Learning goal #1

1.2

Huffington Post Article

The focus of the article is on 3 Muslim women who decided that they no longer desired to wear a veil. It's about the difficulties they had when trying to decide if this was the best choice for them. The article mentions that for some of the women their families often thought badly of them and thought they were going directly against the will of Allah.These Women all seem to fell uncomfortable with the hijab. Some women get the feeling that the hijab is forced on girls when they are young and that wearing a hijab is "based on a flawed dehumanizing analogy of comparing women to objects, such as  pearls and wrapped pieces of candy." Muslim women in the United States of America may feel even more uncomfortable because some people will say things like "Osama bin Ladden! or f*****g Arab go home." It also seems to make women feel " shy, fragile,and dumb." They are taught the "hijab is not merely a head covering, but a lifestyle." This could make women feel like they can't live their lives to become what they want to be.

NPR Program: Lifting the Veil

The focus of this article is on a series of women trying to decide if they should take of the veil that they had been wearing since they were very young. The removing of the hijab is considered to be an emotional decision. Some Muslim women believe "when you wear the hijab you are represent the Muslim community (umma)." In some cases the hijab causes Muslim women to draw unwanted attention. One women said that " I'm the kind of person who likes to walk into a room and be unnoticed. When you wear hijab and you walk into a room, everyone notices you; everyone stares at you makes assumptions about you." Many women go through an even bigger struggle with the hijab in the United States because the religion in the United States can be considered fluid. The women in this article seem to have mixed views on the hijab because some of the women would go back and forth between periods of wearing the hijab and periods of taking it off.

1.3

I think that the ways of dress establish the identity of Muslims to those outside the religion. This is because when someone is out somewhere wearing a hijab it is easy to identify them as Muslim. The headscarf has become something that the world widely associates with the Islamic faith. It is what the people of the world notice about Muslim women at a first glance and that first glance is all it takes to define a woman as part of the umma and begin to form assumptions about people. I think that the rules of Muslim dress very clearly inform people of who is practicing Islam and who is not. While it very clearly informs the world of the communal identity, I don't think that it clearly reflect the communal identity. Since Islam is practiced all over the world there is no way that there is a communal identity that can be seen just by looking at the rules of Muslim dress. As is mentioned in the two articles above, not all Muslims are continuing to follow the rules of dress anymore. Many Muslim women especially believe that the rules are not to be considered to be part of Islam, but part of the Arab culture where Islam originated. The articles both mentioned that roughly half of Muslim women in this current generation wear the veil. There is a split that can be seen in the umma or Muslim community. Some countries such as the United States is considered to have fluid religious practices where people often change their views on what they believe. While these changes may not always be extreme in some places around the world they are so set on staying the same that a constitution has been set to establish an official religion.