XPost: can.politics, ont.politics, bc.politics   
   From: {~_~}@nyet.ca   
      
   Published on Sat Oct 01 2011 - thestar.com   
      
      
   Shaila Kibria made a painful but liberating decision to give up the   
   Muslim hijab   
   Hijab, the Muslim head scarf, carries unexpected weight: political,   
   religious, cultural and deeply personal. And the decision to take it off   
   can be wrenching, as it was for Shaila Kibria.   
      
      
   GTA wife, mother and union organizer Shaila Kibria is shown in the days   
   when she always wore hijab.   
      
   “I’m still torn about it.”   
      
   Shaila Kibria is speaking about hijab, the Muslim head scarf she wore   
   secretly as a teenager in defiance of her parents, and then stopped   
   wearing two decades later.   
      
   “To take it off was like taking off a piece of my body.”   
      
   It was at a Muslim summer camp in Mississauga that Kibria — raised in a   
   family that practised the classical music and dance of their homeland,   
   Bangladesh, but wasn’t terribly religious — first saw other girls   
   wearing hijab. It seemed strange that she was the only one without.   
      
   When she launched a campaign to wear the scarf, her parents, who had   
   immigrated to Canada in the 1960s, implored her not to. Her mother   
   fretted that no one would marry her if she insisted on hijab.   
      
   They thought she’d been brainwashed. She, in turn, said it was wrong to   
   wear sleeveless blouses and red lipstick, and that they would all go to   
   hell.   
      
   “I felt it was the truth,” recalls Kibria. “I kept asking, ‘Why are we   
   living this fake life?’ To me, at 13, dancing and singing was sinful. I   
   wanted to go to heaven. I wanted perfection, the whole Mother Mary thing.”   
      
   Hijab is complicated. For a flimsy bit of cloth, it carries unexpected   
   weight: political, religious, cultural and deeply personal.   
      
   Some Canadian Muslim children and teens have battled their less   
   traditional parents and Western prejudice to wear it, using the scarf to   
   express their identity in a post 9/11 world.   
      
   Some of those same women are now “dejabbing” — removing it.   
      
   The garment, whose name means curtain or covering but also barrier in   
   Arabic, is banned in France’s schools and public institutions. It is   
   mandatory to wear it in Iran’s Islamic Republic, where in the early days   
   of the revolution, vigilantes sometimes attacked unveiled women with   
   scissors and acid.   
      
   Women who wear hijab — which ranges from a single scarf to an artful   
   combination involving a tight-fitting cap, a turtleneck, multiple   
   scarves and pins — can be seen as modest, which is the purpose of the   
   covering, but also mysterious, untouchable and unknown. The other.   
      
   Dejabbers have become tired of the separation that hijab can lead to, of   
   being spokespersons for, and defenders of, all Muslim women.  They are   
   choosing their own identity.   
   As writer Rahat Kurd, a “dejabby,” observes: “If we could just quit this   
   protracted and demoralizing fight about women’s dress and mobility in   
   public space, we could get so much done with our lives.”   
      
   Her mother told her the family were “medium Muslims,” she says after   
   serving a reporter breakfast in her Brampton home (“You can’t come and   
   not eat — it’s our Bangladeshi culture”) and settling, barefoot, with a   
   cup of tea on a white leather sofa.   
      
   Kibria, now 36 and a community organizer for the Service Employees   
   International Union, is wearing a blouse in brilliant fuchsia and has   
   styled her hair in a shiny updo. Her eyes are large and expressive, more   
   so with a dramatic sweep of black eyeliner.   
      
   During the two decades she wore hijab, she became an activist at the   
   Universities of Toronto and Windsor, and a spokesperson for Muslim   
   causes. She was the go-to girl for media commentary.   
      
   Kibria married at 17 — her husband’s family chose her, she says, largely   
   because she wore the scarf — and at 19 had the first of their three   
   children, now aged 11, 14 and 16.   
      
   After 9/11 her hijab became a symbol of defiance. “To me it became a   
   political statement . . . People were calling us terrorists. I thought,   
   ‘I’m going to wear this in your face. This is my country. I was born   
   here. My kids were born here.’ ”   
      
   She ran as the Mississauga-Erindale NDP candidate in the 2007 provincial   
   election, one of the first Ontario women in hijab to run for MPP.   
      
   Her marriage ended after the election, in which she placed third.   
      
   Over time, Kibria began began to question wearing hijab.  Were the   
   invitations to speak at conferences, to be interviewed in mainstream   
   media, because she was visibly Muslim?   
      
   “Everyone knew me as a Muslim leader,” she says.  “Every issue was not a   
   ‘human’ issue, but a Muslim issue.  I didn’t realize that the issues   
   that affected everyone, child care, women, had been slipping away.   
      
   “I felt suffocated when I wore hijab,” she continues.  “I felt it pulled   
   me apart from everyone else — from Christians and Jews.  It wasn’t me   
   any more.”   
      
   Hijab, she realized, was almost like a character in her life’s narrative.   
      
   She’d even written a children’s book, Maariyah’s Day, about a six-year   
   old girl who wore hijab (her eldest child is a daughter named Maariyah).   
   She believed she’d landed jobs, including a period writing for CBC   
   radio, because she wore it.   
      
   Kibria remarried in 2009. Her husband, Alex Carter, who works at RBC   
   Investments, converted to Islam. He worried that if she stopped wearing   
   hijab, people would think he was influencing her. But he supported her   
   decision either way.   
      
   Finally taking it off was difficult.   
      
   “You literally feel naked,” she recalls. “It felt too bold showing your   
   hair.”   
      
   There was also the fear of having to give up an important part of her   
   life. “I had this feeling of insecurity, of losing friends who’d met me   
   when I was wearing hijab. It symbolized my work and activism in the   
   Muslim community — things like starting a mother and daughter play group   
   — for 20 years.”   
      
   There was negative fallout, including emails and Facebook comments. “You   
   were beautiful with hijab,” some wrote, or “I can’t talk to you any   
   more; you let us down.”   
      
   But now, Kibria says, “I feel more true to myself. I really didn’t see   
   it (the obligation to wear hijab) in the Qur’an. I don’t really see you   
   have to wear it to be a good person . . . it’s been a piece of cloth   
   that caused family disputes.”   
      
   Ironically, her mother started wearing hijab after she married. Both   
   parents have become more observant Muslims.   
      
   And Kibria has adopted a compromise position.  She wears the scarf to   
   family gatherings, to events at the mosque and Eid celebrations.  She   
   sees it as an expression of her faith, an interpretation rather than an   
   obligation.  She sees its value.   
      
   “It is beautiful.  Just not every day.”   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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