‘I’m not just a minority– I’m a Muslim American’

It was the fall of 2003, and the North East Mall in Fort Worth was packed with people, just as it was every Saturday. Sadaf Syed, with a gray hijab wrapped around her head, pushed her newborn son through the crowd in his stroller. Her son was actually the reason for her outing — after being cooped up in the house with the child, she wanted out. Besides, she was a big window shopper and could spend hours at the mall without becoming bored.

The mall was pulsing with footsteps and chatter, but above it all something began to buzz in Syed’s ear: laughter, coming from a man and a woman right behind her.

Then a single word cut through the air and her heart.

“Towelhead.”

The man hissed the word and yanked on her hijab.

He yanked on the garment that brought Syed a feeling of peace and a sense of modesty, the purpose of the hijab and many other regional coverings.

He yanked on the garment that gave her the feeling that she was judged not by her physical appearance, but by who she was as a person.

Shocked, Syed reached to hold onto her head covering and continued walking. She didn’t say a word, but after a moment, she decided to turn and look at her harassers. Maybe they didn’t say that, she thought, desperately hoping the ordeal didn’t happen even though the word and the tug had been clear as day. When Syed met the couple’s eyes, they laughed in her face.

“It looks like a towel,” the man sneered.

For years Syed, a biology teacher, has been the victim of malicious comments such as “towelhead” and “go home,” even though she was born in Chicago, mainly when she would wear her hijab. The hateful words and hostile glares entered her life after the terror attacks on 9/11– she was in college at the time and had been wearing a hijab for about three years. Before that event, Syed said she was “never persecuted.”

“On 9/11, I went to class after I saw what was happening, and I [didn’t] know what to do,” Syed said. “I went to campus, and that would be the first time I started seeing people pointing and shaking their heads. Then I had a professor who told me I should be ashamed of my beliefs. I remember that was a shock because I didn’t realize that everyone thought that I was doing something.”

In that moment, Syed said she knew “things were changing.” In fact, her parents, who never forced her to wear a hijab in the first place, asked her to consider taking off the covering out of fear for her safety.

“I thought about [what my parents said] and I said, ‘I think that based on everything I know, this country is about religious freedom, and not only do I love the country, but I love the people, and I think that [taking the hijab off] is not a necessary step,’” Syed said. “‘It’s wrong for me to take it off because I have been given these rights.’ That’s why everyone comes here. Persecuted people come here because this is such a great country.”

Syed thought maybe people would stop accusing her after awhile, but she soon “realized that was not the case.” Still, she did not remove her hijab. Instead, Syed learned how to deal with the hate by “becoming numb.”

“I learned to accept the jeers and the negativity,” Syed said. “When people do that, I learned to say to myself, ‘Well they don’t know me.’ But of course that’s what they’re going to think because if all they know about a Muslim is what happened on 9/11, then [they] probably will think that.”

Difficult decisions 

Syed finally decided to take off her hijab for two reasons. The first was that the covering kept her from obtaining a job, which she wanted after her husband’s occupation as an engineer became at risk due to outsourcing. After being a stay-at-home mom for 10 years, Syed got her pharmacy technician certification and applied for a variety of jobs. But the hijab impeded her search. She decided to begin applying to places like Target and Wal-Mart, as “those jobs are easier to get, supposedly.” Still, she had no luck.

“You can fill everything out, and then they’ll call you, and they talk to you,” Syed said. “Then [you] just come in to sign the papers, and [they] see you, and that’s when it would fall through. The really sad part is, when I took it off, [it] literally didn’t take a week for me to get a job.”

The second reason Syed took off her hijab was for her children. She feared they would be treated unkindly, as she already saw “so much negativity when [she stepped] out the door.”

“Around the same time when I was looking for a job was the time when my son was about to start kindergarten,” Syed said. “I thought, ‘What if somebody like [the unkind people I see so often] will be the teacher of my child?’ I thought about the job issue, I thought about my son going to Kindergarten, and I realized that I have to take it off.”

Once Syed moved to Allen from Fort Worth, where she had received much hate, conditions improved. She felt “more accepted” in Allen, for she saw “more smiles, more people of diversity.”