Imagine being a four year old girl. Your life revolves around playing and spending time with your family. You look up to your parents and like to mimic their behaviour. When dad walks around with his hands behind his back, you do the same thing. When mum puts on a headscarf every time she goes outside, you want to do the same thing. You play with the scarf and every time you put it on, you get showered with compliments by the adults. Mum gives you a kiss, dad gives you a kiss and tells you how proud he is, aunties and uncles give you pets, and so do your grandparents. Everyone is smiling seeing how cute you are in that little headscarf that was specially made for your small head.
You grow up and cannot wait to continue making your parents proud. Never letting their smile fade away because you'll always do as they say. When they ask you, 'are you ready to put on the headscarf full-time'? You eagerly say 'yes!'
Now you're ten noticing differences in your class. Not every girl wears the hijab. Sometimes you wonder why that is. Do they not want to make their parents proud? Dad told you that God loves girls that cover their hair. He will take good care of them. What happens to those that don't wear it? You wonder very briefly, because most of the time, you're not occupied with the why's and how's. You just want to play with your friends and siblings.
You're thirteen in your first year of middle school. It seems like differences are becoming more obvious now, and you're more occupied with it. You have a group of female friends but only a few wear the headscarf. You don't mind it most of the time, but sometimes you do wonder how life would be like if you didn't wear a headscarf. Could you then wear the cute crop top you saw last time with your favourite band on it? Could you go to the pool parties your friends are always talking about? You know that you can't ask these questions at home. Mum and dad have been very clear about the rules: no bare arms, no bare legs, except to other girls or family members.
With every year, it becomes more difficult to keep up with the rules. Once you go through puberty, your parents start policing your behaviour even more. You can't have break days during ramadan anymore, you can't hang out with boys in your class anymore and your parents start telling you to be wary of irreligious friends that could lead you astray, like your homosexual friend. These behaviours are all very normal things, so you start to wonder what the reasonings are. The only way you can find this out is to become more religious, so you start going to religious sermons.
Imams and sheiks are telling you that the core of a muslim is one that fulfils religious obligations without doubt. Of course seeking knowledge in order to understand God's divine decrees is permissible, encouraged even because islam is the religion of knowledge. But if you don't understand a particular reasoning for an obligation, then it's way beyond what your fickle, human brain is capable of processing. For God almighty has infinite wisdom from which we can obtain knowledge only if he allows so.
So, you wear the hijab, because God told you to wear it. That's it. That's the message. Something in you is not satisfied with this. Why did God not tell your brother to wear the hijab? Why must you be the one to bear this burden simply because you're born female? After all, you didn't choose your gender. If only you were a boy. You could feel the summer breeze in your hair and neck while biking to school. You could wear what you want and blend in with your age mates. You could even marry christians and jews because you're male.
You cast away all of these thoughts and doubts and try to cope with the situation at hand. After all, doubts are from the devil. And what is it going to change anyways? Your parents would be very disappointed in you if you put off the hijab. You have seen how they talked about your older female cousins who have done exactly that. They have been cast away and turned into black sheep. Their parents are now begging family members to pray for their daughters. They're now constantly sinning every time a non-related male sees their hair. All that trouble for what?
You're now sixteen and your friends keep asking you to go shopping with them. You hate doing that because the local shops don't sell modest clothes for teenagers. Your favourite band is coming to a neighbouring city for a concert and your friends are all going there. Except for you of course, because your parents aren't willing to drive you to a music festival, which is filled with sin, for a boy band that's constantly singing about sex and drugs. In fact, you shouldn't even be listening to them, but it's a guilty pleasure. You'll repent after it, you tell yourself. But mum and dad can't find out.
There's a growing distance between you and your friends. Their curfew is getting later as they're aging but yours has stayed stagnant since you were 12. They're forming memories together you're not apart of. You become bitter and tell yourself it's for the better. They were always tempting you to sin in order to fit in anyways. It's better that you don't have them in your life. Maybe if you spent more time with your family and religion, your doubts would go away.
Except they don't go away. Now you're 18 about to graduate high school and even more determined to take off the hijab. A lot of muslims don't wear it, why can't you? You know it's a sin to not follow religious obligations, but you still can't let it go. You tried to find loopholes for the hijab but couldn't find any. That hasn't made it any less difficult.
Of course, you can't tell your family about it. They would freak out. It's better that you try to convince them to let you move out for college and take off the hijab there secretly. You've been a good daughter and a good muslim and that's enough to let them trust you. They reluctantly agree to let you go, but on the condition that you don't move out too far so your parents can regularly check up on you.
You're 20 years old in your second year of college. You take off the hijab on campus and put it on when going home. You've been doing it for about two years and by the day, you're becoming less and less nervous that your family might find out. The only thing that has been growing is frustration that you have to live like this. Your friends have religious families that accept them despite living an irreligious life, why can't your family do the same? Why can't you just be less religious and still have a bond with them? It's like their love is conditional. That piece of fabric on your head is the weak foundation of their parental love. They're afraid that you'll foresake islam once you take off the hijab, like it's a warning sign for the unthinkable (becoming an infidel).
They're so wrong, you think to yourself. You're still the religious you, just without the headscarf. You still pray, read the Quran, don't go drinking or having sex despite being surrounded by students who's lifes only revolve around these things. In fact, you can say with full confidence that taking off the hijab has made you even more of a practicing believer than before. It's just that now you're practicing your faith more privately as to not get singled out by outsiders.
It doesn't help, you realise. Every time you go back home to eat and laugh with your family, you wonder how fast their smiles would fade away if you told them the truth. Your mum is talking about how she put her islamophobic colleges in their place by telling them that putting on the hijab was HER choice. You laugh, like everybody else, at the dumb non-believers, but you wonder, has it really been your choice? I mean, technically you said 'yes' when your parents asked you, but you were also eight years old. You didn't know any better and just wanted to give the acceptable answer so that your parents would be proud of you. If that's a choice, then it's a choice you heavily regret.
You see, the truth is that, hijab is not a choice. It has never been a choice. The only choice a muslim woman has in regards to the hijab, is the choice to sin. And that's called a religious obligation, not a choice.
