Is Islamic dress acceptable?

Liverpool had to prove that it was qualified to be the Capital of Culture 2008 BUT are Liverpudlians entitled to this title? I decided to find out how differently Muslims women are treated in the Liverpool City centre.

Muslim women wear the ‘hijab’ or headscarf to attempt a modicum of modesty, which I think is quiet admirable the age we are in, where showing a bit of bottom is ‘fashionable’ and blaring a nipple (or two) is a publicity stunt.

There are those people who believe that Muslim women are oppressed and ruled by the men in their lives, but those are the people who don’t know any Muslims and make judgements by reading the tabloids.

I worked for a charity last year and had to travel to different parts of England recruiting the public and I noticed that when I wore my headscarf to work I got very negative reactions from some areas.

Without making a general statement I found that people in Wigan City Centre were extremely tolerant and open minded to the Islamic dress code, whereas in Mold (a small Welsh village) I was terrorised more than once for it and had to resort to being bareheaded when I went there. (Not that everybody was like this because Mold has some of the friendliest people around.)

With Shabina Begum’s jilbab-win fresh in the minds of the public, I went out into the streets of Liverpool with my headscarf on hoping that nobody would be too antagonised by my intrusions. This experiment was to investigate how accepted Islamic dress is in Liverpool.

In the city centre, I got the feeling that people were deliberately avoiding eye-contact, though this probably had more to do with not wanting to seem prejudiced rather than actually being prejudiced. However, even though this is much better than being called ‘Bin Laden’ by a bigoted few, it does give a sense of being ignored, which is not necessarily pleasant either.

Without my headscarf I did not get stared at, at all and people seemed more comfortable when they accidentally caught my eye. I was directed to wherever I wanted to go, even though I did get a few funny looks when I asked for the passport office!

While Liverpudlians have kept up to their friendly nature, Islamic dress is still something of an obscurity to them as with everything that is unusual. Most Liverpudlians do not seem to be affected in their judgement of a person just by the way they dress, which is quite heartening.

Su’aad Hussain, 18, a hijab-wearing Media Studies student at John Moores said: “I don’t feel any different from anyone else with my hijab on. It is something I have always wanted to do and it makes me feel secure. I am always confident in the knowledge that whenever I get something done, it s because of who I am, not what I look like.”