ISN’T IT STRANGE that the more free a society claims it is, the more closed it tends to be!
Take an incident that my wife recalls. She had started a postgraduate teacher training course and her first placement was at a large primary school in a rural area just outside of London.
Here the population was all white- they couldn’t even find a brown face to put in the school prospectus to show diversity because there weren’t any brown faces. A handful of black children and just one Chinese child is all the children are exposed to of a wider world.
Indeed in her first week there, one young boy asked her if she was from China as he hadn’t quite seen anyone like her.
Later she was engaging in a class of 6-year-olds when an autistic girl came up to her and asked her what her headscarf was. The girl turned to the teaching assistant- who was in shock- and asked if she needed to wear it. The TA apologised to my wife profusely and explained that the child was autistic so didn’t mean to offend. When the class teacher heard about it she too rushed to apologise for any offence caused.
My wife found the whole incident really quite bemusing. Why would it cause offence to ask about the hijab? Surely that is the most natural thing to do- if you don’t know something, ask about it!
But this is the society that we live in today- where the obvious and most natural thing to do is lost under layer upon layer of assumptions and prejudices. Rather than discuss debate and understand, people just accept what they are told by the media and the government.
Minds that are supposed to be questioning everything are closed due to being fed a constant diet of stereotypes that Muslims are this or that or that we take offence at this or that. And Muslim women and girls face the greatest prejudices. Society speaks about them, but never to them. The hijab in particular is seen always as an oppression that they need saving from.
Wouldn’t it be so much better if like this small child with autism, free from the prejudices of this society, people could just ask us Muslims what we really thought and felt about issues. We really don’t have a problem with genuine questioning and criticism and not insults thinly disguised under so-called ‘freedom of speech’.
Of course, all that also entails that we Muslims are knowledgeable about our deen so that when those questions come, we can answer with honesty, evidence and clarity.
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