As to Refresh Headscarf

This is Fatmah Yakub (friend from school) on why she put on her headscarf.


sorry horrible quality but you get it.


We interviewed her for our sociology presentation "Hijab: a rising trend among western-raised (2nd or 3rd generation) young muslim women?"(ish.) It went ok. Just ok. Its an interesting question though.
For example, Fatmah never wore the veil when we were growing up although most of her family did. She only put it on when she moved to London for university.


Why?


Fatmah answers that she wears it to put a "barrier" between her(and her religion)and the things she finds bad (corrupting) about western society.

...But, on a larger scale, why?

Is it a counter-reaction to the extreme liberty of women in western society? Has the overdose of baby-oiled skin on TV driven the moderate to conservative? Is all the attention islam is getting in media, creating a sense of religious coherence?
Or is all of this perhaps the symbol of the hijab changing from one of religious modesty to one of defiance of a dominant culture?

I think all of the above. But then hey forced me to read Huntington's Clash of civilizations in stupid intro to academe but it made me bring my business to an EVEN larger scale:
Maybe the hijab trend is the intensification of cultural practice as we draw nearer the apparently looming clash of "western" and "Arab" civilization. Maybe people are (on some level) being forced to take sides, and further to show their loyalty to either. To tell the world that they belong to one, and therefore, according to the way things are looking now, defy the other.

...Well I don't know. There is no need to be dramatic, and this is of course no reflection on individuals.

You know the weird thing about theory, especially in social science, is that you can sit around for ages and ages and read all the Big Guys and try to find the answer and come up with out-of-this-world theories and debate them forever with other people who stayed up all night comming up with their own heavenly-blessed ideas,
OR you could call someone who is part of that trend and they tell you the answer right there just like that.

Of course its important to do the theory but really, sometimes it feels like science is just a roundabout, much longer route to all the things we somehow already know.