SOMETHING INSIDE OF ME died when I read about French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s proposal for a ban on burqas on the streets of France.

Beyond the usual platitudes about “respect for other cultures,” or “but what if the women choose them freely,” what upset me was the possibility that the women wearing whatever it is that Sarkozy deems objectionable—he wasn’t even specific about what he meant by the word “burqa”—might face harassment from law enforcement in addition to the stereotyping of mainstream society.

If a woman knows what it’s like to be harassed and stereotyped, if she has experienced the scorn of people who, based on just a few silly outside markers, have decided to debase her, how could she not worry about it happening to someone else?

I am the least likely person to support the total veiling of a woman’s face and body. Yet my experiences with sexual harassment in Amman have cemented my belief that there is something fundamentally violating about being bullied into trying to pass as someone you’re not.

In the early spring of 2009, I began wearing the hijab when leaving my house in Amman. I am a non-Muslim woman with a drawling American accent and Slavic heritage—and no, I don’t think “Russian Natasha” jokes are cute, just so we’re clear. I was trying to appear to be someone else. It started when I realized that the compromises I had originally expected to make when coming to Jordan—more conservative clothing, no alcohol on my breath, no smiling at strangers in public, and so on—were not enough to allow me to feel safe.

After a number of increasingly scary experiences in comparatively nice neighborhoods like Shmeisani and Abdoun, I was nearly run over by a man who was pursuing me in his car. He must have realized I was set on ignoring him as he shouted the standard lines: “Where are you going?” “Five JDs, baby!” Then he decided to impress me by turning sharply into my path at an intersection, screeching to a halt inches from my body. As it happened, all I could think was: “Am I really about to die or get maimed because of some guy trying to pick me up?”

I broke down in front of my Ukrainian hairdresser later that day, and was gently reminded that many people in Amman “think they know everything about you” if you happen to be young and conspicuously foreign. Out of desperation more than anything else, I decided to try getting around that.

I DIDN’T WANT TO appropriate anyone’s lifestyle, and definitely didn’t want to act like those non-Muslim women who put on Muslim garb to play at being the “exotic” princess they read about in the Arabian Nights.

So I got Fatemeh Fakhraie, the editor of Muslimah Media Watch, a website that critiques the portrayal of Muslim women in international media, to speak to me about the practice of being a “part-time hijabi.”

“I don’t like how the idea of hijab is fixed, as if once you take it on or off, there’s no going back,” she said, when I asked her about what it meant to put it on as a safety measure. “It doesn’t allow for the realities and differing circumstances of life.” We talked about how, beyond being a sign of religious expression, the hijab can function as a “do not approach” sign when one is surrounded by strangers.

I’m cool then, I decided. Sure, I’d known plenty of women who’d been coerced into wearing the hijab, and they all told me how unpleasant it was, but my situation was different, right? I’d be OK. Right?

Indeed, I felt the more aggressive episodes of harassment did become less frequent. But in my scarf I became even more miserable than before.

I could see the confusion in men’s eyes as they sized me up, and overheard hilarious debates as to the subject of my identity. I never ceased to look out of place, but I was no longer conforming to their expectations. I would have thought this would bring me some relief, but I began to feel lost and defeated, as if some fundamental part of me had come unmoored and was floating away.

Looking at my reflection in a shop window at one point, I asked aloud: “Who are you?”

The woman staring back was like a chimera. It was a small relief to find out that it wasn’t just me, when I spoke to foreign women who hadn’t had much success with wearing scarves either. One woman said she didn’t even see a difference in the level of sexual harassment. Another did, but said she felt there was something really wrong with having her inner person validated through dressing like someone else.

I quickly came to learn that when we try to disguise ourselves as someone else, the experience of being “found out” can be even more traumatic than whatever it is we were trying to escape in the first place.

Once, I found tears streaming down my face and destroying my over-priced mascara as I yelled at a construction worker who had whistled at me on the street as I passed by in my scarf.

“I’ll get my husband and he’ll beat you up!” I shouted. (OK, I’m not married, but I knew by then that jealous husbands are the scariest specter women can invoke on the streets of Amman). The construction worker looked genuinely shocked. Although I’m sure he eventually got over it, and maybe even learned a valuable lesson, I realized that my grief and pain had little to do with him.

IT’S EASY TO BELIEVE that one is fundamentally “safe” in a hijab. It’s a pleasant fiction propagated by those clerics who compare uncovered women to “uncovered meat” or candy, and by people who romanticize Muslim dress. Yet more often than not, the muhajabat I “came out” to in Amman when asked if I was also Muslim completely undermined this fantasy.

“My family didn’t believe me when I told them I was being harassed at my new place of work,” said Layla, who asked me not to use her real name. “My aunt finally said, ‘But you’re covered. You must be attracting attention by misbehaving.’ I didn’t talk about it anymore. I gave up.”

Only after Layla announced she was thinking of switching jobs did her boss threaten her harassers, and the behavior abated. Of course, it still took a male authority figure to demand dignity on her behalf.

So, seeing France’s anti-burqa rhetoric through the prism of my experiences in Amman, and the experiences of the women I have spoken to, I can’t help but return to the dreadful condescension behind the assumption that a woman does not have a right to construct her own identity and—horror of horrors—expect that identity to be respected by men in particular.

As for my own hijab, I took it off. In Jordan I have the freedom to do as much. Police officers don’t approach me and tell me to cover my hair. Aside from the usual harassment, I sometimes even get random compliments from passing women on my particular shade of straw-yellow hair (blame the bleaching effects of the Jordanian sun).

I can’t say that I’ve somehow learned to stop worrying and live with the assumptions made about me and women like me, but what I understand now is that you can’t challenge such assumptions when you’re compromising an integral part of your identity.

A fake muhajaba is merely participating in a charade, no matter what appearances may tell you. Perhaps, in time, President Sarkozy may also realize that appearances can be deceptive.

Rudyard Kipling, who was born and raised in India amongst Muslims who were the last Mogul kings, describes a boorka in his short story Beyond the Pale as an ‘evil-smelling’ garment ‘which cloaks a man as well as a woman.’ The main character, Trejago, dresses in a burqa to meet his Indian lover and symbolically throws it away at the end of the story.

No matter how I personally feel about the burqa, I think it is not anyone’s right to ridicule the garment and its wearers.

Two articles against the burqa have left me speechless not because they are insensitive in tone but because of their writers’ innate lack of knowledge about the religion they seem to target with their vile words. One is by the Bangladeshi ex-Muslim Taslima Nasrin titled “Let’s Burn the Burqa” and the other is “Death Before Burkas” by Kyle-Anne Shiver.

There are two popular opinions on hijab by Muslims; one is that it is required in the Quran and the other opinion is that it is not required and only modesty is emphasized. Ms. Nasrin claims that Quran requires niqab because of “an individual’s personal reasons” and “since then millions of Muslim women all over the world have had to suffer it.” Nasrin suggests that women

“should protest against this discrimination. They should proclaim a war against the wrongs and ill-treatment meted out to them for hundreds of years. They should snatch from the men their freedom and their rights. They should throw away this apparel of discrimination and burn their burqas.”

It was amusing to read Nasrin’s words because her knowledge about Islam, a religion she consciously abandoned, is extremely weak. A few examples:

She calls Hadith, “Quran Hadith.”Then she quotes from Surah Al- Ahzab and calls it “Surah Al – Hijab”! There is no Surah in the Quran called Al-Hijab.Nasrin uses a South Asian translation of the Quran and even that version never once mentions that a woman must cover her face. The emphasis is always on hiding and covering the female parts like chest. I wonder how she bases her argument on the ayahs that never say that a woman must cover her face? In her argument she says, “Frankly, covering just the hair is not Islamic purdah in the strict sense.” That is exactly it. Face veil is “strict” and therefore a vast number of Muslim women do not cover their faces. What’s the premise then?Muslims are supposed to know how hijab was prescribed for the Prophet’s wives but Nasrin does not. She writes, “Prophet Mohammed’s wife Ayesha was very beautiful. His friends were often found staring at her with fascination.” The reason behind asking Prophet’s wives to speak to strange men from behind a curtain, as we know, was the rumour that had spread about Ayesha (pbuh) and not because men used to stare at her.

Then there is Shiver who begins her hate-filled rant with the following:

‘Anyone who thinks I’ve spent the last 40 years of my life learning how to properly apply makeup and avoid bad-hair days, only to end up donning that hideous black thing at the command of some foreign guy with a severe case of Male-Chauvinist-Pig syndrome, is in for a fight. Give me death before burkas!’

Fair enough! No non-Muslim woman who has spent 40 years of her life learning how to apply makeup should be asked to hide that face, but Shiver does not stop there:

‘And in my opinion, the ultimate oppression of our age, no matter how one cares to cut it, slice it, dice it, whatever, is hands-down the subjugation of females – from birth to the grave – in places ruled by this cockamamie Sharia law. Liberals may be scared to call a spade a spade, but I’m not. So, I’ll say it again, Give me death before burkas!’

Again some people may find her words tolerable. The infamous Saudi rape case has stirred Shiver so one can understand where she’s coming from until she writes:

‘In my book, a gang-rape victim deserves a whole heck of lot more peace and blessings than the Prophet, who continues to inspire such barbarism in the name of his religion.

In 2002, again in Saudi Arabia, a mob of very “religious” followers of the Prophet surrounded a girls’ school that was engulfed in raging flames, and refused to permit firefighters to save the young girls, or even to permit the ones that could to flee the building.’

Many Muslims have already spoken out against the punishment awarded to the Saudi rape victim. The 2002 incidence disturbed not only me but many other Muslims. However, how does Muhammed (pbuh) fit in here? I never read one hadith awarding punishment to a rape victim. I cannot recall the Prophet asking any firefighter to let an uncovered woman burn to death.

Later Shiver goes on to talk about the Taliban, the Turkish Muslim immigrants in Germany, the mutawa (religious police) of Saudi Arabia, and cases of barbaric female genital mutilation. I have never liked or supported the Taliban or anyone else who abuses Muslim women in the name of Islam so I could be seen nodding, although Shivers information on the topic is flawed, once again:

‘The type of FGM specifically practiced and taught by the Prophet is the milder form, and limits mutilation to the removal of the clitoris. On the other hand, other forms practiced by Mohammed’s followers today are so grotesque and cause so much permanent damage, that only a truly monstrous God could possibly condone them.’

First, the hadith on female circumcision is a weak one and second even in that weak hadith the Prophet (pbuh) is said to have supported trimming of the clitoris and not its removal. Majority of Muslims do not accept the hadith as genuine which is why female circumcision (which has its roots in Pharaonic times) remains today a culture-specific practice.

Also, just for record, there is no Muslim God. The God of the Jews is the God of the Christians who is the God of the Muslims. And no “the God” is not monstrous, thank you very much. I am a Muslim woman and I am not “mutilated.”

Somehow somewhere down the line Shiver loses it again and begins lashing out at Islam:

‘Whenever I see a woman wearing one of those hideous symbols of oppression — the burka — I just wonder how many beating scars or bruises or disfigurements she is covering. I don’t blame her for being brainwashed into submission, or even for identifying with her oppressors. She is, in my view, to be pitied, not scorned.’

Let’s be honest, I am no fan of the burqa, and I am a Muslim living in a Muslim country so I know exactly what all can happen to a woman (unlike Shiver who reports gossip) but I would never be stupid enough to claim that Muslim women who choose to wear the burka do so to hide a black eye. Save yourself further disgrace, Shiver, majority of Muslim women who wear the burka are not “brainwashed into submission.”

After another crazy story of domestic abuse in a Muslim family (as if domestic abuse only takes place in Muslim households!) Shiver issues some truly classic statements:

If a Jewish or Christian man beats his wife, or otherwise abuses her, he does so against his religion, and his worship community. When a Muslim man does likewise, he does so in full obedience to the Prophet himself. It’s in the Koran. (There is enough woman-bashing fodder in the Koran for many future columns, but one of the specific admonitions to men to beat their wives is 4:34) … As an American woman, blessed by God and the Constitution, that is all I need to know about Islam. [Emphasis mine]

This just tells any reader that Shiver is just as poor at Christian and Judaist theology as she is at Islamic theology. For the interpretation of the Quranic verse 4:34, read this. As for the Bible – one may be interested in reading Deuteronomy 25:11 or Numbers: 511-21.

To conclude, I’m not arguing here whether or not hijab or niqaab is required by the Quran. This is not my place to argue that. My argument and criticism is that if a person decides to write on a topic and worse argue on a topic on a public forum then s/he should do their homework.

I am also not trying to prove Islam’s superiority over the other two Abrahamic religions. I have deep respect for all religions and special love for Abrahamic religions. All I am trying to say is that in essence many religions are not different from each other. Several years of interpretations and filtering has given rise to modern Christianity and Judaism. While Muslims cannot dare to re-write the Quran, we are trying to reinterpret it, do ijtihad, and fit traditional theological concepts in the modern world.

Give Muslims a chance. One can wish death before the burka for all I care, but please leave Islamic theology out of your rants because you clearly do not know what you are talking about.

This brave young girl was allegedly killed at the hands of the man that should have been protecting her: her own father. Canadian media has reported that the 16 year old argued with her father about wearing the hijab, or traditional Islamic headscarf. Friends said she would leave the house in traditional dress and change into western-style clothing when she arrived at school.

Her father, Muhammad Parvez, called 911 to report that he had killed his daughter on Monday, December 11th. She died from her injuries only hours later. Her 26 year old brother has been charged with obstruction of justice for failing to cooperate with police. To me, Aqsa is a martyr for the freedom of individual choice.

I am especially distraught that this alleged murder happened in Canada, home of “Little Mosque on the Prairie,” a TV sitcom produced by a brilliant Canadian Muslim director, Zarqa Nawaz. In the episode, “The Barrier,” first aired earlier this year; the teenage girl, Layla and her very conservative father, Baber, disagreed about her attire. She was an active girl and didn’t want to be restricted by her garments. She hid the fact that she had had her period—a traditional moment when girls are encouraged to begin covering their hair–for fear that her father would want her to wear a headscarf. While the two fundamentally disagreed about the issue, as is the case in most civilized families (Muslim or not), violence was never an option.

To some zealots, there is no place in heaven for a Muslim woman who doesn’t cover her hair. For some, it is an ancient patriarchal tradition that should be abolished. But American Muslim teens themselves are embracing the autonomy that Islam and America afford individuals. In recently released The American Muslim Teenager’s Handbook, Yasmine Hafiz, her brother, Imran Hafiz, and their mother, Dilara Hafiz, of Phoenix, Arizona, advise teens (and parents): “According to the Quran, as long as Muslims are dressed modestly and behave respectably, no specific dress code is required… modest behavior is also encouraged, therefore ogling the cute boy in Chemistry class or leering at the cheerleaders is definitely out! …Each person must read the Quran for herself and form her own opinion.”

Teens and others are turning to interpretations of Islam that assert that there isn’t one way to look if you’re a Muslim girl or woman. According to the distinguished Islamic scholar, Reza Aslan, “The veil was neither compulsory, nor for that matter, widely adopted until generations after Muhammad’s death, when a large body of male scriptural and legal scholars began using their religious and political authority to regain the dominance they had lost in society as a result of the Prophet’s egalitarian reforms.”

Some so-called “traditional” Muslims argue that ‘Western’ women are oppressed because they must derive their self-worth from the gaze of men. However, it is also true that within some Islamic communities a woman who does not cover is not afforded the same respect as one who does. The expectations are different but the result is the same; a woman’s worth is still determined by others, including men.

While living in Yemen, my friend, Kelly Wentworth, who is also a convert to Islam, experienced pressure to cover herself that did not stem from a religious mandate but a cultural one. As the wife of a Yemeni man, if she chose not to cover, the society would consider it a dishonor to her husband’s family.

It is essential that men and women make their own choices about dress for internal reasons rather than succumbing to external pressures. This is only possible when individuals have the freedom to choose. Personally, by wearing hijab, I experience a sense of autonomy, confidence and femininity I did not before. Yet, for those who have been forced to wear it, I believe it is a very physical barrier to connection with the Divine. Perhaps it is because of her belief in this freedom of choice that Aqsa Parvez was so viciously murdered.

As a Muslim, a woman, a wife, a daughter and a citizen of the free world, I am outraged by the fact that Aqsa was taken from this earth. No human being has the right to destroy the life that God has made sacred. I am sickened that this man has shamed Islam through his very unislamic acts. There is no place in the world for this kind of intolerant, chauvinistic and bigoted thinking, no matter in what faith tradition it appears.

An important distinction difficult for fundamentalists of all faith traditions is that dress codes are a matter of choice, not religious mandate or obligation. Without choice, no act bears meaning. According to Islamic scripture, an act is judged by the intent with which it was performed. If a woman chooses to wear a scarf because she believes in its benefit to her, she has a pure motive. However, if she covers to please another person, whether that person is her husband, brother, father or mother, while not believing in its benefits, the motive is lost and the act of wearing it loses all meaning.

I believe Aqsa has found her place in Paradise. I pray that in her passing we will not miss this opportunity to take a lesson from the tragedy of her death, inspiring us to practice tolerance, love, kindness and understanding with all, however they are dressed.

Alas, I do not wear the “hijab” (head-covering). Therefore, I find myself too weirded out to take the bus.

Allow me to elaborate; I’ve always been proud of myself for being largely neutral on the hijab. I’ve come to understand that Islamic women’s dress is not a cultural monolith, that it has many definitions for different people, and can be, like all women’s clothing, both empowering and imprisoning, depending on who you ask. Following the events of September 11th , 2001, I decided to adopt an attitude I called “hijab blinders,” i.e., I decided that it would no longer matter to me who wore what, as long as they were basically nice people. In America , I think that veiled Muslim women were getting enough flack from psychos such as Ann Coulter, when all they wanted to do was to go on with their lives like everyone else.

I was able to make friends and interact with “hijabified” girls without the word itself even entering the picture. I commented on their hijab and other clothing choices about as much as they commented on my faded Guess jeans. I was living in my own mini-utopia of fashion. Then I came to Amman .

Manner and style of clothing is related to class-systems everywhere. As a rising senior at Duke University, I see many a coveted trend and designer label worn by the more well-off girls. The same thing occurs in the capital of a developing country such as my sometime hometown of Kiev, Ukraine ; a few women can afford a fancy coat in the cold weather, the rest wear layers and try not to turn blue.

Yet in Amman , the combination of class and clothing takes on a whole new meaning. The wealthier women, the ones who have no need to wait for a bus in the scorching sunlight, remain mostly unveiled. Meanwhile, their poorer sisters appear to be, on the whole, more “Islamically” (I put the word in quotation marks, because there is some debate as to whether or not the Quran specifically requires the hijab, or simply encourages modesty) attired.

As a matter of fact, I have been observing the residents of Amman for over two weeks now, and I have yet to see a woman riding the bus without a hijab on her head. I’m sure a few must be out there, somewhere, but I have yet to join their ranks; perhaps I never will. Having been fed horror stories of female foreigners heckled, threatened, and abused over “improper” dress, I have relinquished my desire to ride the public transportation system in Amman , propriety being such a subjective issue. If, for example, I board the bus wearing jeans and a short-sleeved t-shirt on a hot day, who’s to say I won’t offend someone whose ideals of propriety insist on a full “niqab” (to be entirely veiled with only the eyes showing)? One of the perks of public transportation is that it offers interaction and opportunity for further observation, but an unveiled woman in Amman would find herself in a strange setting upon boarding a bus. Is it worth it?

Gender norms are tricky to navigate in a city such as Amman , when the issue of class enters the picture, finding a way to be comfortable is almost impossible. Are wealthier women less religious, is this the issue here? Or do they have more room when it comes to interpreting religion? Are poorer women more religious? Or are they pressured into putting on hijab, because using public transportation involves more interaction with strange men, hence creating an environment that lies outside old gender rules? Is it a little bit of both or none of the above?

Speaking of men; it has become glaringly obvious to me that they do not face the same pressures regarding clothing. In Amman , I have seen more male posteriors sticking out of skin-tight pants than on the streets of Paris . These men mingle freely with their conservatively-dressed compatriots. Heckling only tends to occur when a man leaves his house wearing shorts, and even that is not an absolute by all means; I’ve seen a couple of men in shorts who seemed to be treated perfectly well.

I’ve heard that veiled anchors are banned from Jordanian news stations, because they are “backward.” I beg to differ. Treating women like crap because of a piece of clothing or lack thereof seems to be the real issue at stake here. The coin has to sides: on one hand, a veiled woman who attempts to be socially mobile will be discriminated against based on her style of dress. Meanwhile, an unveiled woman can be exposed to ridicule and scorn if she leaves her so-called comfort zone.

This situation becomes even more absurd when one takes into account the way that foreigners perceive Ammanite women. Arriving from the United States , I quickly noticed that women’s fashions are more conservative in Amman , with or without hijab, when compared to an average American city. Yet to hear some clerics talk, you’d think that Amman is a city whose female population is composed exclusively of “prostitutes.” In other words, one man’s hooker is another man’s virtuous virgin. And real women are meanwhile stuck trying to negotiate whatever role that has been assigned to them by men.

I’ve made myself as comfortable as I can in Amman . Yet I’ve also realized that comfort is much easier to achieve when I am being driven places, providing me with a degree of choice as to what to wear and much-coveted privacy, a bus full of soldiers that occasionally pulls up next to me notwithstanding. I have never been more aware of my femininity and the labels that go with it.

Some men try to dismiss feminists as abnormal wannabes obsessed with learning how to pee standing up. I think I have met few feminist unsatisfied with her own gender. Yet in Amman , I have suddenly felt a strange urge to tape my chest. Cut my hair. Be a boy. Be safe.

…Either that or suddenly inherit a million dollars from a long-lost relative and ride around in a Mercedes SUV.