It is our duty as feminists to protect and respect women in Hijabs
Now. More. Than. Ever.
Question: if I see someone pull off a Hijab, what should I do? I know there are reasons they are worn so I want to if i should stand in between them and who did this, should i protect them from view somehow, or something else? This has been happening a lot so I feel it’s something everyone needs to know.
Good question! I cannot correctly and effectively answer, as I am a white, non-Muslim person; however, I will reblog in case any of my followers can answer.
I asked my Hijabi friend, so here’s one Hijabi’s answer:
“my opinion is, definitely try cover them or give them something to cover themselves with. And perhaps shoo off the person, without putting oneself in danger! God forbid, if that happened to me, I would like someone to come and comfort me and give me something to cover my hair with and then help me report it to the cops “
(Followers, if any of you are hijabi and would like to expand on this answer or offer alternatives, please do.)
If u see it happen to 1 of us, pls cover our head + hair with a coat or shawl or any piece of cloth, while hugging us in comfort. Please don’t get hurt by lashing out @ the perpetrators in any way, coz if they dare to do that, they’re probably too far gone in their own hatred to listen to any reason. Much love + Thank You to anyone who supports us.
yes !! everything said here is important af. if you see someone pull off a girl’s hijab immediately cover her hair and provide comfort. don’t talk to the perpetrator but try to get the woman out of there if you can. maybe if you have a scarf on you at the time give it to her so she can wear it until she’s alone and can replace her hijab. please please protect muslim girls because we already had it hard before donald trump became president and now its gonna be worse with people going around thinking their violence and cruelty is justified
for my other white ppl who might have a hard time, it’s my understanding that a hijab is like a major item of clothing, not an accessory like a hat or a scarf. so think abt it more like if someone just ripped someone’s shirt or skirt off. u don’t want to be left there exposed or have to walk home without it.
everyone, even outside America needs to protect our Muslim sisters in these times.
as a man, what would be the best thing to do? should i turn my head and avoid looking at their hair? can i still offer a jacket or something similar?
^I’m hoping someone has an answer islamaphpbia is on the rise in my town and I want to be a good male non Muslim ally
For men, yes please, we would prefer it if you avoided looking at our hair, and if we don’t have something to substitute as a hijab at that moment, anything you could lend us, a jacket, etc, would be very appreciated.
Also, since most girls avoid physical contact with men they’re not related to, please do not hug them, but rather shoo the offender away if you can, or at least escort the girl to a safe place. You can still offer words of encouragement and support. Furthermore, understand that the victim may not be very welcoming towards you because she’ll obviously be shaken, and won’t know where you are coming from. If that’s the case, please still give her something to cover herself (hijab is very important, think of it as someone ripping your shirt off) and stand some distance away until you are sure she’s in safe hands.
Thank you so much for your support, we really appreciate it, god bless all of you.
This weeks attacks at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris have justly sparked a lot of public discussion about terrorism. Unfortunately, most of it has been trite, relying on the old narrative of barbarians at the gates of civilization.
The proverbial “they” are the terrorists, constructed in the collective imagination out of fear, ignorance, and gullibility. “They” hate our perceived freedoms. Our movies have been saturated with images of them: brown-skinned men and women attacking our way of life. Tabloids prominently display their faces alongside images of carnage. Such an understanding lacks nuance and ignores historical, social, and cultural context – it creates a caricature of culture that constructs a monolith of Otherness that must be destroyed at all costs in order to preserve Western liberalism.
So pervasive is this myth that it infects all facets of our culture. Westerners trace their political fantasies to Athens and Rome, fetishizing democracy and republics that were inherently flawed, corrupt, and unequal. More important than who the West identifies as its cultural ancestors, is who or what the West denies. The West is not, in its eyes, barbarous, savage, and cruel. The West is not corrupt, dictatorial, and problematic. The West is justice and all those who oppose it are the purveyors of evil and injustice. Instances that say otherwise, are mere aberrations in our history, not symptoms of our inherent cultural defects. It was Western culture that birthed the Nazi party, it was Western culture that birthed the Spanish inquisition, it was Western culture that both developed and used nuclear warfare. At a point, the weight of all these aberrations becomes too great; there are simply too many Wounded Knees, too many internment camps, too many My Lai massacres, too much slavery, too many secret medical tests on Black people, too many Hiroshimas (it takes a kind of savagery of the soul to eradicate a people without even looking at them), too many drones in the sky, too many Fergusons, too many Eric Garners, too much torture.
The West is more than the United States. Our notions of France are archetypal of our ideas of Westernism. Paris is the “City of Light” and we claim the French Enlightenment ushered in a new era in human history that emphasized reason over traditional, light over dark. The slogan of the French Revolution translates to liberty, equality, and fraternity - a three word summary of what we imagine the West to stand for.
Yet, it was the French who colonized much of North Africa, namely Algeria and Tunisia. The colonized were oppressed both in their native lands and as immigrants in France. France’s history in Africa, rife with racism, is especially problematic. The French referred to the colonized who took on French customs as “evolved,” implying an empirical superiority over native culture. During the Algerian War of Independence, an uncounted number of Algerian Muslim protesters were massacred by the police in the streets of Paris.
When the scales of justice are weighed down with these so-called aberrations, justice, like a house of cards, falls over, an aberration unto itself.
America and the West is not devoid of problems, we are hardly exceptional in that way.
When a terrorist attacks a civilian or government target in a Western country, the discourse varies based on the attacker. If the attacker is obviously Muslim, the agent is labeled an Islamic terrorist. If the attacker is a white Westerner, he is deranged and irrational. One is a product of his society, the other is not. This essentialist dichotomy is precisely the reason the media was slow to label the Tsarnaev brothers attack in Boston, so much so that they threw one of the brothers on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.
But when either terrorism is discussed, societal, economic and political context is dismissed. The personal context of the white American terrorist is magnified - he is a deranged man, a disturbed lone wolf acting outside the bounds of his society. The Muslim is essentialized as culturally-predisposed to terror by a violent faith, acting in accordance with the nature of his society.
Think on Timothy McVeigh, the man convicted and executed for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995: he was portrayed as alienated, insane, and fundamentally evil. The social and material conditions that produce McVeighs are rarely explored; rather, psychological defects are cited as the root cause of their malice. We have had similar homegrown American terrorists. We have had Ted Kaczynski the Unabomber, a Harvard-educated mathematician who wrote scathing critiques of modern industrial society. We have had the shooters: James Holmes in Aurora; Michael Page, the Army Veteran responsible for the Sikh temple shooting; Jared Loughner the Tucson, Arizona shooter; and Steven Kazmierczak, who killed 27 people in a Northern Illinois University lecture hall. These are just a few of the many. Between 1982 and 2012, there have been at least 62 mass shootings in the United States. Most of these acts were meant to send a political or social message.
Is it something about our society or culture that produced these killers? Are they anomalies or are they representative of something ubiquitous?
Simultaneously, there are no close studies of the Muslim individuals who perpetrate acts of terror. Their upbringings are not dissected nor are their conditions examined; instead they are painted with a broad brush. Their childhood friends are not interviewed, elaborate psychological profiles are not publicly discussed. The motives are reduced to one word: Islam.
If the target of both kinds of terrorists is the Western power structure, in the eyes of the media, the West is a priori exonerated without scrutiny. No reasonable person would blame the terror on people shopping in a Parisian kosher market or those working in the Twin Towers. Clearly, the victims of terror are innocent.
Our current discussions on terrorism are inadequate. They are largely racist, serving to further the political and economic interests of the Western power structures while doing nothing to create a world in which we can live alongside one another.
Responsible discourse lies not in dismissing these actions as the products of either psychosis or an evil, inferior culture. It begins with self reflection– in unraveling our myths about others and ourselves.
Watching people call the Supreme Court “American taliban/Isis” and sharia law like you are so unabashedly racist, islamophobic, and orientalist that you can’t comprehend that this was made by White Evangelical Americans and wasn’t influenced by any of those groups but 100% White Evangelical American in its conception
[ID #people rlly see white American injustice in the US and go what are we a bunch of MUSLIMS?? /end ID]
SERIOUSLY. A lot of the white “moderates” I grew up with who say shit like this really prefer to think of any injustice against them as something from far away or a “foreign” “unamerican” thing because otherwise they’re going to have to acknowledge it’s people like their own goddamn dad supporting policy that may kill them. And they’re gonna have to stare their fucked up inter family dynamics in the face if they acknowledge this. But nothing will change until they actually DO confront that.
It’s a lot easier to act helpless and like there’s nothing THEY could personally do.
