{"id":11650,"date":"2014-01-25T18:45:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-25T18:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/?p=11650"},"modified":"2025-10-05T22:14:32","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T21:14:32","slug":"world-hijab-day-doa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2014\/01\/25\/world-hijab-day-doa","title":{"rendered":"World Hijab Day: DoA"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/images\/nazma-khan.png\" alt=\"Nazma Khan, an Asian woman wearing a hijab, delivering a lecture\" style=\"margin-left: 5px; margin-bottom: 5px; float: right;\" \/>Earlier this week, there was a so-called <a href=\"http:\/\/writerinawheelchair.co.uk\/2014\/01\/in-which-i-get-ranty\/\">Day of Acceptance<\/a> (of Disability), organised by a company called 3E Love, which markets a variety of merchandise, like T-shirts, stickers etc, bearing their logo of a wheelchair with a heart-shaped &#39;wheel&#39;. Some disabled people objected that the event was a marketing scheme for that company&#39;s products, that they had already accepted their disability and wanted other people to accept them and their disabilities seven days a week rather than one day a year. Saturday week (1st Feb) is meant to be World Hijab Day, &quot;an open invitation to Muslims &amp; non-Muslims to wear Hijab for a day&quot;, which has been leapt on by various media outlets including BBC London. Much as with the occasional bit of disability tourism, however, hijab tourism (or niqab tourism) doesn&#39;t really give an accurate impression of the full-time experience. (The event has <a href=\"http:\/\/worldhijabday.com\/\">a website<\/a> and a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/WorldHijabDay\">Facebook page<\/a>. More: <a href=\"http:\/\/muslimmatters.org\/2014\/01\/20\/world-hijab-day\/\">Muslim Matters<\/a>, Ms Muslamic <a href=\"http:\/\/msmuslamic.wordpress.com\/2013\/07\/21\/heres-whats-wrong-with-hijab-tourism-and-your-cutesy-modesty-experiments\/\">[1]<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/msmuslamic.wordpress.com\/2014\/02\/01\/hijab-tourism-redux-world-hijab-day-edition\/\">[2]<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->I&#39;ve written about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2010\/10\/14\/niqab-experiments-dont-do-it\">both types of tourism<\/a> before, but it&#39;s an idea that never quite goes away. Sometimes it has good intentions, such as when non-Muslim women wear hijab at times when Muslim women who wear it are being attacked, but other times it&#39;s just a matter of them not being bothered to ask women for whom it&#39;s their normal dress for going out in. When BBC London put out their tweet asking for women who&#39;d &quot;take up the challenge&quot; of wearing hijab for the day on 1st Feb, I responded:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\n<p>.<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/BBCLondon949\">@BBCLondon949<\/a> lots of women in London wear hijab all the time. Ask someone who&#39;s been wearing it for years, not hours! <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/search?q=%23WorldHijabDay&amp;src=hash\">#WorldHijabDay<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Matthew Smith (@indigojo_uk) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/indigojo_uk\/statuses\/426355907979911169\">January 23, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Among the other inspired responses to the event:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\n<p>I wore a fake beard for a day. I now understand The Male Experience. What do you mean not all men have beards. I UNDERSTAND MEN NOW.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Fatihah (\u256f\u00b0\u25a1\u00b0)\u256f\ufe35 \u253b\u2501\u253b (@Hijabinist) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Hijabinist\/statuses\/426358154805669889\">January 23, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\n<p>I mean what if instead of interviewing politicians or sportsmen we took people off the street to dress up and roleplay as them for a day<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Edcrab (@Edcrab<em>) &lt;a href=&quot;<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Edcrab\">https:\/\/twitter.com\/Edcrab<\/a><\/em>\/statuses\/426356635427037184&quot;&gt;January 23, 2014<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>I&#39;m quite disappinted by the manner of BBC London&#39;s participation, as it&#39;s a local radio station and can easily contact people who can tell them what it&#39;s like to go out in <em>hijab<\/em> every day. For these women, it&#39;s a matter of a religious commitment, something that they and others before them have fought to get accepted in schools and workplaces, and they have found a way of wearing it that they find most comfortable. This won&#39;t be the case for someone who just wears it for a day; they&#39;ll take an off-the-peg type such as an al-Amira, or they&#39;ll awkwardly pin a scarf under their neck. In the same way, when women just &quot;try on the niqab&quot;, they&#39;ll not have the religious commitment and they are unlikely to have shopped around for a well-made and comfortable one. In addition, most women who wear <em>niqaab<\/em> live in areas of substantial Muslim settlement such as east London; their numbers in other areas have become noticeably fewer, particularly since the hostility stirred up by Jack Straw in 2006.<\/p>\n<p>Then again, perhaps getting a &quot;just put it on&quot; view makes the whole event a bit more dramatic; inviting people who wear it all the time to give their accounts might get boring; it&#39;s just an account of normal life. (The same desire for novelty and drama is found in TV&#39;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2011\/06\/13\/emmerdale-assisted-suicide-and-the-drama-imperative\">treatment of disability<\/a>.) Furthermore, probably the majority of hijab-wearers in London are Asian women, and the sight of an Asian woman in hijab in London has become somewhat normalised, while a white woman would still attract stares, although perhaps less so where there is an established Arab population. However, someone just doing it for a day as a challenge, rather than an actual female convert who wears it because it is part of the religion, will not have to deal with hostile questions about why she wears a &quot;garment of submission\/oppression&quot;, a terrorists&#39; uniform, &quot;that rag&quot;, or about where she&#39;s from (as it would be assumed it would be anywhere but England, especially if she is in a rural town) or about her conversion itself.<\/p>\n<p>What is most irritating about this stunt is that as is so often the case, non-Muslim (most likely white) women&#39;s opinions are being sought on something that normally only affects Muslim women, whether it&#39;s university lecture segregation or hijab and whether women (and girls) should wear it and where. (Occasionally they find a &quot;Muslimoid&quot;, someone who has the right colour and a Muslim-sounding name, but who is not in fact Muslim and is hostile to Muslims &#8212; Yasmin Alibhai-Brown being the usual suspect.) There are tens of thousands of women who wear hijab in London who could offer a variety of experiences of wearing it as a teenager, an adult, in various professions and at various times in history &#8212; if they want to invite one woman who tried it on for the day and include her among the other women, that&#39;s fine, but we don&#39;t want to hear a whole feature of trying-on experiences.<\/p>\n<p><em>Image is a still from a lecture given by WHD founder Nazma Khan; you can watch it on their website or <a href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/_fgohZYqbmE\">YouTube<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this week, there was a so-called Day of Acceptance (of Disability), organised by a company called 3E Love, which markets a variety of merchandise, like T-shirts, stickers etc, bearing their logo of a&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-women"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-31U","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11650"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41194,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11650\/revisions\/41194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}