I have officially been living as a converted Muslim for over two months now. It is now the middle of Ramadan and I feel so blessed to be able to experience such a spiritual time where I can prioritize my faith above all else for a whole month. I feel a little unlucky because of the timing of COVID-19 which has meant I have not even been able to visit a mosque since my official conversion or pray in-line with the other women in the area. Since I put on my hijab as a permeant accessory for when I step outside my apartment I have not seen a single other woman in hijab. I think I would not be wrong in saying that I am the only hijabi for miles. The experience is a bit lonely and sometimes I think about what I would do if I saw another woman in hijab walking down the street. I don’t let it bother me too much, in fact anyone who knows me well knows I like being alone in the things I do when I think they are the right things. I guess my stubbornness pays off in that way.

The first couple weeks of wearing my hijab outside I noticed absolutely every single look that people gave me. If someone glanced at me for .001 second longer than normal I noticed. I don’t think this hyper-awareness came from me feeling insecure about my headpiece, but more from the fact that I felt like maybe I made other people uncomfortable when I walked down the street. My more rational self knows that this is likely not true, rather people are probably just slightly curious due to the lack of multiculturalism in the area. More daunting than walking out my front door in hijab was stepping into the classroom. I teach dozens of different students on a weekly basis and I realized that I had absolutely no clue how I would address it. On one hand I could say nothing about it and eventually it would just be normal, yet this would mean assumptions would be made and some students would just be confused. On the other hand, I could address it right away and explain my conversion. The problem with this being that I could risk some students becoming uncomfortable with religion in the classroom, especially something so different from Catholicism that reigns supreme over Poland. I opted for an approach somewhere in the middle. Some classes were interested and asked questions and some didn’t even blink so neither did I. I think my favorite classes to appear in hijab to for the first time were the children’s classes. The first lesson the kids came into class and stared a bit more. I imagined the sort of thoughts in their head went something like this:

“Hmm, teacher has a funny thing on her head. I wonder why? I like the color though… Oh, now it’s time to sing the ABCs…” And they completely forget about it because in the end it doesn’t really matter to a child and they don’t have enough English vocabulary to ask about it anyway.

And so life in my permeant accessory continues and I love wearing it. I’m sure this will come as a surprise to people who find it so easy to believe that modesty is something imposed on women by men rather than something that is a symbol of submission to Allah (SWT)*. I wear my hijab for Allah (SWT), period. The Quran states that women should wear hijab to guard their chastity and place the value and focus of a woman on things other than her beauty.

“Say to the believing women that: they should cast down their glances and guard their private parts (by being chaste) and not display their beauty except what is apparent, and they should place their khumur over their bosoms“

Quran 24:30

Scholars have much to say about this verse and how to transfer it from 600s Arabian Peninsula to the modern day Muslim woman from all corners of the Earth. The basic idea is that when this verse was revealed women would wear a “khumur” on their heads. This piece of fabric would be worn on the head and trail behind on the back. In the front women would allow their necks and upper chests to be bare. When this verse was revealed Allah (SWT) gave clearer instructions for how women should cover themselves. Hair is a big piece of beauty in women and by covering it the value of a woman will shift from straining, unattainable beauty standards to the things that make her valuable in Allah’s (SWT) eyes. For me, being a new hijabi is not easy when I treasured my long hair as a large part of my beauty and identity for a long time. Putting on a hijab reminds me that being covered is not a punishment or a trial Allah (SWT) bestowed on women to limit their freedom but rather it is a release from everything I see every single day that tells me my value is based on having a slim body, long, thick hair and perfect skin. When I’m not obsessing over my hair, face and body I can value my mind, heart and soul. That’s what hijab is. It’s not a punishment or a form of oppression but rather a freedom from what the world values. Submission is what “Islam” translates to in Arabic and so often submission is put into the same category as oppression. I find that every free human being in this world has three options for the way they live their life…

Submission to the world. Following everything the world values for a moment and tosses to the the side the next. The second is submission to oneself, it feels so liberating for a moment until the inevitable moment when you have to realize that you’re only a flawed human and so many trials in this world are so much bigger than ourselves. The final solution is submission to Allah (SWT), where I feel peace and security because while I am a flawed, sinful human-being but Allah (SWT) is All-Knowing, All-Merciful and All-Powerful.

Okay so I hope I have expelled the image of oppression that filled my American family and friends’ heads the moment they heard the news of my conversion. I’m not walking out of my apartment covering every single piece of skin except my eyes and being ordered what to do by a man who treats me as property. Yet if I ever wanted to cover every piece of skin except my eyes then I could because it’s my choice. I will not neglect the fact that there are women around the world forced into hijab or marriage in the name of Islam but that’s simply not legal in the Quran. There are thousands of Muslim women all across the globe that choose not to cover their hair but that doesn’t make them any less Muslim. Islam is a very personal relationship with Allah (SWT) that no one is allowed to touch. An extra yard of fabric on my head doesn’t make me any more or less Muslim than women who have made the choice not to wear it. As far as I’m concerned hijab is something deeply personal and shouldn’t involve anyone other than the woman and Allah (SWT). No one is holding a gun to my head and forcing me to put on my hijab every morning. On the contrary I can feel free to take it off anytime I like. Same as all women in Europe have the freedom to choose if they want to wear a t-shirt or a sweater on any given day. I simply choose not to take it off even if it causes slight discomfort at times. In America many women feel empowered showing off their bodies in a bikini on the beach and while I may not agree with this it doesn’t give me the right to go around covering every bikini-clad woman I feel makes me uncomfortable. Judgement just doesn’t do much but give room for spite to grow. I’m sure some people would be uncomfortable with me going to the beach covering everything except my face, hands and feet but the beauty of choice is that not everyone is going to agree with you. Even within the hijab community there are women who wear the hijab so you can still see part of their hair and some that cover everything but their eyes. I think that in the end there are bigger things to worry about than what women put on their heads.

Finally I will end this post with some answers to the most common misconceptions and questions I have received about women who wear a hijab…

• I don’t shower with it on
• I don’t wear it when I’m home
• I don’t sleep in it
• My intermediate family can see me without it on as well as small children
• If someone shows up at my apartment unannounced (like my neighbor or the mailman) it takes me forever to answer the door
• I pray while wearing it 5 times per day
• Sometimes its nice not to have to do my hair
• I have no idea how I will get my hair trimmed since there are no “female-only” salons in Poland to give me privacy from male clients like there are in Middle Eastern countries. So I’ll probably need to learn to learn to trim my own hair (I’m scared)
• Before I began wearing my hijab everyone assumed I spoke Polish and now everyone assumes I don’t. It’s nice though since I don’t speak Polish.
• Wearing a hijab is really convenient at the moment since it only takes a single clothes pin to make a mask (which is required to go outside here in Poland).
• If anyone has photos of me before I started wearing hijab I would appreciate if you kept them private and removed them from social media. Unless they are photos of me before the age of like 13. This is around the usual time girls start wearing hijab.

*SWT: Subhanahu wa-ta’ala (meaning The One, The Supreme, The All-Powerful in Arabic)