Cahaya’s Rants

For Kavelle Thorne, the most challenging part of wearing a hijab for the first time was figuring a way to get the earphones for her MP3 player on without dislodging the bright pink scarf covering her hair.

Luckily, Sajda Khalil, a veteran hijabi and organizer of the National Hijab Day initiative at the University of Toronto, was on hand. “You have to go under the scarf, not on top” she said, laughing.

Thorne, a third-year Caribbean studies student, was one of 70 non-Muslim women at U of T to take part in the cross-country initiative to encourage an understanding of the everyday experiences of a hijab-wearing Muslim woman.

Overall, those experiences are the same as any other woman, said Khalil. While most women face relatively few incidents of overt racism in multicultural Toronto, Muslim women on campus have been targeted in the past.

The Toronto Star Story

Silly women! As if wearing a hijab (or tudung as they are called in Malaysia) for a day is going to make a lot of difference. Try wearing it for a year and see if you like feeling like you have to cover your head. The Muslim women wear the head covering because their religion requires it of them. For modesty.

That’s Islam for you. A religion with a mind set stuck in the 7th century. Every part of a woman’s body except for the face and palms has to be covered, because everything else is considered too sexy, too alluring, that they must be kept hidden. It is the woman’s fault if they get sexually assaulted because they did not help the men to control their libido by not covering themselves up. How backward!

And for the Canadian students who participated in the National Hijab Day? Yes they were showing solidarity with the Muslim women, solidarity in their oppression.