I thought this had some interesting things to say about the conflation of hijab with Muslim women.
The one thing possibly more harmful than invisibility is simplistic or tokenistic representation. I am torn between acknowledging that in L’Oréal’s campaign there is a value for people who don’t see themselves represented in the mainstream media, and worrying that we have come to a point where edginess becomes the whole point – where Muslimness becomes collapsed into an image of an over-filtered, hot, bourgeois, fair-skinned hijabi woman, whose highlighter is “on fleek”.
I find it a worrying normalising of an ahistorical phenomenon. When I was a child in in Karachi, a hijab was rare enough that when a girl who wore it joined, the teachers discussed it with the students in advance to ensure no one would make fun of her. And that was in Zia’s Pakistan. Then after 9/11 I came very close to wearing a headscarf. Eventually I didn’t because it doesn’t reflect me, my religion or my culture, and because there seemed no point in making a statement in the Kremlin-on-the-Charles anyway.
Ursula Le Guin remains in my thoughts. It’s a funny one, because the nature of her writing – and indeed her age – was such that I can’t feed sad that she is dead. But I have been thinking about what her writing meant to me, the weight it carried, its elegance.
And another death, a great-uncle whom I wasn’t terribly close to, but was in the background to my life. He was close to my mother and my brother remained close to him. A very important man in his circles, and generally (I think) felt to be a kind one.