Naina and the Dancing Hijabis

**This post might (will) be offensive to ultra-religious and hijabi types but I am PMSing and I just want to be mean and offensive today. So there**


Last week we went to the Fetes de Geneve, basically a giant fair along the lake in Geneva. They had a ferris wheel, other strange rides and more importantly lots and lots of yummy food stalls at the not-so-usual for Geneva bank-breaking prices. Interestingly most of the stalls were Indian. Samosas here I come. There were also wicked looking cocktails (sadly I was still on antibiotics and cortisone so I had to abstain) and cotton candy and churros.


Oh yes, when I say we went to the fair I include my dog, Naina. She was excited, sniffing at the ground, the air, trying to figure out what all the excitement was about.


We were about 30 feet away from this ninja...errrr....hijabi woman. Did I mention most of the fair attendees were the Arabs who descend on Geneva in the summer? She had her index fingers up in the air and was sort of jerking around rather rythmically.


I was thinking, cool the woman is dancing. A bit strange to be doing a bhangraesque dance while in full religious regalia but she's happy, she's at the fair...so whatever. Then she comes closer and starts shaking a finger in my face, "no...no...no....dog...no...no."


What the fuck? My dog, on a short leash (maybe a two-foot leash, while she was really about 30 feet away) was happily sniffing some other dog's pee on the ground (charming, yes, but that's my dog) nowhere close to this woman. If you're afraid of dogs why come closer to one to admonish its owner?


I said, "My dog has no interest in you," and she gave me a dirty look. Okay, so I think it was a dirty look since all I could see were her eyes and I really need to see someone's entire face to interpret expressions.


We continued walking. And I realized either I was the modern equivalent of Moses or people were just jumping back on either side when we passed. I am not exaggerating. Mothers would pull their kids back, husbands would bark out something to their wives and they would just fall back. Yes, the good religious folk were fleeing the polluting presence of my dog. You do have to wash yourself seven times if you are touched by a dog. I love touching my dog. She feels great, silky and fluffy and warm. I am perennially unclean I guess.


Then this 7 or 8 year old brat runs forward with an inflatable baseball bat (I wonder if his religious parents knew the bat had pot leaves all over it) and behaves like he is going to swat her on the head with it. I looked at him and said in my sternest, mean voice, "I don't think so," and he slunk away.


If he had even touched her I would have hit him. I was getting really pissed off about this. No one says you have to love my dog or even pet it or whatever, but quit behaving like idiots. All dogs are not itching to attack you, especially one that has its nose to the ground sniffing or trying to look pathetic so that I'll give her a churro (I did).


Geneva is an incredibly dog-friendly city so when we stepped into a weird parody of a country western bar tent, the waitress immediately brought water for her. She got tons of petting including from this very cute and very energetic two-year old.


This kid kept running to Naina, petting her (roughly) on her head, poking at her paws, her eyes, pulling her tail and sticking a finger up her nose. She was very sweet and very into the dog but Naina, who usually cannot get enough of being touched, retreated under the table, looking at me reproachfully each time this girl touched her somewhere she didn't want to be touched. Still, she did nothing. Just moved her paw or her face away while I tried to teach the kid to be gentle. Eventually, she would just pat her face and her head very sweetly and semi-gently.


Usually when I am out walking I keep Naina really close to my side, walking at my heel so that she doesn't bother people. I know some people are afraid of dogs so I try to be a good citizen.


Now as stepped into little Arabia again, even though I still kept her close to my side I wished that some some hair or something of hers would get on to some of the people jumping back from her. Okay, so I might have held her just a little bit more out there than I usually do. I was getting sick of this strange dog paranoia.


The said dog however was having a grand time. An old man knelt down and hugged her and a little girl petted her belly. Naina was in doggie heaven.


Then I saw a woman wearing a headscarf, looking at her eyes. Her eyes get a lot of attention..since one is blue and the other brown. I braced myself for another negative reaction, some jumping out of the way, abject terror.


Instead this woman rushed over to Naina and hugged her tightly (which she tolerates but does not like) and petted her. Then she called her son who was on some spinning ride and brought him over so he could pet her as well. We managed to communicate despite her broken English and my total lack of Arabic.


She said Naina reminded her of her dog at home. That her dogs too had eyes like Naina. She wanted to know nothing about me but everything about my dog. How old was she? What did her name mean? etc. etc.


We spent about 10 minutes talking about the dog. "Bye, bye Naina," she screamed out as we left. I smiled.


I had confronted a stereotype and it was slightly altered but to be honest hijabis still make me uncomfortable and the Arab invasion of Geneva strikes me as odd. They love what Geneva has to offer. But they still don't want most of it in their own countries. Why?

Perhaps as a (semi) Muslim woman I am even more sensitive to this whole head scarf/hijab thing. I don't remember hearing any of these debates when I was a child but suddenly it's a big thing. When did it become such a symbol of identity.

As a child I was told proudly that no woman in three generations of my family had observed purdah. It was seen as a step forward. And now there are young women choosing to wear hijab as a right. To some they are asserting their rights as Muslim women. To me they are regressing and setting women back.

I am not sure I understand this at all. This need to set yourself apart when there is no need to. Dress modestly. Be religious. Pray five times and definitely avoid my dog. But why make yourself into a spectacle? Why attract more attention when the stated purpose of the hijab is to attract less?

I am liberal, unabashedly so and feminist, unreservedly so. And I find religiosity and religious people rather frightening. I believe they have the right to believe and do what they want to do but I can't understand it. Or want to understand it. And I have the right to find them frightening and strange.

Interestingly, it is liberals who support the right to wear the hijab. And so uneasily I find myself on the side of a more conservative viewpoint. I believe (and I am sure many will disagree) that wearing the hijab is injurious to women...and men.

It pre-supposes that women are just their bodies and their hair and by controlling these two, society is made safer. It pre-supposes that men are lustful animals unable to control themselves. And it pre-supposes that women have to curtail their personal freedom and bear the responsibility for men's inability to control themselves.

I have a solution.

Instead of women wearing hijabs, why don't men wear blindfolds? I'll even throw in the white canes for free.

And then Naina and I can go to the fair without dancing hijabis and bratty kids.

A Year of Resistance

Later this May it will be a year since my essay 'War Stories,' was published in the Seal Press anthology, Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality. Nothing has changed. At least on the surface.

The world is still at war, trapped in an ever escalating cycle of violence. And women--not just Muslim women--are just still being victimized for many reasons. Killed for honor, killed for dowry, flogged for studying in Afghanistan, held down and had their genitals excised for purity, living in captivity for venturing outside the home...for resistance. It all boils down to one reason: they are killed because they are women.

The women in the anthology spanned the globe, representing almost every continent. They cut across not only racial and demographic lines but also in their degree of Muslimness. From the pious to the profane, from very Muslim to barely Muslim, all were represented. From essays to art, to memoirs and poetry, this slim volume has it all.

To me it was a work that reached behind the Muslim veil to uncover a world teeming with many and contradictory ideas. Personally for me, while writing War Stories, I broke many taboos.

I've always written honestly about myself --whether in my blog or in articles and stories--but it was in bits and pieces, vignettes. No one could really put an entire picture together. No one knew me. Now I was about to rip that away. In 'War Stories' there was no anonymity to hide behind, no disguise. This was my own story, my journey...and my resistance.

There are others braver than I, others who have resisted and overcome more, and I can only appreciate them when I think of the fear that came to the surface each time I started down to write this essay.

Fear about what my family might think and say, fear even if some crazy fundamentalist types might come knocking, fear of hurting others by my writing. I cannot even imagine the struggles of the others who wrote in the same anthology: the lesbian struggling to come out, the Afghan woman trying to make sense of her world.

In the end I am glad I wrote it, glad it was published and glad it was reviewed well. But I am most glad when I think of my own small triumph: my own resistance.

So, every May, from now on I will celebrate my resistance while thinking of those who cannot resist, those who die for resisting and those whose voices we never hear because they are stifled even as they resist inside. And I realize that wars will continue and become more violent, more tragic and yet sadly mundane. The only thing that ultimately matters is our own resistance to violence and to its insiduous reach.

Here's an excerpt from my essay:

"How do I define war? How do I redefine it? Is that even possible? For years war has been the fear that follows my mother even into her later years. Fear that blossoms like daisy-cutters in my dreams. It is being violently uprooted from long-held anchors like home, family, city, nation, and comfort. It is the understanding that places that were havens can become killing grounds, in an instant. Wars don’t even have to be fought between countries. They are fought within them, between people who live side by side. They can be fought between strangers or between brothers. Wars unleash machines of destruction from afar like mega video games. You can look straight into the eyes of your killer and he can feel the warmth of your blood on his hands before you die. War has to be felt and experienced. And it still might never make sense. Living in a culture and in a time where war is part of the constant narrative it is no wonder that its stories haunt me, though I am lucky enough never to have experienced it first-hand. "