Textbooks, Timetables and the Hijab
Kip Williams investigates the challenge that faces all Islamic students: How do you reconcile faith with an academic life and a campus culture of drinking?
A week ago, while researching this article, one of my friends recommended I talk to Haneefa Buckley, a third year Arts/Science student and a practicing Muslim. I casually suggested to my friend that Haneefa and I meet at Manning Bar for a chat. But half an hour later I find myself on the phone to my friend: Haneefa isn’t comfortable meeting in a pub. Feeling slightly moronic for my original suggestion, we schedule a new meeting place.
Later that week, I find Haneefa waiting in the Barnard Eldershaw room on the third floor of Manning. I close the door, but Haneefa asks me to leave it open. Her faith doesn’t permit her to be alone in a room with man. I oblige and we sit waiting for a friend of hers who is also keen to be interviewed.
Moments later Sevgi Yildiz, a third year English and History major, strides through the door. I introduce myself and go to shake her hand. “Sorry, I don’t shake hands,” she says confidently. I ask why and she explains that Islam does not allow unmarried women to have any intentional physical contact with men.
And so, before my interview even begins, I’ve been made aware three times how little I know of the Islamic faith. Naturally my first question is aimed at finding out how these two students have come to cope in a country where a simple handshake or a trip the pub are daily occurrences.
“I am a first generation Australian,” says Sevgi proudly. “My parents are both immigrants from Turkey. But growing up here, you realise that you can’t get enough support from your parents, because here the culture is so different [from what they’re used to]. So you sort of find your own way to mesh religion with your surroundings. You learn as you live and you become a weird Muslim. A hybrid.”
“When you look at Islam and the central texts it’s quite basic really,” explains Haneefa. “There’s only a certain amount of set rules and then everything else derives from which culture has adopted it over time and then added to it.”
One of the core aspects of the Islamic faith is a daily praying. Whereas your average Christian might say a prayer each day before going to bed, the Islamic faith requires its followers to pray at five specific times every day. There’s Fajr, which is the prayer before sunrise, Dhuhr, which is usually just after midday, Asr, which is in the late afternoon, Maghrib, which is just after sunset, and Isha, which is later on at night. With such a strict religious routine, how do Muslim students manage class time with prayer time?
“It’s really not that complex,” says Sevgi. “It basically takes about 5 to 10 minutes of your time, so it’s not like it’s intruding on your life.”
“The only hard thing when it comes to praying on campus,” explains Haneefa, “is getting to the Musallah (the prayer room), which is at the Old Teachers College. If you’re at Merewether or doing Engineering all day, the likelihood is you’re going to have to find yourself a patch of grass and watch people laugh at you as they walk past.”
But for some of these stranded Islamic students praying in public isn’t ideal. Luckily, Midday prayer time is still possible thanks to a makeshift Musallah in the most unlikely of places.
“No one knows this,” giggles Sevgi, “but on level six of Fisher Library, there is a deep dark corner that all Muslims know about. We all pray there. They even have a newspaper there as a prayer mat.”
Sevgi and Haneefa talk of their praying ritual with great affection. For them it is a cleansing and comforting routine and the Musallah provides them with a safe place where they can retreat and regather their thoughts. Yet the rest of campus does not always offer the same level of security. Although neither woman feels uncomfortable about expressing an opinion in the classroom, sometimes their presence isn’t always made to feel welcome.
“When I walk into my English classes,” begins Sevgi, “I sort of feel that everyone is thinking ‘what’s she doing here? Does she even speak English?’ Everyone sort of looks at you as if you’re a lost international student.
“I’ve never been actively discriminated against, but there are times when I feel left out. Like when I’m walking past Manning and they’re selling tickets for Snowball. I never get offered one! I wait for the day where someone doesn’t think ‘she would never come’ and just passes me one, because what if I wanted to come dammit!”
It’s comforting to know that both Sevgi and Haneefa view Sydney University as a generally accepting environment, especially when compared to wider society. But occasional incidents like being ignored by the person sitting next to you in class or being forgotten when assignment groups are formed sometimes make life as a Muslim student an isolating experience. As Haneefa explains, most students make superficial assumptions about Muslims and this can be a significant stumbling block between Islamic and non-Islamic students.
Ironically enough, however, Haneefa has been on the receiving end of such assumptions from her fellow Muslims on campus. To be honest, this is because Haneefa doesn’t look like your average Muslim. For starters she doesn’t wear the headscarf known as the Hijab. But more than that, Haneefa’s ethnic background is quite unique when it comes to young Muslim Australians.
Haneefa’s mother is a third generation Australian of French and English decent, and her father is an Irishman who immigrated to Australia aged nine. They converted to Islam in the 1970s whilst working in Indonesia. Since then, they’ve taken an active role in the Australian Muslim community, establishing several Islamic schools across Sydney. Haneefa is one of four children born into a white Muslim family, which is highly unusual in a country whose Muslim population is built upon tightly-nit ethnic immigrant groups.
“Because I’m white, not a convert, went to a Muslim school and grew up in the Muslim community, I’m in the minority of the minority,” says Haneefa. “There have been times when I’ve walked into the Musallah and people have thought I’m that white girl who wants to know more about Islam. Then I’ll put on the Hijab and start praying and get these weird looks [as if to say] ‘what are you doing here?’ It was much easier when I wore the Hijab, just because people couldn’t pick that I was actually Anglo.”
If Haneefa’s experience is anything to go by, it seems that regardless of faith, people will always make assumptions about the cultural attitudes of their fellow students. But if removing her Hijab, something she has only done in the past year, makes it more likely for Hijabis (women who wear the Hijab) to assume she’s just another white person, why take it off in the first place?
“How much time do you have?” she says with a wry smile that betrays the long path she has taken to reach this decision. “I think the Hijab is a very personal choice, irrelevant of what the media like to do with it or what political groups like to do with it, and I think people keep forgetting that.
“You’ll meet women who’ll wear it passionately and they’re incredibly smart and talented women; women who take a greater role in the community, who are sometimes lawyers and judges. But that’s their personal choice [to wear it].
“I decided to way up the pros and cons and make my own decision. I took it off because it wasn’t a part of my identity. I felt like it wasn’t protecting me and wasn’t representative of me.”
Impressively, Sevgi, who sports a funky green, blue and white striped Hijab, nods encouragingly throughout Haneefa’s explanation. She agrees that wearing the Hijab, and indeed her entire belief in Islam, is an individual choice and not up for public debate.
“My faith is my faith,” she says with a refreshing frankness. “It’s personal. I don’t hide from my religion, but I don’t fight for it. I was in a tutorial and the issue of the Hijab came up. A couple girls in the class started on the good old feminist argument, saying [things like] ‘why do those girls have to cover themselves up?’ and so on. I [sat there] thinking ‘how do I tell these people that I’m not oppressed? I know I’m not oppressed and I don’t act like I’m oppressed.’ So I spoke about how I chose to put it on myself and how I’d done a lot of research to understand the wisdom behind it.”
It was also research that led Haneefa to remove her Hijab. Her elder sister, a PhD student in Islam Studies and proud Hijabi, provided her with the sources that gave her the resolve to take it off. Her sister supports her choice, as do her parents, grudgingly. But now that she’s made that decision, she wishes people would stop making such a big deal out of it.
“When people try to question why I took it off,” she says, “I think to myself ‘how does something on my head affect you? It’s a piece of cloth. If I was wearing it around my neck [or] around my waist it wouldn’t make a difference! I’m wearing it on my head – MY head – why is that an issue?”
“There are two sides to the Hijab,” chimes in Sevgi. "You have the personal side; your own personal choice and that’s the bit no one’s allowed to touch. But then there’s the public side. When you put on the scarf, you automatically become a representative of Islam. It’s like saying ‘hello, I’m Muslim’.”
And then there’s the funny side of the Hijab that both women are quick to point out.
“I do wear my scarf very passionately,” explains Sevgi, “but there are days where I’m [putting it on] and I think ‘Dammit, my hair looks hot!’”
“And then there are other days,” adds Haneefa, “where I would be like, ‘great my hair looks terrible! Thank god for the Hijab!’ But then you do have bad Hijab days where you’re sitting in front of the mirror thinking, ‘damn that fold doesn’t work!’”
The two friends burst into laughter. They clearly share a strong connection through their faith. It makes me wonder whether friendships with non-Muslim students could ever rival such a bond.
“I make friends really easily," says Sevgi. “It doesn’t matter what religion they [belong to] or what cultural background they come from. And you’ll go and have your coffees, but then the moment it hits the ‘hey guys lets go have a beer’ I have to quietly leave.
“The bonding sessions that occur in those bars over a beer are huge, so you are kind of left out from that. It is socially constricting, especially in Australia in the summer time when everyone’s off at the beach in their bikinis running around like hot little girls. We can’t do that! We can go to the beach, but we can sit there and sweat. So we’re left out in that sense.
“But I think friendships are made up of a lot more than just sharing a drink. [My non-Muslim friends] know me for who I am. They know that I’m not going to drink and they don’t need to know me over a beer or whatever it is.”
“I think you can split friendships with non-Muslims into three categories,” says Haneefa. “The first group of people look at you and think ‘no, her world is just too different from mine, there’s no possible way we can get along, we’ll just be nice and polite’. Then you’ve got people who think ‘oh, she’s different. I know that I’ll never really understand her, but we’ll still have a conversation or send a message on Facebook’.
“But then there’s the third group of people who honestly don’t care. The only difference [between this group and the others] is that they believe that your two worlds aren’t completely different. For example, I’ve got lots of gay friends.”
“Me too!” interrupts Sevgi.
“They’re attitude,” continues Haneefa, “is ‘oh cool you’re Muslim, who cares?’ And we’re like ‘cool, you’re gay. Awesome!’. It’s great to have people who don’t already have that barrier there that you can make good friends with. They look at you as just another person.”
It seems the common thread throughout all that these two young women speak of is the need to be viewed not as a religion but as a person. But is this a need that pervades their entire life or is it something specific to their time spent of campus?
“I don’t feel the outside world needs to be accepting,” reflects Sevgi. “I’m just doing my own thing in the outside world. I don’t need to feel accepted by the man on the train or the woman on the street. But Uni is a place where I’m growing and becoming a better person. At Uni I do feel the need to be accepted.”
And it’s at that point where I realise that despite my three mistakes before the interview had even begun, these two students share with me, and indeed all students, the same anxieties. Acceptance, ultimately that’s all they want at university. Well, that and a Halal Indian food outlet on campus. But, as Haneefa laughs, “that’s not so much to ask for, is it?”