A child chooses the veil

This story originally appeared in the Daily Herald on Jan. 29, 2002

Thirteen-year-old Yusra Al Shawaf is preparing to make one of the boldest statements of her young life.

When she starts eighth grade in the fall, she'll walk into her Naperville school with a changed appearance. Her classmates, who have known her since second grade, will expect to see a girl with long, light brown hair and golden highlights.

But they won't. On that day, for the first time, Yusra will go to school wearing her Muslim headscarf, called a hijab (hee-JAHB).

Although she's worn the headscarf at home for months, and even modeled it for her classmates, wearing it to school will mark a turning point. From then on, Yusra won't be seen in public without it, probably for the rest of her life.

Ask her if she's worried about being the only girl in her school to wear the hijab, or if she's afraid of looking different from the other fashion-mad, Britney-emulating teens. She says no, she's not worried.

Ask her if she's concerned about her personal safety, what with looking identifiably Muslim in these skittish times, and no, um, her friends told her not to worry. She thinks she'll be OK.

Her main worry has a lot more to do with basic adolescent lack of concentration.

"I'm thinking, 'What if I forget to wear it one day?' " she frets.

She is, after all, still basically a kid. She could forget the scarf just as easily as other kids forget their lunch bags.

But she's a kid who is making a pretty bold decision to follow the tenets of her Muslim faith, even though they will make her life vastly different from most teenage girls in the United States.

Connection to God

The choice of whether or not to wear the scarf is up to her.

"We don't force her. We tell her it's up to her," says Yusra's mother, Susan Gailani, who uses her maiden name in accordance with Islamic tradition.

"I'm always asking her, 'Do you feel comfortable with this?'

Yusra says she looks forward to wearing it. She sees it, as most Muslims do, as a symbol of faith, and of reverence and devotion to God.

"It makes me feel like I'm a real Muslim, like I'm closer to God," she says solemnly in her child's voice.

Her mother sees it as a physical manifestation of faith. "I think it's a spiritual thing," Gailani says. "It's a connection with God. You're giving up worldly things for something spiritual."

Verses in the Koran instruct both women and men to dress modestly, taking care to cover up and not wear anything so tight that it reveals the form of the body. In the case of women, some Muslims interpret this modesty as also extending to the hair.

"What God has told us is that (women's) hair can be attractive and alluring. These are the parts that need to be covered," Gailani explains.

It wasn't all that long ago that Western society considered it proper for women to wear hats or head coverings, reminds Louise Cainkar, an academic and a fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Great Cities Institute, who has studied Arab women's issues.

"Prior to the 1960s, ladies, queens and respectable women in Western society covered their hair. But during and after the 1960s, part of the women's liberation movement was that women rejected hair coverings as a sign of oppression. Even nuns rejected it.

"But in the Muslim world, they never had that revolution, and they don't view hair covering as oppressive.

"You can't take our (Western) views and plant them on someone else and understand them," she cautioned.

Women in Afghanistan view the burqas as oppressive, but the burqa is a stifling, cumbersome sack that covers a woman head to toe, with only a small mesh opening to see out of. Most Afghan women who shed their burqas after the fall of the Taliban will probably wear a head scarf out of Islamic modesty.

Old Navy and the veil

Both Yusra, who was born in the United States, and her mother, who is from Iraq, wear regular Western clothes, but choose them with modesty in mind. Gailani, who owns her own interior design business, usually wears a professional-looking jacket and skirt.

Yusra dresses like a teen, but puts her own spin on it.

"I go to Old Navy and the Gap and everything," Yusra says, "but I don't wear tight pants or short-sleeve T-shirts."

She also doesn't wear shorts in the summertime, and she sticks to long-sleeved shirts, even in the heat.

Her classmates may not have noticed those subtle differences in the way she dresses, but they definitely noticed the headscarf.

Last month, Yusra made a presentation to her class about the hijab, and she modeled it for them. Her teacher welcomed it as a chance to teach the kids about Islam.

Two of Yusra's friends, Caitlin Duerinck and Kristen Eshelman, neither of whom is Muslim, got to try the headscarf on before school started. Both are 12, live in Naperville and attend seventh grade with Yusra at Madison Junior High School.

"When I saw myself (in the scarf), I thought, 'This is really cool what she's doing, how dedicated she is to her faith," Caitlin recalls.

Kristen had a different reaction. "I thought I looked pretty strange," she says.

"I thought she looked good in it," Yusra counters.

When Yusra tried on the headscarf for the class, kids reacted in different ways.

"Some of them said it was really great she was showing physically how much she cared about her religion," offers Caitlin.

"Yusra said kids were looking at her like, 'Ooooh-kay, that's really weird," remembers Kristen.

Yusra recalls it this way: "Some people had their mouths open -some were like, 'oh, cool.'

Neither of the friends thought Yusra would suffer in fashion exile, though.

"At school, no one cares," says Caitlin. "Maybe some of the people who pretend to be 14 or 15 and wear a lot of makeup, they might care, but not everybody else."

"We're not exactly in that kind of crowd," Kristen scoffs. "We don't care what style of clothing we wear."

Caitlin's mom, Jenny Duerinck, explains, "The girls just take the headscarf in a very matter of fact way. There was never anything strange about it. Caitlin came home from school that day and said, 'Yusra's still Yusra, no matter what she has on her head.'"

No dating allowed

While the scarf and the modest clothing may make Muslim girls look different than other American girls, their lifestyles are even more divergent.

December was not the first time Yusra told her class about Islam. A couple of years ago, she decided to give her classmates a glimpse into her world.

"It was right before the holy month of Ramadan, so I thought it would be a good idea to tell my class about my religion," she recalls. "I told my class I couldn't have a boyfriend, and they asked me, 'How do you get married?' I told them I'd probably meet a friend of my family's and talk to him and decide if I wanted to get married."

Yusra came home and told her mother that her classmates' jaws dropped when she told them she couldn't date.

"She thought it was funny that they were so astonished," Gailani recalls.

Muslims, especially those from Middle Eastern families, allow their teenaged children to go to parties with same-sex friends. But Yusra and other Muslim girls won't attend parties where boys are present. She won't socialize with boys much at all, much less go on dates.

"We don't date," says Dr. Ghada Talhami, a professor of politics at Lake Forest College, who is of Palestinian heritage. "The preferred matchmaking in the Middle East is to marry a friend of the family."

Muslims also don't dance and already, Yusra has missed some school dances. Her friends fill her in later on what happened.

She stoically accepts the fact she will miss out on some of the social scene during her teen years.

"I think it'll be different from normal girls, but I'm looking forward to going to college and studying and stuff like that," she says.

Yusra's older brothers, Mustafa, 20, and Hassen, 18, who are both studying at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, don't date either. Like other Muslim kids, the Al Shawafs hang out at home or invite friends over.

"Yusra can still have a party with her girlfriends. We aren't against having a nice time with your friends. But what goes on nowadays at parties, we are against," explains Gailani, mentioning the death of one suburban girl from a drug that looked like Ecstasy, and the death of another from a car crash in which the teen driver had been drinking.

"Drugs, drinking and premarital sex are forbidden in Islam," Gailani says. Both she and her husband, Taha Al Shawaf, make it a priority to raise their children with Islamic values, such as charity, honesty, truthfulness, caring and justice.

"We try to influence the kids to be responsible, do the right thing and follow the faith. We have discussions with our kids. We try to spend time with them," says Taha Al Shawaf. "It can be difficult to raise kids here with Islamic values - it's not impossible."

The scarf's popularity

As recently as the 1980s, many Muslim women didn't wear the hijab. Yusra and her mother are part of a worldwide wave of Muslim women who have decided to put it on in recent years. These women are giving the hijab its greatest resurgence since medieval times.

"Ten to 12 years ago, most Muslim women in the United States did not cover their hair," says UIC's Cainkar. "Now, 70 percent of these same women cover their hair."

She recalls one American-born Muslim woman she interviewed in 1984. At that time, the woman was about 26, had long, blond hair and came from a not-especially-religious family in the Chicago area. The woman now wears a head scarf.

"Lots of women made that same change," Cainkar says. Noting that most Arabs in the Chicago area come from Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, she says, "To me what happens with immigrants is tied to the happenings in the home countries - it's called transnationalism.

Since the 1920s, Arab countries have experienced movements for greater democracy and justice and less classism.

"When these ideas didn't bring about changes needed in society, people turned to religion," she comments. "There has been an Islamicization of the communities here."

'It became part of me'

Yusra's mother's own story reflects this global history.

Gailani never wore a head covering when she was growing up in Iraq. Hardly any women did, because Iraq is a secular country within the Islamic world. And she didn't wear it when she came to the United States to get married in 1973, just short of her 19th birthday.

About a year after she came here, she sat next to two women wearing head scarves at a meeting in California, where she and her husband lived at the time.

"They were young, white, American-born women from families that were not Muslim," Gailani recalls. They told her they had learned about Islam from foreign students, and decided to convert.

"They said if you want to do it (Islam), do the whole thing, or don't do it. They said the cover shows your inner beauty.

"I started thinking, 'I was born Muslim, why am I not applying everything in the religion?' They followed the religion by the book, they took it to its details," she recalls. "I felt ashamed I wasn't following it as closely as they did."

That's when she began reading more books and acquiring more knowledge about Islam.

She began wanting to wear the scarf, as a way of manifesting her reverence for God.

"I told my husband, and he said, 'It's up to you. I prefer that you wear it.' So I bought a bunch of nice scarves and began wearing them - it became part of me."

She feels true believers have no choice but to wear the hijab.

"I believe wearing it is compulsory, it's part of our faith," she says. "Every Muslim woman should do it. But in our religion, you can't force.

"I cannot be the judge. If they don't do it, they might be nice people, but they're not adhering to the religion. God is compassionate and forgiving - he should judge people, not me."

Facing harassment

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Al Shawafs experienced the same shock and sadness as every other American family.

But they had something else to worry about, too.

Because Gailani's head scarf publicly identified her as a Muslim, they were concerned she might be harmed by someone who was angry and seeking revenge.

"You hear about so many incidents," says Taha Al Shawaf. "She's always in the car, going from one house to another for her business. I thought she maybe could just be careful and only go out when necessary. But she said, 'I have to do my work."

She did go out, and she did get harassed - three times.

All three happened the week after Sept. 11. One incident happened after she parked her van in Naperville's White Eagle subdivision to visit a client. A teenage boy drove past and yelled, "You're cruel."

In the second incident, she was driving in the parking lot of Fox Valley Mall in Aurora when some high school boys in a car started screaming at her.

The third incident scared her the most. She was stopped at a red light in Chicago when a man started cursing at her loudly.

All three events shook her up. "I felt, 'This is unfair'. I felt, 'Is our life going to change?' Because we've been feeling so comfortable and blessed for so many years," she says.

Neighbors, friends, business associates and clients provided a warm counterbalance to the incidents by offering reassurance and calling to see if the family was OK.

Now that a few months have passed, Gailani says she doesn't worry that her daughter will be at risk when she wears the hijab in public. Yusra has never been harassed for her religion.

"I believe that if you believe you're doing the right thing, you have no need to worry," Gailani says.

No regrets for Yusra

From the mainstream girls who find the scarf unusual, to the academics who see it as a symbol of Islamic pride, or culture, or political trends, many observers are injecting a lot of meaning into this little piece of cloth.

Yusra may have to consider the various sides of the debate as she gets older, but at age 13, she probably hasn't heard of most of them.

For now, when her mother asks whether she's really comfortable wearing the scarf to show her reverence for God, her answer is uncomplicated: "Yes, why wouldn't I be?"