my way, I will never come back to Wisconsin where my family thinks they can tell me what to do.

britishmuslim:

911 caused a lot of non-Muslims to convert to Islam. Why? Because they tried reading the Quran to find evil, but all they found was peace

(via beautyofhijabs)

On Monday I am signing up to be a Thirty-One consultant… I already would have signed up but the catalog changes in May and if I wait until the 15th to sign up, I get some of the new catalogs. Anyway, I have created a tumblr for Thirty-One but it is kind of bare right now. I’ll post more when I can after Monday.