A teenage hijabi is profiled in the Christian Science Monitor

Photo from the story. The Monitor used the following quotation from Sarah Ismail, the subject of the article, as a caption:
'It's not just a piece of clothing. It's a lifestyle and a statement about who I am.' - Sarah Ismail

The Christian Science Monitor this week featured a profile of 16-year-old Sarah Ismaili, a suburban Massachusetts daughter of Egyptian immigrants — a middle-class, professional family — who decided last year that she wanted to begin wearing a traditional headcovering (see photo). In light of recently having read Soul Searching, the article — which is pretty intelligent, worth a read — made me think again about the convergence of three loaded concepts: "religion," "American," and "teenager." The article refers several times to the way in which Sarah is simultaneously both "normal" and different from the norm, to put it in crass terms: "Sarah is both different from her non-Muslim classmates and very much the same."

What does this mean? Well, she's a "normal" American teenager because she has the same kind of inner life and subjectivity. This can come across as shallow. Her emotional world is dominated by concerns over academic performance, social life, caring for her appearance, and leisure time spent doing consumer-oriented activities. (In other words: she worries about grades and college admissions; she hangs out with friends; she goes to the gym; she "coordinat[es] her outfits with stylish hijabs"; and for fun she visits the mall.) This can also be somewhat more profound: "She is also, in her autonomy and ambition, and in the premium she places on her freedom of expression, a thoroughly American teenager, intent on becoming herself." In other words, it is "normal" for a teenager to be intensely concerned with his or her own dynamic subjectivity itself: themes of freedom, transformation, self-directed decision-making, independent life choices, and — most interestingly — religious behavior as a form of individual self-expression are common throughout the article. The hijab itself might appear, to the cynical reader, as just another designer brand, one that Sarah picked out for herself in the process of becoming her own woman — the veil becomes "an opportunity to make a statement about who she really is," which sounds a little vacuous. It reflects a kind of emotional self-assertion that doesn't really say anything very specific (at least in this portrayal).

And what about religion? This writer is trying to be sensitive, and it's not a bad effort, but Sarah's Islam comes across mainly as only two things, both fairly cliché. First, there's the standard prohibition on "normal" teenage fun, i.e. intoxication and sex ("[S]he doesn't drink alcohol or smoke. She doesn't date, although boys don't go unnoticed"). This is a kind of self-sacrifice that sometimes makes Sarah uncomfortable, but not in very big ways: the writer describes her pining over a sexy (the word she uses is actually "cute") outfit in a mall. There is a tantalizing hint of Sarah's isolation from non-Muslim peers, which strikes me as a genuine source of possible unhappiness, but the writer doesn't really delve into this suggestion that all is not well in Sarah's world.

The other part of Sarah's Islam might be described as a kind of everpresent inner piety that, like Sarah's independence and autonomy, is described only vaguely as a sort of feeling — this time, though, rather than a general feeling of self-possesssion, it's a feeling of dutifulness. This goes along with a subtle sense of wonder — also a little cliché — at Sarah's ritual discipline: "And five times a day she stops whatever she is doing to pray."

What brings these ideas together, I think, is that the writer stresses that Sarah chose the hijab herself, apparently as a kind of "statement." ("The decision to wear a hijab was Sarah's alone. Neither of her sisters does.") To me, this rhetorical touch is what resolves the story into a feel-good portrayal of American values, first straddling and then reconciling various apparent conceptual and cultural tensions or contradictions. Sarah is an in-between figure, neither a girl nor a woman. She's a member of an exclusive and mysterious (for the reporter) religious community, but at the same time she's "just like everyone else." She's uniquely herself, but she is also described as representing a kind of nonthreatening, well-behaved, idealized femininity (she cares about clothes and shopping, her best friend is her mom, and she wants to marry young and have seven children, "like her mother and both of her grandmothers"). She sticks out in a crowd with her colorful and strange clothing; but, among other Muslims, she is "hard to distinguish ... from [the] huddle." (If I were Sarah, I'd have found that last sentence insensitive or even insulting, in the midst of an overall very friendly and sensitive profile. Isn't that almost like saying, "all Asians look alike to me"?) Her religious beliefs represent a combination of nonspecific piety ("You always have to have God in your mind, no matter what you're doing .... Every action should please him") and erotic self-deprivation ("no guys, no drinking, no partying"), but what matters is that she chose this herself — in other words, she is autonomously deciding to do something that many American teenagers — probably adults too — would regard as an unacceptable sacrifice of their own autonomy.

Another photo from the story. Here's the Monitor's caption for this one:
A VERY AMERICAN PATH: Sarah Ismail, a Sharon (Mass.) High School senior, wears a hijab as a reminder of her Muslim principles - but, she says, she's "still a teenager ... just like everyone else."

The point here is, at least according to this reporter, Sarah sounds surprisingly like the kids described in Soul Searching, even though there is no clear Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Anyhow, read the article — it's interesting. I don't have anything else to say about it.

---

And a little postscript: the South Jersey paper, the Courier-Post, has a breezy little piece about the Mawlid al-Nabi, the Islamic celebration honoring the Prophet's birthday that some of us were lucky enough to attend the other day. Have a look. Includes this cute photo of a five-year-old girl and her father looking at the Quran together in their Camden home, complete with wall-to-wall carpeting.