There are lots of stories we can tell about ourselves, and our story can be told in different ways. The space for reflecting on identity and story and creativity that the Empty Hanger project brought about was something the students from the London College of Fashion were passionate about making possible for disaffected young people. They too began to take inspiration from the stories themselves, incorporating symbols into their coursework and their final collection designs. But I was to have my own opportunity to reflect when the following summer we were asked to run the Empty Hanger project as a summer school for Muslim, Jewish and Christian teenage girls.
I had grown up being told stories about people of other religions. I had absorbed the story preached from the Big Top stage at camp about Muslims rising up to overthrow Christianity, and it had become a part of the story of fear and defensiveness on which my childish imagination had fed. It wasn’t the story that I wanted to shape me, and I had done all I could over the years to let go of these stories I’d been told about Muslims. I made a lot of effort and felt pretty self-righteous about the improvements I’d made. That is until I saw a woman in a burka which, since I was living in London, was fairly frequently, and then it got me. It would flare up and the flash of infuriation and offence would leave me feeling totally out of sorts for a while. “Why don’t you get out from under there?” I railed at them in my mind.
I couldn’t tell if I was more peeved at the men who made them wear it, at the women themselves for not refusing or at all those preacher-men who had ever made me feel overruled and suffocated with talk about covering women with male headship. But now I had 30 girls heading my way, a good number of whom were going to be fully veiled: hijabs, niqabs and all. I had seriously to deal with my prejudice, otherwise I was going to feel out of sorts for the whole three days. Only it’s hard to go into battle with one’s monkey mind and win. And, having learnt in the convent that the more I fight it the louder it shouts, I thought about a more subversive approach. Like, what would I choose to feel towards them instead of vexed suspicion? How would I like my relationship with these women to look?
When the word “sisterhood” popped up I immediately imagined going to visit Ty Mawr and taking some burka-clad Muslim women with me. That floored me for starters; as I pictured the scenario, I realized I would be the only one not in a veil of some sort. Enough said. But I couldn’t help enjoying the picture of the convent, all cosy against the drizzle of Welsh rain, the sisters sitting around in the library handing out tea and slices of cake to their veiled visitors, chatting away with them. More than anything I knew their response would be what it had been when I’d met them all those years before: a smile, and open welcoming arms, beckoning the newcomer to join them. So I started with that – well, the smile at least. Every time I met the eye of a Muslim woman on the bus or tube or on Oxford Street I decided I would smile at her.
It’s a hard thing to do when you feel stupid, and I did feel stupid. It was kind of ridiculous and could have been badly misinterpreted, especially since I felt I really had to force it to begin with and probably looked like I was giving a weird wince. But the image of the nuns’ tea party stuck with me – a fearless sisterhood of women – and it was a picture I could believe in. I wanted to overcome the distance between sisters on different sides of the religious fence.
When the girls arrived at the London College of Fashion on the first day, I was told by one of the interfaith facilitators that none of the girls from Islamic schools studied art or music; these subjects had been removed from their timetable.
*FLASH*
‘^$%! *£% @$*&’
Breathe…
“OK, so let’s see how they get on with some sketching.” I handed out slim sticks of bamboo and small pots of coloured ink and set a clothed mannequin in front of them to copy.
They were a marvel.
How did these girls learn to draw and paint like this if they weren’t taught? Which in my head sounded more like an indignant yelp of “It’s criminal for anyone to rob these girls of their chance to be creative.” But then I looked again at Aliya, the robed young teacher in front of me, and thought how much she had done to get these girls here in the first place. She and others had been working for months, smoothing the way with school authorities and parents and the girls themselves, to make this possible. The result was magnificent, and I wanted to meet the girls in their enthusiasm and do everything possible to enable them to make the most of the opportunity.
But I was in for a rough ride. We were taking a spacious, reflective look at our stories and our identity. For these girls their art, their poetry and their fashion designs all came back to modesty. They had been well schooled and I was intrigued by the frequent partnership of the words “beauty” and “modesty” in the annotations around their designs. Their veiling was carried out with utter self-respect. If a man came to visit the studio, gentle nudges were given, faces would turn aside and veils would be quietly let down to fully cover their faces. Then there was the tall girl who even wore gloves to cover her hands, whose elegance and self-possession were evident, even under layers of flowing black fabric.
These girls weren’t telling me the story that I had believed about them. As I sat alongside, helping them to reflect on their drawings and make connections between their history, their faith and their identity, I realized they were rewriting a part of my story. It wasn’t just a privilege to have these girls come and attend the summer school; it was a privilege to encounter them, to listen to them. They opened up about the prejudice they felt others held towards them because of their dress, and their stories moved me.
And on the second day we were to see these reactions unfold before our eyes. We were sharing the small campus of studios with another summer school, this one attended by eighteen-year-old school leavers. So, when we took our lunch out into the small grassy area outside the cafeteria and collided with the older, hot-pants-and-skinny-vest-wearing students, it was the stuff caption competitions are made of. Our girls needed to let off steam, but they weren’t taking any robes off in the process. So, as a teenage version of “What’s the Time Mr Wolf?” ensued and veiled girls raced and shouted and black robes billowed, the other tutors and I sat back to watch the reaction of the older students.
Having just listened as the girls had told us how keenly they felt the judgement and misperceptions of strangers because of their religious clothing, I wasn’t surprised by what I saw. While our girls continued to laugh and race, the mouths of the older girls were covered in hands as whispers passed back and forth; quiet stares gave way to sidelong looks of snide incredulity. It was the kind of reaction that anyone might have on crash-landing unexpectedly in someone else’s subculture, but I felt protectiveness for “my” girls, as I was beginning to see them. Over the small lawn I caught the eye of Aliya, but her calm smile told me those instincts were premature. It wasn’t our girls who were acting insecure; there was no evidence right now that they doubted themselves because of how they were dressed or perceived. I wished the same were the case for the girls perching on the walls, whispering and looking on.
Throughout their art, their reflective notes and poetry and even in their stalking of Mr Wolf, it was evident that these fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds had discovered something of what it means to inhabit their own place in the world. Their way of seeing themselves was not in comparison with celebrities or cover girls or any other image of beauty plastered onto our cultural wallpaper. Their hijabs were like a pre-emptive strike on the temptation to derive their value from the approval of men in the way Western women were persuaded to by marketing companies and celebrity obsessions. These girls leaned into their self-image as modest and therefore beautiful, and they derived great strength and purpose from it. But if I was hoping to hear them say that they were made to wear it then I was going to be disappointed. The only hint I detected was when they talked about wishing their hijabs were more colourful and had prettier designs. I made a mental note to invite Novice Joy the next time we ran this summer school. The following day one of the girls arrived in a bright pink hijab embroidered with tiny white flowers. “This course is making me feel differently about what I wear, and this pink one says what I feel.” She beamed shyly.
And yet they were instructed to wear it. No matter how much they insisted it was their choice and they were freely choosing to embrace their covering, it was all the same a cultural construct of beauty and worth valued by their world; just a different one from the one I had listened to when I was their age.
Theirs was upheld by elders, imams, fathers and mothers and peers; mine by a cacophony of bullies, preachers, godly wives and supermodels. But all of us, whether hot-pant-wearing kafir or Islamic schoolgirls in niqabs, were carving our niche into a pathway already hewn for us, whether through the force of religion or of liberal capitalism. And all of us would trip and fall again and again as we tried to match up to the perfection set for us because each of us would, in our own way, mistake that contrived perfection for the kind of love that could dispel our shame and doubt and fear.
On the final morning I sat at a table with four girls as they told me about the kind of Islamic love songs they were allowed to listen to. Songs whose lyrics were reminiscent of the choruses we sang at Bible camp about our love for God. I wondered if the choruses we sang about being in love with Jesus would translate to Mohammed; I smiled to myself at the possibility that that’s what they had been singing over the fence at Islamic Youth Camp all those years ago.
But even if our desire was directed towards very different leaders, it soon became clear that they weren’t so unlike me at the age of fourteen. Their chatter, which had begun with love, soon crossed over into the fears they had about judgement and punishment.
“The judgement I really don’t want is the ultimate one where you get buried in a pit with snakes and everything. That’s at the end of the world”, the girl next to me explained. My knowledge of the Islamic version of Judgement Day was zero but, going on past experience, I felt I had a handle on just how troubled this girl could be. Absorbed in colouring the layers of her dress design, she talked to me about the three levels of punishment and how she hoped she would never experience eternal banishment into this dark, snake-ridden pit. Underneath her robes and piety she was just as worried as I had been about failing and falling into the wrathful hands of God.
As I listened to her, it struck me that a tea party with the nuns might be a very good idea. To introduce them to the sisters who had been more like mothers to me and who had the strength to love, in the name of God, everything that people brought to them. But there would be no such Welsh field trip; these girls just had me and the other facilitators, so right now it was down to me to be the older sister, able to hear and hold all the fear she wanted to name. By the time she had finished describing these punishments her colouring motion had become languid, as if her energy had drained away.
I asked her to imagine she had a child.
She nodded.
“And imagine that child began to rebel against you and act in a way that you’d taught her not to.”
More nodding.
“Then this child begins not just acting out but actually seems to turn against you and reject you. How would you feel about your child, do you think?”
“I’d feel sad and I’d want to do all I could to bring her back to me.”
“Yes. I think you would do everything you could to bring your child back to a good relationship with you.”
She nodded. “I would.”
“I think that’s how Allah feels towards you. Unstoppable love.”
She smiled in recognition.
“And from everything you’ve told me you want to be in a good place with Allah …”
“Yes.”
“So it sounds like you and Allah are after the same thing then?”
She smiled at me, her enthusiasm returning in the vigorous nod of her head.
“You know, we’re both going to mess it up, no matter how much we want to do the right thing? Even though you’re wearing the right clothes you’ll get it wrong at times.”
She sighed and nodded.
“But if Allah is Allah then we can trust that we’ll be met by mercy and kindness and it’s not down to us to be perfect on our own.”
“That would be idolatry.”
“Yeah, it would, like we were saying we are OK on our own and we don’t need love and understanding and forgiveness.”
“Mmmm”, she agreed.
“So that pit of judgement with all the snakes in it that you mentioned: don’t think about that – it’ll just sow fear. Think about having a heart that stays open for Allah to pour His love into.”
The Jewish interfaith facilitator turned round from her table and nodded, smiling. “Amen.”
That afternoon as the girls presented their finished designs I read an inscription on a piece of fabric:
I thought only Muslim women were modest and I thought only modest women could be truly beautiful. Now I know that’s not true. I know that women can be faithful and devout and modest even without veils, even outside of Islam, and that is beautiful.