Boldly modest declaration of faith
For a Fairfax County teenager, middle school represents a major test of her decision to wear a head scarf as a sign of her devotion to Islam
By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 15, 2009




Smar Abuagla steps out her front doo r at 7:20 a.m., her shoulders slightly hunched, her eyes watchful.

Last year when she made this walk to the bus stop on the first day of school, she was wearing black skinny jeans and a short-sleeved T-shirt; her hair was in braids. But this year she's a different Smar. In addition to looser, more modest clothing, her hair is completely hidden under a head scarf.

It is a look that not only sets her apart from most girls at her Reston middle school but also proclaims her as a Muslim, a religious minority in a country that sometimes associates her faith with terrorism and acts of violence.

Most of Smar's friends and classmates have never seen her in the scarf before. Smar, 13, has no idea how they will react.

It's drizzling as she reaches the bus stop, where she huddles under an umbrella. The eighth-grader is normally chatty with an impish grin, but today when a couple of girls she knows slightly walk up, she mutters, "Hi," and rolls her eyes self-consciously. Omigosh, I probably look horrible. Omigosh, everyone's staring at me.

She closes the umbrella.

"Hey, Smar, if you're not going to use that, can I?" one of the girls says. "My hair's getting wet."

Smar silently hands it over.

At her middle school, plenty of the 960 students are from Muslim families. But only three or four of the girls wear head scarves.

Some of Smar's friends didn't even know she was Muslim until she mentioned one day that she spoke Arabic.

"They're like, 'Why? Only Muslim people do that,' and I'm like, 'Yeah, you don't get it?' "

Today, when she arrives at school in her green and black head scarf, they'll get it.

Badge of faith
Smar hated the scarf when she first put it on.

Hijab was required for Saturday Islam classes at her family's mosque, the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS). But the scarf itched. It felt hot. Smar whipped it off as soon as she got outside.

"I was like, 'This is America. You can't make me wear it!' " she recalls.

Although she was born in Sudan, her parents brought her to the United States when she was 3 months old. She speaks fluent Arabic, and her faith is a central part of her life. She follows the requirements for fasting and praying, and she would like to go to Mecca one day.

At the same time, she loves the Jonas Brothers (especially Nick) and vampire books. Her Facebook page declares her admiration for Michael Jackson, fries, her mother and Barack Obama, and it is strewn with pictures of herself, scarfless, hamming for the camera.

For a long time, the question of hijab, worn by many Muslim women to fulfill a religious requirement for modest dress, hovered in the blurry future, along with prom, college and marriage. There is no set time when a girl has to start wearing it. Some start as adolescents; some never do.

Smar's mother, Taysir Ali, who grew up near Khartoum, has always covered her hair. She didn't give it much thought, she says, until after her arranged marriage to Jamal Abuagla, who had been living in the United States since the 1980s. When he brought her here in 1996, she was confronted with all the temptations that Americans face.

"Seeing the kissing, the hugging, I was sweating," says Ali, a vivacious mother of four.

She has never been harassed for covering her hair, she says, not even in the tense days after Sept. 11, 2001, or in the wake of the Nov. 5 shootings at Fort Hood, Tex., where an Army psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, a Muslim, is charged with killing 13 people.

People have always seemed more curious than hostile, Ali says.

But that hasn't been the case for everyone. After the World Trade Center fell and the Pentagon burned, mosques were vandalized, and women in hijab were spit on and cursed at. In a few cases, Muslims were killed.

Eight years later -- even as the Muslim population in the United States has soared to as many as 7 million -- it still can take real courage for a girl to put on a head scarf and venture into a public middle or high school.

"Young boys go to school, and nobody knows they are Muslim, but young girls, with a scarf on their head, it shows clearly that she made a decision to stand out as a Muslim," says Mohamed Magid, the imam at ADAMS. "They suddenly become ambassadors of Islam."

Smar didn't embrace that role until her mother took her and her younger siblings to Egypt this past summer to visit family. Smar noticed immediately that all the women and girls there wore hijab. People stared at Smar's shoulder-length dark hair.

"It felt awkward," she says. "I felt so left out."

She decided to try wearing a head scarf. Her aunt, who lives in Cairo, showed her different styles: double layers of color that frame the face, tight cloth that gathers at the neck or blooms into a floret behind one ear.

Smar returned to Virginia in early September with a rainbow assortment of scarves and a changed attitude.

She had grown used to wearing what she calls "my badge of faith." It was new and exciting, and it made her feel, she says, "modest and confident at the same time."

She knows it makes her parents proud, especially her mother. "She's my rock; she's my base," said Smar, a few days after mother and daughter had returned from Egypt with their fingertips dyed black with matching henna treatments.

In America, the scarf makes her unusual. Smar has never been a follower. "I like being my own person," she says.

Now, with eighth grade starting, she feels ready to show off her new look, regardless of how her classmates might react.

Glad to be green
The long yellow buses pull up to Langston Hughes Middle and deposit hundreds of adolescents. In the sea of uncovered heads, Smar's stands out like an emerald. She hugs friends she hasn't seen all summer.

Eman Kurtu, a skinny Muslim girl with pink braces and frizzy hair, looks at her in amazement, Smar will recall later, and asks, "You're going to wear that for the full year?"

Yes, Smar says.

"Well," Eman says, "at least you can pull it off. I could never do it."

The girls disappear inside the school.

At 3 p.m., Smar bursts back into her family's townhouse. Her mother is stirring a lamb stew that infuses every room with the aroma of cinnamon and cardamom. Smar hasn't eaten today -- she's fasting for Ramadan -- but she doesn't seem to notice the food as she breathlessly reports on the first day.

"For science, I have Miss Love, and I have to write a paper about hurricanes. And you have to sign these papers." She pulls out a sheaf of forms for Ali to fill out.

Only when prompted does Smar recall the effect the head scarf had as she navigated the crowded halls on her first day.

"Oh, yeah, my friend Joey, he saw me, and he had to do a double take." Another boy "actually didn't recognize me, which was kind of shocking. I'm like, 'I was in your second-period Spanish,' and he's kind of like, 'My God, it's Smar. You look really . . . green.' And I'm just like, 'Thank you.' " She got called a leprechaun and a snake charmer, but the teasing was affectionate. Several friends told her she looked great.

Smar is in high spirits as she heads to the bedroom she shares with Smah, her younger sister.

Smah is practicing Beethoven's Ninth on the recorder. Ten years old, she still has a child's body, and when Smar started wearing the scarf, she wrinkled her nose and pronounced herself "out" as Smar's maid of honor.

But now, as Smar sifts through a colorful pile of scarves on her bed, Smah brings out her own outfit, a smock with a matching scarf from Egypt. Soon, Smah declares sassily, she is going to one-up Smar and adopt the hijab in sixth grade.

Smar rolls her eyes. She wishes she could hang out with friends more, but her parents won't allow her go to the mall or to movies unchaperoned. She has never attended a sleepover.

Smar complains that sometimes she feels caged.

"I know I'm going to thank them for this someday," she says gloomily. But for now, "it's kind of bad, like when my friends go to skate night at the mall. I can only go on family outings, which I really hate. At my age, it's not that great because everyone else does their own thing, but I'm stuck being the child that stays at home."

Taunts and tears
The taunts come during the second week of school.

Smar is sitting in her first-period Tech Exploration class, chatting with friends, she will recount later, when she feels something hit her forehead. She looks down and sees an eraser.

"Who did that?" one of her friends demands.

A few seats down, a group of boys snicker. Smar glares at them and flings the eraser back.

"Hey, chill," the guys say.

"No, you don't do that to me," she says.

"Okay, okay, fine," they say, and she lets it go.

But later that day a boy in gym class asks if she is hiding a bomb under her scarf. Another calls her "raghead." Someone throws a pencil at her head; she can't tell who, so she just snaps it in half.

At the end of the day, she comes home and collapses in tears. "I think, like, five things got thrown at me," she says, her voice breaking.

None of it hurt, not even the zucchini hurled at her head by an eighth-grade boy as she got off the bus. But Smar is devastated.

"It's the thought that no one did that to me last year that bothers me," she says. "I don't care if it's a feather or a 50-pound rock; I don't care. No one did this to me last year, and last year I didn't have a head scarf."

If they had tried something like this last year, she says, she would have retaliated. "I can hit just as well as any other boy. My father signed me up for boxing when I was 5."

But this year Smar doesn't know what to do. She doesn't want to tell her closest friends because it will upset them. And if she tells the teachers, she says, "then they'll put out an announcement saying, 'Don't judge people with head scarves,' " which will only make things worse. "I don't want the girls with a head scarf to be hated by everybody."

"My mom said: 'Stick it out. You're going to meet people like this all your life.' But my mom wouldn't know how it is because my mom's been raised in a Muslim country." Smar melts into sobs.

For the first time, she thinks about taking off her head scarf. No one is making her wear it. Her father says he is proud of her decision, but "if today she comes and tells me, 'I'm tired; I just want to be without hijab . . . I'm not going to force her."

Taking it off would offer momentary relief, like sneaking a bite of lamb during Ramadan. "But I know that I'm not going to," Smar says. "I know who I am and I know who I always will be."

Her mother is furious. Tomorrow, when Smar goes to the bus stop, she says, she is going to watch from afar to make sure nothing happens, and if it does, she plans to march over to the school and complain.

But the drama is short-lived: The next day, people are nice to Smar again.

Fear of ridicule
"We're not going to allow skinny jeans this year."

Gasps of horror. A girl jumps up on her chair and points at her denim-clad legs. "See, they're not skinny!"

The ADAMS teachers, young women robed from head to toe in capacious abayas, smile. It's the end of September, and the first day of weekend Islam classes since summer break.

The girls, wearing head scarves along with brightly colored plaids, are asked what they hope to learn about in class. Islamic marriage! The hajj! The Day of Judgment! But the conversation circles quickly back to hijab.

Smar is one of the first girls in the class to become a "full-timer;" the others wear it to the mosque or on special occasions.

"I bring it to school, but I don't wear it," says Rayan Salih, 14.

Shahd Salaheldin, 13, says her older sister was called a terrorist when she put on the scarf. "I was thinking about wearing it, but I heard my friends, people I really do care about, saying, 'There go the ragheads, the towelheads.' I don't have enough self-confidence to do that, you know?"

After class, as the muezzin calls people to prayer, the girls buy a plate of rice and chicken kebab from the mosque's Ramadan holiday bazaar and continue the discussion.

Hijab can't be pushed on a girl, they concur.

"My dad wants me to do it," says Sana Rauf, 14, but her parents are leaving the decision up to her. "They see people who were forced to wear it" and rebelled. "It's like a journey, and a way of life, but you have to find it all by yourself. "

Shahd can only think of a few friends who would accept her in a scarf. "The rest of them would be like, 'I'm not going to talk to you any more because you're Muslim.' I know if I wear it they're going to be like, 'Terrorist! Bombs!' " It's a dilemma. "I know inside that I have to. It's just" -- tears fill her eyes -- "I want to make my parents happy."

Smar tells them about her bad day at school. They are indignant. "You should demand your respect," one tells her. But they don't say how.

Ambassador's burden
On another Saturday at the ADAMS center, Smar hears people talking about how a Muslim man in Texas has done something terrible. The mosque has already denounced his actions, but the news hasn't trickled down to all its youngest members. Smar's mother would like to have kept it that way. The community is horrified by Hasan's actions, Ali says, but she doesn't want Smar to know the details.

No one at school has said anything to her, but the vague information Smar hears at the mosque is upsetting. "Everyone was sad about it," she says. "People lost their lives that day."

She adds: "Islam is a peaceful religion, and it's really sad that people call themselves Muslims" who do such things.

Now, more than ever, she feels the gravitas of her role as an ambassador of her faith.

"It's important for me to be proud of myself and my religion," she says. "It just makes me proud that I get to wear a head scarf and show people."
 
 
What Would Jane Do? How a 19th-century spinster serves as a moral compass in today's worldBy JAMES COLLINS Jane Austen is very funny. Her characters are vivid. The poise of her sentences is perfect. Her plots are pretty good—at least, they keep you reading. However, to write brilliant novels was not Jane Austen's foremost goal: What was most important to her was to provide moral instruction.

Getty Images An engraving of English novelist Jane Austen.

In their essence, Austen's books are moral works. "Northanger Abbey" is really about Catherine Morland's moral education: She learns that the world does not operate on the principles of a gothic novel. As the title indicates, "Sense and Sensibility" is a moral tale: It is the story of Elinor's self-command and Marianne's self-indulgence. The central event of both "Pride and Prejudice" and "Emma" is each heroine's discovery of her own moral weakness. "Mansfield Park" treats any number of moral issues, from the propriety of engaging in amateur theatricals to the consequences of leaving one's husband for another man. The premise of "Persuasion" is that Anne Elliot once sacrificed her happiness by doing her duty and obeying the admonishment of her moral guide, Lady Russell. Moral concerns are not only reflected in the large themes of the books, however: They are pervasive. Even the smallest act or the briefest dialogue or the mere description of a character's manner of dress is freighted with moral content.

Today's readers tend to appreciate Austen despite her didacticism rather than because of it. She can be positively priggish, and that is an embarrassment. The contemporary reader who loves Jane Austen sort of blips over the moralizing sections and tells himself that they don't really count. It is possible to ignore this aspect of her work, just as it is possible to discuss a religious painting with hardly any reference to the artist's religious intent. But this seems absurd: Ignoring a writer's central concern is a strange way to attempt to appreciate and understand her.

The question arises, then, of how to reconcile Austen's moralism with modern sensibility. To address this problem, it would be useful if we could find someone with this modern sensibility who actually reads Austen for her moral instruction (in addition to the literary pleasure she provides). How convenient that we have someone who fits that description available to us: me.

I find that reading Jane Austen helps me clarify ethical choices, helps me figure out a way to live with integrity in the corrupt world, even helps me adopt the proper tone and manner in dealing with others. Her moralism and the modern mind are not, in fact, in direct opposition, as is so often assumed.

To say that one values Austen's moral instruction may produce skepticism because, after all, she was a spinster living in provincial England 200 years ago. But our worlds aren't so very different. We see Austen's characters—vain, selfish, naïve, compassionate—in our own lives every day. Her time and place are actually an advantage. In her circumscribed world, the problems of life may be examined with clear-eyed precision.

Austen lived on the cusp of the 18th-century Augustan and 19th-century Romantic ages. In our own time, nearly every song, advertisement and movie is based on Romantic principles. No matter how much we may enjoy the "felicities of domestic life," as Austen put it in "Persuasion," we still feel the enormous Romantic pull to do something more heroic and intense. Rather than digesting a good dinner while conversing with friends, we should be out forging the consciousness of our race in the smithy of our soul, or some damn thing. I don't really want to forge the consciousness of my race, but at the same time I don't want to miss out on all that Romanticism offers. This is where Austen comes in, for she is an Augustan familiar with Romanticism, which makes her more useful than a modern writer in helping us face the Romantic challenge. Only she can so credibly show us that it is possible to have moderation and deep feeling, good dinners and good poetry.

What, then, are the values that Austen would teach us? Value-laden words and phrases appear again and again in her work, often in clusters: self- knowledge, generosity, humility; elegance, propriety, cheerful orderliness; good understanding, correct opinion, knowledge of the world, a warm heart, steady, observant, moderate, candid, sensibility to what is amiable and lovely.

Austen's moral instruction points one toward a more moral life—where "moral" refers not only to right principles but to conduct in general. Austen's value system can be thought of as a sphere with layers. The innermost core might be called "morals," the next layer we could call "sentiments," and finally the surface "manners." Morals are the fundamental principles: self-knowledge, generosity, humility, tenderest compassion, upright integrity.

Austen's emphasis on good order and propriety can seem dry and stiff. But anyone who reads "Mansfield Park" will feel the same relief that Fanny does at the change from the rackety disorder of her family's house in Portsmouth to the order of the Park. Similarly, Austen's regard for self-control, especially as expressed in "Sense and Sensibility," can seem hard, but it must be remembered how the author clearly regards Marianne's emotionalism with the greatest compassion. Austen is not advocating a suppression of the feelings themselves— despite her faultlessly correct behavior, Elinor undergoes great suffering and feels every bit of it. What Austen is saying, as a modern psychologist might urge, is that one should try to prevent the disintegration of one's personality. Sentiments are built on the foundation of our morals: an amiable heart, sensibility to all that is lovely. Manners, in turn, have to do with behavior, with the way we work in the world: perfect good breeding, gentle address. Surely it is still necessary to have models of good sense and gentle manners held up for us.

How can morals, sentiments and manners help one live in the world? What should one's relations to the world be? Should one reject the world entirely as corrupt and mercenary and hypocritical and shallow? Or is there some other way, where one can keep one's integrity and sensitivity, but live in the world too? W. H. Auden stated the problem well when he wrote:

"Does Life only offer two alternatives: 'You shall be happy, healthy, attractive, a good mixer, a good lover and parent, but on the condition that you are not overcurious about life. On the other hand you shall be sensitive, conscious of what is happening round you, but in that case you must not expect to be happy, or successful in love or at home in any company. There are two worlds and you cannot belong to them both.'"

In effect, Auden is asking if life offers only the two alternatives of "Sense and Sensibility," and one can sympathize with his cry of despair, for when the dilemma is put the way he puts it, the two seem hopelessly irreconcilable.

Austen comes to our rescue, though, for she does manage to modulate between "Sense and Sensibility," rejecting the excesses of both. Her attitude appeals because the combination of morals, sentiments, and manners provides a way of living that allows one both to be in the world and to enjoy the sweets of sensitivity as well. Austen does not write about bohemians and rebels; she doesn't want to change her world—"she would not alter a hair on anyone's head or move one brick," as Virginia Woolf wrote. Her sympathetic characters participate fully in their society and accept its conventions, yet they have exquisitely well-tuned minds and hearts. Good sense does not have to be at war with sensibility.

Irony is not just Austen's characteristic mode of expression: It is her characteristic mode of thought. Austen's irony reflects a perfect understanding of all the ways the world is wretched and the belief that although you can't really fight it, you can at least separate yourself from it. In her ironic sentences, there is movement with stability. She moves toward the object of criticism, then away from it, and then provides a gentle snap of closure at the end. This rhythmic motion serves as an ideal for both accepting and rejecting the ways of the wretched world while maintaining balance.

The irony of Austen's characters also gives those of us who believe in decorum a way to handle hypocrites. "Sense and Sensibility"'s Elinor Dashwood is rarely ironic, but she provides a good example. Recall the conversation when the odious John Dashwood, who has reneged on the deathbed promise to his father to help his half-sisters, suggests to Elinor that Mrs. Jennings will leave them a bequest. Elinor replies, "Indeed, brother, your anxiety for our welfare and prosperity carries you too far." John Dashwood lacks generosity and integrity. Elinor insults him, but she does it in the politest possible way.

If one is to argue that Austen's morality is useful for a person living today, one must deal with three hard cases. First, there is Fanny's objection to the amateur theatricals in "Mansfield Park." Then, in "Sense and Sensibility" there is Elinor's refusal to pursue the man she loves, Edward Ferrars, when she learns that he is oficially engaged to Lucy Steele, a woman who "joined insincerity with ignorance." Finally, there is Anne Elliot's avowal in "Persuasion" that she did the right thing by following the dictates of Lady Russell to refuse Captain Wentworth, even though this led to years of loveless misery for them both. In all three cases, Austen endorses a morality that seems nearly absurd in its strictness. What is the big deal with theatricals? Is the principle of honor worth upholding when it results in mismatches and regret? And what kind of value system puts obedience before love?

Perhaps Austen's strictness is very old-fashioned, but anyone can find merit in the concepts of honor, duty, and obedience. Those strings have gone so slack that there's nothing wrong in their being tightened by a sympathetic reading of this aspect of Austen; they will loosen again soon enough.

To dispense briefly with Elinor and Anne, I will say simply that their actions must be seen in the context of their own sincerely held beliefs. The lesson is that it is sometimes right to sacrifice something we want for the sake of our conscience.

With Fanny Price it almost seems as if Austen set out to create a character that has no manners and no personality, but is simply raw morality. She is famously disliked by readers, but her actions and attitudes can be defended. For all her timidness, she has real courage. She stands up to all the others when they want her to participate in the play, and she even withstands the terrible onslaught of Sir Thomas's disapproval when she refuses to marry Crawford. It is too rarely acknowledged that Fanny is right. The danger of the theatricals is that they bring young men and women together in a sexually charged setting, and, indeed, they do lead to the very outcome Fanny dreads: Henry Crawford and Maria Rushworth run off together. So Fanny is not simply adhering to an arbitrary and silly rule about whether amateur theatricals are proper, she is trying to forestall a circumstance that does end up causing real pain.

Jane Austen's principles are of transcendent value, they are not "priggish," and her novels illustrate and advocate a way of being in the world that is ethical, sensitive and practical. The best representative for the worthiness of Austen's approach to life, however, is Austen herself. The reflection of the first sentence of "Pride and Prejudice" shimmers beneath it: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman of small fortune must be in want of a husband." There is nothing ironic about that: In Austen's time it really was a universal truth. Austen's condition as a single woman without money and no longer young was, as she put it when describing Miss Bates in "Emma," to stand "in the very worst predicament in the world for having much of the public favor." As that very phrase indicates, however, Austen was able to regard her predicament coldly, clearly and without self-pity. The novels convey the poise, balance, forbearance and humor of their creator. By reading them, one is enfolded in her personality, a personality we might wish we could adopt ourselves, for it seems to resolve many of life's problems, moral and otherwise.

—James Collins is a writer and editor whose first novel, "Beginner's Greek," came out last year. This piece was adapted from "A Truth Universally Acknowledged," an anthology of essays about why we read Jane Austen, published earlier this week by Random House. Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved