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Hijab Quotes

Browse 48 quotes about Hijab.

Hijab Quotes

“المصريون يعيشون في خديعة نفس مزمنة .. البنات يلبسن شيئا ضيقا فاضحا متظاهرات بأنه حجاب و أنهن شديدات الإيمان .. والأولاد يلبسون بدلة تدريب يطلقون عليها ترينك متظاهرون بأنهم رياضيون .. وهم أهلكهم التدخين والبانجو”

“With my veil I put my faith on display—rather than my beauty. My value as a human is defined by my relationship with God, not by my looks. I cover the irrelevant. And when you look at me, you don’t see a body. You view me only for what I am: a servant of my Creator. You see, as a Muslim woman, I’ve been liberated from a silent kind of bondage. I don’t answer to the slaves of God on earth. I answer to their King.”

“Listening to my tutor tell me the story (of Khalid ibn al-Walid at the Battle of Mu'tah), I was overwhelmed with such pride in my history that I decided in that moment that I wanted to wear a headscarf, as a public marker that I belonged to this people. I wanted it to be so that before people even knew my name, the first thing that they would know about me is that I am a Muslim. I told myself that upon my return to the States, I would wear the headscarf with pride as my outward rebellion against the Islamophobia that had seized me and suffocated me for most of my life. With that decision, I inherited the entire history to which the hijab had been tied, and carried it on my head like an issue for public debate.”

“Instead, I’d been counting the number of dipshit things people had said to me today. I’d been holding strong at fourteen until I made my way to my next class and some kid passing me in the hall asked if I wore that thing on my head because I was hiding bombs underneath and I ignored him, and then his friend said that maybe I was secretly bald and I ignored him, and then a third one said that I was probably, actually, a man, and just trying to hide it and finally I told them all to fuck off, even as they congratulated one another on having drummed up these excellent hypotheses. I had no idea what these asswipes looked like because I never glanced in their direction, but I was thinking seventeen, seventeen, as I got to my next class way too early and waited, in the dark, for everyone else to show up. These, the regular injections of poison I was gifted from strangers, were definitely the worst things about wearing a headscarf. But the best thing about it was that my teachers couldn’t see me listening to music. It gave me the perfect cover for my earbuds.”

“When we finally arrived, the chauffeur escorted my younger sister, Laila, and me up to my father’s suite. As usual, he was hiding behind the door waiting to scare us. We exchanged many hugs and kisses as we could possibly give in one day. My father took a good look at us. Then he sat me down on his lap and said something that I will never forget. He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Hana, everything that God made valuable in the world is covered and hard to get to. Where do you find diamonds? Deep down in the ground, covered and protected. Where do you find pearls? Deep down at the bottom of the ocean, covered up and protected in a beautiful shell. Where do you find gold? Way down in the mine, covered over with layers and layers of rock. You've got to work hard to get to them.” He looked at me with serious eyes. “Your body is sacred. You’re far more precious than diamonds and pearls, and you should be covered too.”

“Her skirts, sleeves, collar, and hat saw to it that none of the young ruffians of the Leased Territories would have the opportunity to invade her body space with their eyes, and lest her distinctive face prove too much of a temptation, she wore a veil too... The veil offered Nell protection from unwanted scrutiny. Many New Atlantis career women also used the veil as a way of meeting the world on their own terms, ensuring that they were judged on their own merits and not on their appearance. It served a protective function as well, bouncing back the harmful rays of the sun...”

“I’m sorry for sisters in France who have to deal with this. And I hope that you won’t compromise. I mean, anything that you’re going to learn in those schools you can learn from home anyway. I would tell the sisters in France that you are already greater teachers than your instructors in those classrooms. And the lessons that you are teaching to the people of France, to the society of France, by your continued compliance with the dignity and the modesty of Islam, those are far more important and far more beneficial lessons for your society than anything they want to teach you.”

“The Anti-Stereotype Sonnet Black is not evil. White is not trash. Brown is not illegal. Muslims don’t crash. Women ain't weak. Jews ain't greedy. Men ain't playboys. Queer ain't sickly. Hijab is not oppression. Hourglass ain't beauty. Faith is not delusion. Atheists don't lack morality. Assumptions only reveal shallowness. Beyond stereotypes lies humaneness.”

“If a woman had a right to wear a miniskirt, surely I had the right to choose my headscarf. My choice was a sign of independence of mind. Surely, to choose to wear what I wanted was an assertion of my feminism. I was a feminist, wasn't I? But I was to learn that choosing to wear the hijab is much easier than choosing to take it off. And that lesson was an important reminder of how truly "free" choice is.”

“I'm not fucking fighting to defend women's right to wear the veil, the hijab, the niqab, whatever," she declaimed. "All these young women these days who describe the veil as a signifier of their identity. I tell them they are suffering from what that presently unfashionable philosopher Karl Marx would have called false consciousness. In most of the world the veil is not a free choice. Women are forced into invisibility by men. These girls in the West making their quote-unquote free choices are legitimizing the oppression of their sisters in the parts of the world where the choice is not free. That's what I tell them and they're very shocked. They tell me they find my remarks offensive. I tell them I feel the same way about the veil. It's exhausting. I've become embittered.”

“I want women like Aunt Michelle to understand that it is not only women who look like them who are free, who think, and care about other women. That it is possible for two things to look similar but be completely different. That I cover my head like other strong, respected women have done before me, like Malala Yousafzai, like Kariman Abuljadayel, like my mama. That I cover my head not because I am ashamed, forced, or hiding. But because I am proud and want to [be] seen as I am.”

“The hijab or a variation of the word shows up eight times in the Quran. And it never means headscarf. And so what's happened is that the identity of a Muslim woman especially is being equated to this piece of cloth on her head. And in that ideology there's a very fundamental assumption that people need to think very deeply about, which is do you believe that a woman is too sexy for her hair?”

“I see certain parallels between the debate over feminism where some women argue that women should not be forced to stay at home and take care of children [and debate about hijab]. And there are other women who are saying you are criticizing my decision as a free liberated women to stay home and take care of my children.”

“Flying while Muslim is nerve-racking in itself. Every time I prepare to fly, I have to make sure the anxiety I feel from all the stares I get from the moment I walk into the airport doesn't show on my face. This is what every woman in a hijab or bearded Muslim man experiences. But we are not alone: Sikh men who wear a turban experience the same anxiety because they encounter Islamophobia by dint of being perceived as Muslim.”

“What crystallized the importance of speaking out like that - of making nonviolence not just a tool or a tactic, but a way of life - was in San Diego [at Comic-Con]. One of the young girls who marched with us was wearing a hijab, and she came up to me afterward because I talked about my beard, and I talked about why I was doing it, and she came up and she gave me a hug, and she was crying. And she said, "Thank you. You have no idea how the other students treat me because they're shown that this is OK by Donald Trump. Thank you for speaking out."”

“I am against revolution and am proud of it. Democracy cannot be created through revolutions. The most important dichotomy that I make for a society is between those who support democracy and human rights, and those who oppose it. In a totalitarian state, the state views any act of an individual to be political in nature. For example, the clothing that a person wears in a modern state is a private affair whereas in the Islamic Republic all women are forced to wear the hijab (Islamic attire). When women push their headscarf back an inch or two, this is interpreted to be a political act.”

“In practice, you realise that most attempts to feed your baby in a public space will be met with subtle but palpable resistance. Older chaps roll their eyes, slick young businesswomen purse their mouths, teenagers look disgusted, waitresses anxious. But it strikes me as ironic that many members of the public fret about British Muslims donning the hijab, yet happily condone the veiling of nursing mothers.”