Many Muslim women in America are facing issues regarding whether they should wear their traditional headdress, the Hijab. The issue has acquired a lot of urgency, especially after the Paris and San Bernadino incidents. Not surprisingly, opinion has tended to vary across different Muslim women on the place that they should accord the Hijab in their lives and practices.
Many Muslim women in their native and traditional societies have grown up wearing the Hijab. Muslim women that have migrated or otherwise moved to America with that kind of background have continued to wear the Hijab themselves. Often, they also raise their daughters and daughters-in-law in much the same way. Hence, a number of such women have grown up wearing it, according to the entertainment magazine Reel Life with Jane.
The recent events in Paris and San Bernadino have injected a new urgency to this issue. For the newer generation of women from Muslim families that are growing up as second-generation Americans, the current events surrounding it have been virtually unprecedented. They have very rarely been subjected to the kind of scrutiny, attention and - sometimes, abuse - by their fellow Americans as they are facing today.
When someone chooses to use or abuse a Hijab to express racist or xenophobic behavior - the American Muslim woman is caught in a quandary. Should she stop wearing the Hijab entirely out of fear of such attacks recurring? Several Muslim women certainly feel that this is right, that they should prioritize their own self-protection and perhaps not wear the Hijab anymore, to stop such attacks from recurring.
However, several other Muslim women have argued that the wearing of the Hijab is a part of their cultural identify, and therefore that it would not be correct for them to stop wearing their Hijabs under any circumstance. Indeed, they argue that racist and xenophobic behavior must be confronted with the positive affirmation of their own identities by the wearing the Hijab, according to the Associated Press.
It is clear that Muslim women in America are going through some very testing times, and how they respond will shape the way their communities will evolve in time.
