Childhood
In Year 5 my ammu gave me my first pair of thick, black tights to wear under my school uniform. They were harsh against my skin, prickling against the hairs that were beginning to grow along my legs. They would slip down in inches during a playground game of tips, causing me to stop every few strides to adjust them.
My first pair of tights coincided with my first period – I was finally a woman. The shift into puberty was sudden enough to confuse me as to why overnight my body had become a risk, a hazard, something to be protected rather than a vessel for the more interesting parts of myself.
I came home from school one afternoon and found my closet empty of the clothes I used to love. Anything considered immodest was dumped. This began the process of ‘spring cleaning’ of the body I used to have.
I remember the silk, pink, Disney boxer shorts I used to wear to bed every night. They were my favourite. I remember tearing through my closet that night, through all the gaps where the fabric of my childhood used to lay, and crying when I realised that the shorts, too, were missing. If childhood was synonymous with innocence, then childhood was over the day I grew out of my kid clothes. My legs were suddenly a safely kept secret that no man should ever gaze upon – even in my own home.
“Womanhood”
I began wearing long skirts and maxi dresses to the park. I stopped running as fast as the other kids, and then stopped running all together. I chose instead to sit with my legs folded neatly beneath me on the hill. On the way home I would argue again and again about how I didn’t understand why I had to wear so many layers.
I got some variation of the same speech so many people hear – it is my duty to protect the body I am growing into. Men and boys (but especially men) would look, so it must be my responsibility to turn their gaze away, to not give them anything to look at.
Growing up, the expectation was that I would develop a sense of modesty (hayya) as I aged, and eventually carry myself with this sense. The headscarf itself was never suggested to me, nor was it implied I would ascend to that level of modesty; it was explicated that the choice to cover my hair was mine entirely. Islam was always explained to me logically, mostly with clarity of rules and expectations. I was always encouraged to read scripture in detail to understand practices instead of mindlessly abiding by them, and I had less than average “because I said so” comments from my ma which I was grateful for. Despite the fact that the covering of hair was an Islamic obligation, my ma understood and reiterated it was not something that could be forced. It has perplexed me, to this day, why this logic did not extend to lower thresholds of modesty —shoulders, stomach, knees, etc. I was expected to maintain, at least, a “bare minimum” level of modesty, but the threshold for this seemed subjective and indicative of cultural expectations rather than religious ones.
I had a “cover-up jacket”: worn over an allegedly scandalous top before leaving the house, tossed aside, and then worn before re-entering. The jacket functioned as a lot more than just a piece of fabric, it separated me into two people. There is Me at Home; there is Me at Everywhere Else. It did not just cover up exposed collarbones, it covered up an entire identity: the desire to date, to drink, and to dream.
Beauty
I no longer felt beautiful. This wasn’t because I didn’t believe modesty could be beautiful, I knew it could be. It’s just that beauty was not a concept prior to modesty. I was made to draw and read and play and laugh – beauty was something that ‘just happened’ with growing up, not something that should have been considered or contemplated on. Modesty is beautiful, but when you were a child there was no such thing as ‘modest’ or ‘immodest’, and all the implications that come with the labels. There was only the beautiful and the ‘other’. My tights and maxi dresses and layered cardigans put me in the ‘other’ category – I was explicitly Muslim, explicitly brown, the moment I put them on.
In my cohort, the only other girl to wear tights like me was the other Muslim, brown girl. Cool girls did not wear tights.
Culture
I often couldn’t help but wonder if I had been born in a different time period, or a more conservative country, would the hijab have also been an expectation? Perhaps not, as it stands to reason that the covering of hair is a marked step above other forms of modesty; it’s a notable visual signifier of religiosity and explicitly requires the wearer to behave accordingly. It still perplexed me, however, how my ma decided upon the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable skin. What logic rendered an exposed shoulder illegal, but legalised an exposed upper forearm? The answer is, of course, that like many things in life, it was entirely a constructed ideal. I don’t think this makes it any less real, or any less important to my ma and many others; I respect this. But I think it fundamentally underscores my confusion and disregard for these expectations. I understood the desire behind encouraging this bare minimum standard; it is the same logic by which parents expect a bare minimum level of good behaviour from their children, and it is an idea borne out of love, care, and deeply-held faith. But it was fundamentally tearing into my relationship with my ma.
Mothers
The relationship between ma and I becomes strained, and clothes start to manifest as the ultimate form of rebellion. It’s too difficult — too guilt-trippy, too anxiety-inducing — to say “I don’t align with your perspective on religion and modesty; I feel stifled and pushed away”. So instead you say, “I want to wear a tank top”. And the tank top becomes the object of a screaming match where every sentence, every accusation, is buried by the weight of its connotations. I craved my ma compromising on clothing because it felt like a broader existential tug-of-war about identity, faith, and love. If she couldn’t do that, how would we ever reconcile our much deeper irrevocable differences? I could not comprehend why she was legitimately willing to strain our fragile relationship over endless arguments about clothing, instead of accepting our differences in peace. I still cannot comprehend it.
