by Sheba Karim
But at Lincoln Prep, I didn’t feel normative. I felt invisible, except for my hair.
I saw Farah before she saw me. I was sitting with Ian and Danny in the window seat of the student lounge, which overlooked Lincoln Prep’s grand, imposing main entrance. Ian and Danny were taking selfies of themselves to use as profile pictures for some new gay teen social networking site. They weren’t happy with any of the photos, pronouncing themselves too fat, too skinny, too freckled, too big-nosed. I was staring out the window, listening to them repeat Gross! Delete! when I noticed Farah standing at the bottom of the marble steps. Her blue plaid uniform skirt hit her mid-calf; unlike the other girls, she hadn’t hemmed it to a more fashionable length. Her hair was iron straight with deep blue streaks and she was wearing blue lipstick. I didn’t even know they made blue lipstick.
She reminded me a bit of my mother—long face, elegant nose. She had a prominent widow’s peak. Her eyeliner was so thick I could see it from here. She was striking. Beautiful.
I watched as she visibly exhaled, looking up at our school’s pillared entrance.
Come on, I thought. If anyone can do it, it’s you.
She squared her shoulders, and started to climb the stairs.
“Who is that?” Danny asked.
“Oooh,” Ian said. “Love the hair, but not so sure about the lipstick.”
“Yeah, what’s it called, Hypothermia?” Danny riffed. “Delete.”
“I like it,” I said.
Danny elbowed Ian. “I think your friend has the hots for Hypothermia.”
“You sure you’re straight?” Ian teased.
“Strike a pose,” I ordered, grabbing Ian’s phone and taking a photo to get them to shut up.
I saw her next in pre-calculus. I was already at a desk in the back when she walked in. Our eyes met. The thick silver hoop through her left nostril was another indication that she could be South Asian. I was hoping she’d choose a desk near me but she opted for the front. When she introduced herself as Farah Haider, I knew she was Muslim. Another thing we had in common. Sort of.
Days passed, but she didn’t hem her skirt. Most girls had theirs hit above the knee, the popular girls mid-thigh, a few, as Ian called it, “low-butt.” My mother, whose definition of modesty for me was at or below the knee and well above the boob, had hemmed mine exactly knee length, not so cool, but not weirdo Amish like Farah.
Naturally, the students made fun of her, but she didn’t seem to care. As far as I could tell, she wasn’t engaging in any effort to make friends. I’d see her in the library, reading, or drawing in her notebook or on her arm, wearing these big silver headphones, bopping her head to the music. I wanted to be her friend but I didn’t know how; I smiled at her a few times, but she barely smiled back.
In the middle of fall semester, I entered the auditorium for a school assembly and saw her in one of the back rows, surrounded by empty seats. She’d braided all of her blue streaks, it looked really cool. I walked down her row, pretending to read texts on my phone to make it seem less deliberate, and sat one seat away from her. For me, this was already an act of courage, and I was hoping she’d take it from there, but she kept her headphones on. She was reading a book. It was called Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing.
She wasn’t going to make this any easier. As I got up the nerve to say something, she sighed, slid her headphones down to her neck, stretched her arms forward, interlaced her hands, and cracked her knuckles loudly. Her wrists were even more hirsute than mine, back before I started epilating them every week.
She glanced at me.
Say something.
“My arms are hairy, too,” I said. “Except I epilate them.”
As she wrinkled her forehead, I realized too late that could be construed as an insult.
“Do you always lead like that?” she asked.
“Beginnings aren’t my strong point,” I admitted.
“I see. You know, you could try, Hi, my name’s Shabnam, what’s yours?”
“You know my name!” I exclaimed.
“Uh, you’re in pre-calc with me. You messed up that logarithm question in class the other day.”
“Oh. Yeah, that was me.” Considering my father was a mathematician, you’d really think I’d be better at it.
“You’re Muslim?”
“My mother is,” I told her.
“What’s your dad?”
“Weird.”
She snorted. “And what about you?”
“Me? I’m . . . nothing.”
“You can’t be nothing. At minimum, you’re a Homo sapiens.”
“Well, yeah. What are you?” I asked.
“I’m Muslim,” she answered.
“You don’t seem it,” I said.
“Check your bias,” she replied. “Anyway, I’m more of a Muslim misfit.”
“Cool,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that.
“Are you queer?” she said. “I’m cool if you are, but I’m straight, and anyway I’m celibate until further notice.”
“And I’m the token straight person in the LGBT Alliance.”
“Ah. At least they don’t call it the LGBT/Straight Alliance like they used to. I swear this school is so twentieth century. And the uniforms? Girls in skirts, boys in pants? How misogynistic/gender normative can you get? How has this not been an issue before?” she demanded.
“I know,” I said. “It’s such a pain to have to shave your legs every day when it gets too warm for tights.”
Farah gave me this strange look, and I marveled at the dramatic symmetry of her eyeliner, curving to a fine point a half inch beyond her lids.
“You keep shaving, Qureshi,” she said. “I’m going to wear pants.”
“But you’re not allowed to.”
“Who says? The Man? Are you going to fight the Man, or are you going to let him step on your face?”
“Uh . . . neither?”
She laughed. “Well, I’ll fight for both of us then. Principal Stone better brace himself.”
A few weeks later, Farah was wearing the same navy polyester chinos as the boys. After listening to her feminist argument, Principal Stone informed her that all female students were entitled to wear pants; all they had to do was fill out a dress code exception form. Farah argued there shouldn’t even be the need for an exception, and Principal Stone told her she was welcome to start a student petition. She wrote up the petition and it got passed around. When it came back to her, only thirty-three people had signed it, someone had crossed out Pants and written Hot Pants instead, and someone else had written Long Live Easy Access Pussy! across the top.
“Fuck this noise,” Farah said. “I’m going to buckle down and focus on getting into Harvard.”
Farah began spending a lot of time at my house, and was even allowed to sleep over because her mother assumed we were a good Muslim family like theirs. My mother wasn’t at all perturbed by Farah’s punk style or dyed hair. She was thrilled I’d become such good friends with a girl who was Pakistani, and Muslim, and excelled at school, and who made me happy. “You’re like sisters!” she exclaimed. She even began referring to Farah as her second daughter. I don’t know about sisters, but we quickly became best friends. You could have stuck Farah and me in a room with blank walls and we still would have had a blast, talking shit and laughing our asses off. I could never stand out from the crowd like she did, but I loved being her more “normal” sidekick. We became our own breed of Lincoln Prep misfits. I finally found somewhere I belonged.
As close as we were, we had some major differences. I was the only child of two working parents. My dad hardly spent any money except on books, my mother was frugal, our house was paid up, my parents could afford the Lincoln Prep tuition. I had my own car, a ten-year-old Honda Accord, and I got a two-hundred-dollar-a-month allowance. If I ever needed anything—a new laptop, etc.—all I had to do was ask. I’d only have to take out a partial loan for college, and my mother said they’d he
lp me with the payments later on if needed. I didn’t feel rich, especially compared to the kids at Lincoln Prep, but I never had to worry about money.
Farah, on the other hand, was one of four children. Her father worked as an engineer for the town she lived in, and it didn’t pay much, and her mother was a stay-at-home mom who watched a lot of QVC. Her mother was always complaining that her dad didn’t make enough, that he was lazy and unambitious, and her father would say that if she needed so much money she should go find a job herself. Sometimes, especially after a QVC shopping binge, their fights would turn nasty. Farah was at Lincoln Prep on full scholarship. Even though she was a talented artist who loved drawing, she wouldn’t even consider art school because she never wanted to depend on someone else for money like her mother did, and because she wanted to make enough to help put her younger siblings through college. She was going to become a doctor, one thing about her that toed the line of a good Pakistani girl.
Farah also engaged deeply with her deen, or faith. She spent a lot of time thinking about Islam, which I didn’t, except occasionally when my father went on a rant about the evils of Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism. Her family had been going to the same masjid, or mosque, regularly, for years. She prayed every day, didn’t drink, wouldn’t date, fasted during Ramadan. She also swore a lot, listened to punk music, wore combat boots outside of school, and wanted to pierce her lip except her mother, who wore hijab, could barely deal with her ever-changing hair color. Her mother would say things like, What if you go to Harvard and then boys are too intimidated to marry you? You already look like a freak.
One day, Farah told me she’d listened to a Radiolab episode about memory. “Do you know, the more you remember and talk about something, the less reliable your memory is about that particular thing?” she said. “Given what we know about how memory is so fallible and easily influenced, I don’t understand why we’re still following hadith. They’re all he said/she said hearsay. Every time my parents fight, my dad will throw out with some stupid hadith about how the majority of people in hell will be women.”
“Did the Prophet really say that?” I asked.
“No! That’s the point. He didn’t really say any of it. We don’t know what he actually said, but centuries later Muslims are still trying to base their lives on it. There are a few hadith I like, though, like the Prophet saying that Allah told him, ‘I was a hidden treasure and I wanted to be known.’ It’s kind of beautiful, though it does make Allah sound pretty egomaniacal.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “If you have so many questions, how can you believe?”
“I have so many questions because I believe,” she replied.
I still didn’t get it, but it didn’t matter, at least not until our senior year. Over winter break, Farah went to visit her cousins in San Francisco, buying her ticket with money she’d earned the summer before. She flew to the West Coast with magenta-colored hair, and returned with every strand covered by a black headscarf.
When I saw her enter school, my mouth fell open. We’d been in touch over break, but she hadn’t mentioned this at all. I knew that a piece of cloth shouldn’t make a difference, that she was still the same person underneath, but it did make a difference. Even though she was still wearing her dramatic eyeliner and blue lipstick, she looked, well, religious. And religious wasn’t cool.
“Surprise,” Farah said, frowning as she adjusted her scarf’s folds around her face and neck. “How does it look?”
“Great,” I lied.
“No, it doesn’t,” she said, touching the back of her scarf, where it kind of poofed out in the middle, as if covering a large bun. “My cousin told me it would take a while to get the hang of tying it, and figure out what style I liked. I’ve been YouTubing it, but I still spent half an hour this morning putting it on, I stabbed myself with a pin twice, and it looks terrible. Plus, if I want to cover my whole widow’s peak, I’d have to wear my scarf like, halfway down my forehead.”
She was exaggerating, but not by much. “Can’t you ask your mother for help?”
“Ha. She’s super pissed that I continue to dress like a freak even though I wear hijab.”
“But . . . why did you decide to wear it?”
“I always figured I would, if it felt right.”
She’d never told me that.
“Qureshi? You okay?” Farah asked.
I was relieved when the bell rang, giving me an excuse not to answer.
Farah told me she met her cousin’s new wife in San Francisco, a badass spoken word poet who wore hijab, and she’d told Farah she didn’t have to change her look at all, she could just add hijab to it, that there were people who were going to judge her no matter what she did—if she wore hijab, if she didn’t—so all she could do was be true to herself. Inspired, Farah had worn it with her one day, and then decided not to take it off.
A lot of kids at Lincoln Prep hadn’t even known Farah was Muslim, unless they took a history class with her or paid attention to the Allah pendant she sometimes wore on a black leather cord around her neck. The students gave her a harder time when she first showed up in her unhemmed skirt than when she started wearing hijab. Some of them even made it a point to be nice to her, as if to prove they weren’t prejudiced. A lot of them asked her dumb questions. Since I was her best friend, sometimes I got asked dumb questions, like does she have cancer, do her parents force her to wear it, did her hair fall out because she dyed it so much.
“What’s up with the headscarf?” Ian asked me.
“Delete,” Danny said.
Farah got asked those questions and a hundred thousand others—if she showered in it, if she slept in it, if she still combed her hair, if she was going to have an arranged marriage, if she’d started wearing it because she thought it might make her stand out on her college applications.
The headscarf made a difference to Farah, too. She was conscious of it, always tugging at it, adjusting it, and she became more subdued, like she was trying to figure this new Farah out. Before, people knew her as the feminist in pants or the girl with chameleon hair, but now when they saw her, the first thing they thought of was that she was Muslim.
Initially, the new Farah responded to all the mostly dumb questions nicely, worried that if she was too rude or sarcastic they might walk away with a bad impression of a religion that already had enough negative press. But this also meant she had to suppress her natural impulses, and it made her less fun. I knew I should be patient, give her time to figure this all out, but I wanted my best friend back, the one who didn’t take crap from anyone.
Plus, I hated this new kind of attention, where everything was about Islam. I was tired of having people ask me if I was Muslim too, of having to explain that I wasn’t really, and feeling guilty about it, like I’d betrayed Farah, even though I’d never signed up for any of this.
When Farah confessed how exhausting this was for her, or showed me the comments over a photo she’d posted on a hijabi Tumblr, where a bunch of people had criticized her formfitting long black dress and red-laced black combat boots and heavy eyeliner and blue lipstick, saying it wasn’t Islamic, one guy called jamesdeen786 even calling her a hojabi, I’d say, “So stop wearing hijab.”
After a while, Farah stopped complaining to me. Instead, she withdrew, bit by bit. I knew I should reach out, bring her in for a tight embrace, tell her I loved her no matter what, but I was annoyed at how she’d pulled this without even a warning, that she hadn’t considered how this would affect our friendship, had taken her deen to a place I couldn’t follow.
And, deep down, I kind of agreed that the headscarf was a symbol of oppression. It wasn’t like men had to cover every strand of their hair. I’d heard my father rant about how the Quran was revealed to a particular people at a particular time and needed to be adapted as times changed, how all religions were controlled and interpreted by men and thus backward and misogynist. (He’d be on the couch saying this as my mother was cooking dinner in the kitchen.) It se
emed to me that, on some level, feminist Farah was submitting to the patriarchy.
After Farah started wearing hijab, I even read some Muslim feminist writers who explained that the Quran didn’t actually direct women to cover their hair, that it was a misinterpretation of the text combined with the adoption of patriarchal cultural traditions. When I presented these arguments to Farah, she sighed and said she’d read all of their books and more, and that she wasn’t wearing it because she believed it was a commandment from Allah. Yes, she was wearing it as an expression of her faith, but for her it was as much political as it was religious; because we lived in a society where both Muslims and women were constantly objectified, this was her way of subverting that objectification; she was fighting the Man, she was making a statement, she was continuing her punk Muslim rebellion.
But I still didn’t understand.
Our friendship was beginning to fray, but neither of us was doing much about it. Then, one day, a lanky junior named Ashish stopped her in the parking lot to ask, “Hey, can I ask you something?”
I could sense Farah’s internal, not again sigh.
Taking her silence for an affirmative, Ashish asked, “I don’t understand why the Muslims don’t tell the terrorists to stop?”
For Farah, this was some kind of breaking point, the end of nice.
She clapped her hand over her mouth. “Oh. My. God. You are so right! Hold on—” She took out her phone and pretended to dial. “Hello, Terrorists? Hi! Can you please stop blowing stuff up, it’s becoming a real drag. You will stop? No more beheadings, no more suicide bombs? Awesome, thanks! What? Can I stop US hegemony? Sure, no problem, I’ll make sure it’s over by tomorrow. All right, later! Holy shit, Ashish, thanks to you I just saved the world.”
Ashish stared at her for a moment, then muttered something under his breath and shuffled away.
“So much for brown solidarity,” I said.
“That felt so good,” Farah proclaimed. “I didn’t change my style for hijab, I’ll be damned if I change my personality, too.”
“But you should be careful,” I cautioned. “You don’t want people to think you’re making light of terrorism, either.”
