Ayan pens a personal account on the unsolicited consequence of her religion…

 It is not normal to feel shrouded in shame whenever an intrinsic part of your identity comes up in conversation. It is not normal to carry around immeasurable guilt for the concocted image others have entrenched in their minds about you. It is not normal to constantly be on the defensive because of actions committed, not by you, but by someone who looks enough like you to warrant concern.

And yet to this 20-year-old Muslim, it had become exactly that: normal.

Humans cannot exist in isolation, removed from the contexts we were born into, and I am no exception. The cultural climate I grew up in was one where at best the Muslim experience was ignored and shunned by the mainstream. at worst, weaponised in a bogeyman narrative, depicting a faith of animalistic terror. I determined our lives as unworthy of nuance. Born a month before 9/11, I am a baby of the “War on Terror” era, never knowing a world where the word Muslim and terrorist were depicted as anything other than mutually exclusive.

Instead of fading, it seems the harmful stereotypes that have been stamped onto my people long before the Twin Towers fell are more visible now than ever. Political Islamophobia has become the easiest ticket into positions of power it seems, with politicians needing simply to pander to the fear of their people in order to garner votes. The basic philosophy: to you create a monster so that you can defeat it — and in Western countries, the scariest creature of all is the foreign one who prays differently to you.

Like with most conversations surrounding the experiences of minorities, it becomes very easy to remove the personal implications of such attitudes from the political ones. The consequences of mainstream Islamophobia can and indeed does manifest in legislation akin to the banning of burqas in places like France, Belgium and China; but more times than not, it is an invisible weight on the everyday life of Muslims. An article may not get written every day about why Islam is problematic as a faith, but random acts of aggression triggered by the lies we are being fed crop up more regularly than they should

It is a burden that dampens your joy and can at times take a toll on your mental health. 

The way that this constant awareness of my own difference manifested in me was in a misplaced self-loathing that drew me further and further away from my faith. It has become some unwritten rule that part of being a Muslim in the West is to placate the mainstream about our faith in the hopes of being seen as more palatable and less "extreme" in our Islam, and so that is what I did. Apologetic in tone whenever Islam came up in debate and submissive to the very stereotypes I knew to be false, in an act of self-defence I simply cowered to all the vitriol that came my way. There is a reason why repetition is such an efficient way of retaining information — if you are told something enough, your subconscious will pick it up. And I spent most of my young adult life picking up the shame I was told to feel for behaviour and callousness I had no hand in. I shrunk into myself, and lived without the vigour and joy that I deserved until finally, enough was enough.

To renew your mindset and free yourself of a shame that has been forced onto you by society is probably one of the most difficult things to accomplish. It takes a strong mind and an even stronger support system to show you that you are in fact the only one worthy of determining who you are. For me, it meant actively going out of my way to claim back my narrative through writing and by refusing to compromise my beliefs, no matter what. Even something as small as wearing a brighter, bolder Hijab simply because it makes you feel good — consequential side-eye on the bus be damned — is a necessary act of not only self-care but revolution. There are fewer things more powerful than expanding when the status quo would have you shrink; fewer things more beautiful than seeing someone live their life on their own terms, no matter how inconvenient that is to the systems that exist to oppress us.

Accountable for only my actions, apologetic for only my mistakes and free from undeserved shame is how I now choose to live my life.

I hope it is how you choose to live yours.

credits

words — ayan artan

design — sâde popoola