I used to be desperate for others to accept my hijab – now I wear it for me

I would have shared videos about it, and planned an Instagram post about what the hijab meant to me. 

But this year, I’ll admit, it feels like a day just like any other. 

This realisation has caused me to contemplate my ever-shifting relationship with the hijab itself. 

I’ve gone from feeling like it was the centre of my identity to just one small part, from feeling self-conscious to unapologetic, from desperate for validation to somewhat apathetic.

I’ve gone from relying upon the approval of others to realising that I don’t need external validation to exist, unapologetically, as a hijabi.

A decade ago, when it first started, World Hijab Day was all about acceptance. 

Any British or American Muslim will tell you about the stalls set up on busy high streets and university campuses designed to allow non-Muslim women to try on a hijab or ‘be a hijabi for a day.’

At the time I thought this was an exciting, inspirational, progressive idea: the pinnacle of tolerance. 

But looking back, I realise that’s because, as a teenager, I was seeking approval, craving the arms of the country I had grown up in to finally open up and embrace me as a visibly Muslim woman. 

In short, I was longing to no longer stick out as different, and the messaging around World Hijab Day itself was all designed to do the same – to fit in.

As an adult now, and with more awareness of the political status of visibly Muslim women in modern Britain, I can’t help but feel that campaigns like World Hijab Day just belittle the multifaceted, complex experience of being a visibly Muslim woman, reducing it to nothing more than a physical garment. 

White women trying on a headscarf for a few hours can never comprehend the twin oppressions that face Muslim women: the gendered Islamophobia perpetuated by political figures (think Boris Johnson’s famous ‘letterbox’ comment) or the very specific form of violent racialised misogyny that targets women in hijabs and niqabs. 

For example, just last week, a Muslim woman was threatened with being shot and called a terrorist while travelling with her young child in London. 

The racism, Islamophobia and misogyny of incidents like this cannot be separated from each other and, the fear of living with them cannot be replicated by wrapping your head in a colourful scarf for the day. 

On the other hand, it also can’t recreate that special, rare joy of spotting the only other hijabi in a room and becoming instant friends.

I’m all for giving more coverage to visibly Muslim women – for us to be handed the microphone after decades of being talked for, and over. Especially those of us who are deemed more ‘conservative’ because of the way we dress. 

But I worry the appeal of World Hijab Day is just because it is convenient to bundle up our experience and repackage it like a fancy dress costume to hire for 24 hours.

It may just be appeasing notions of liberalism and tolerance without really bothering to unpack why Muslim women face so many simultaneous oppressions.

A decade on from World Hijab Day’s origins, I feel less desperate for the acceptance I sought out as a child and teenager. 

Even if it feels like something deeply spiritual and intensely personal, it carries a heavy political weight. Whether that’s hijab mandates in Iran or niqab bans in Europe, the veil is used as a means of coercion and control over Muslim women’s bodies. 

It feels about time that we use the growing platform of World Hijab Day to shift the narrative from acceptance to one of resistance. We need it now more than ever.

So this World Hijab Day, I’m no longer seeking external validation. I am staying true to who I am as both a hijabi and so much more, while acknowledging, and battling against, the multitude of ways that Muslim women are undermined by systems and people in power. 

This year’s slogan is ‘Unapologetic Hijabi.’ 

And that’s what I’ll be.