Hijabis...Unveiled!
As cornily stereotypical as the title of this post sounds, that's exactly what it's about. I went to a segregated Egyptian wedding last night, and thus this post is born.
For those of you who know Arab women, you know that they like to go all out for weddings. By "all out," I mean wearing relatively revealing and fancy/sparkly dresses, coiffured hair, make-up, crippling heels; the whole shebang. And I completely get it - most of these women are in hijab every day of their lives, so the opportunity to dress-to-kill is snatched up in a heartbeat.
I'm personally not a big fan of the overwhelming sparkliness & fanciness of Arab weddings, but I will admit that Arab women definitely know how to party it up. I'll leave the rest to your imagination, so I don't expose too many of our secrets.
So I was in this room, and I looked around and realized that there was an astounding amount of beautiful women all around me. I turned to a friend of mine and said "wow, the world is seriously missing out on all this beauty." I first said it in a humourous tone, but that statement really made me think about what it meant to purposely cover one's natural assets.
I've been a hijabi since I was 11 or 12, so I've become very accustomed to not being gawked at for my looks (not that I'm saying I would be gawked at, or that I'm especially good-looking...moving on...) I've become used to the idea that I'm the proverbial wall-flower in the realm of all-things-beauty. Whether I like it or not, I'm on the sidelines of fashion (regardless of how fashionable I might be - which I'm not at all).
What I'm trying to say is that it dawned on me just how much hijabi women give up of this material world for Islam. Sometimes we forget how much we give up just because we're so used to the idea of being covered. We give up being at the centre of attention, we're relegated to the "religiously observant" category of people who are sometimes silently scoffed at. I don't think we're generally considered beautiful.
But regardless of how good it might feel to be physically appealing, I'm so happy that I'm able to remove myself from that. It's really priceless how I can get ready in literally 5 minutes in the morning and still look put-together, even if I'm having a bad hair day. It's good to not have to worry about make-up running and smudging. It's good to not be concerned that my feet will kill after a day in heels. In short - it's good.
Of course there are definitely more fashion-forward hijabis out there who need to match their hijab pins with their shoes and purses and cell phone cases. But even those super stylish hijabis give up so much to be closer to Allah.
And this point is paramount when you see how physically beautiful these women are, but still willing to cover their beauty for God. Only then do you realize how much inner beauty they have, too.


