a story

Note: Sleeves or a head appearing is okay IN CERTAIN SITUATIONS. Like working in a garden and rolling up your sleeves OR going to the hair salon OR checking up in a hospital. In other Mazhab or fiqh, it's much more lenient and it's okay to show ankles or neck. (depends on country or Mazhab)

Note: Camel Hump hijab in certain tafsir could mean a haughty attitude rather than the camel hump shaped hijab, but there are also others that take it literally too, so it depends on the person.

to preface what im about to say i am a malaysian muslim and hijabi and we follow the same sect and mazhab as op

from a purely educational perspective these are for sure accurate according to the teachings in the quraan, and as a post to inform abt what is right and wrong regarding hijab/modesty this is great!

but in the context of oc making.... not so much

character design shouldn't have 'rules' or 'mistakes' . if you give your hijabi characters the "no's" it helps tell a story, gives your character a personality etc. bc not every muslim is the same.

Lineup from forever ago that I keep forgetting to post !!! Eek!! Bare witness upon my blorbos from my brain

Left to Right: Brianna (she/her), Emily (they/he/she), Ezra (she/they), Amara (she/her), Elizabeth (he/she), Zenebe (they/she), Esmeray (she/her)

May is Asian Readathon, so I have been prioritizing reads by Asian authors this month.

I'll include thoughts on specific reads and fulfilling challenge prompts under the cut.

my dad is a brown Muslim immigrant and my mom is a french-canadian white girl

and good god. some of the towns we stopped in when I was a kid, stores I've been to, random people in québec, my white family members...

my french is fluent. I speak it with my mom. I can vocally pass for living in québec. but none of that matters in the slightest with white people there. they take one look at me, or find out my (arabic) name, and I'm nothing to them. sont pas comme nous.

when I was a kid my mom explained "sont pas comme nous" to me, as a phrase and an attitude, after I asked about the treatment our family was receiving

it's...bad

In Jasper, Alberta, I pass through the widowed poplars. Evening hikes up its dark hems, trees begin howling their elegies, when loosened from the thicket, two elk walk into my gaze.

Here, in the gap between needle point and destination, there is an unkind earth that persists even as loss petals down leaving the poplars bare. Earlier that day, I had crossed the forest’s bridges and stepped beyond its corridors.

I had longed to find the hidden trail that led to the valley of roses.

From the elk, I am expecting a lesson, as if Allah has approached me in the shape of a compass built from antler and vine. Their muscles tense. One rises into a gallop, widening the field.

I think there's something to the "gendered versus gender neutral scripts" idea but I'd attribute it less to the feminist revolution of the sixties and seventies. After all, women in the workplace are still recognizably women, and women having jobs is not a recent feminist invention. Rather, I attribute the shift to recent generations growing up with the internet...and specifically, the text-based early internet.

Pre-internet, having a "penpal," was a rare novelty; most actual human interaction was face to face or at least over the phone. The internet introduced the idea of having people who you talk to day after day, week after week, month after month, without ever seeing their face or hearing their voice. All you had was text and a pfp, so there was no way to reliably know whether these people in forums and chatrooms and message boards, who had become a real presence in your life, were male or female. I mean, sometimes they told you outright, but not always. You could make guesses, but you were frequently wrong. Asking directly was kind of awkward...and of course, even then, you had no proof that someone was telling the truth. And most of us internet young'uns also had the experience online of being mistaken for a different sex, and then when it came out, realizing, "Oh, huh. This person was interacting with me for the last few weeks wrongly assuming I was a boy/girl." And also realizing that maybe you had a better rapport with them when they were working under that mistaken assumption about you.

So Millennials, the first generation to really grow up with the internet, developed a gender neutral mental model for interacting with people. They developed a mindset where you waited and looked for clues to someone's sex or gender rather than just knowing based on their face or voice.

On the one hand, yes, the evolution of the internet and its formative effect on our generation and younger has been really, really crucial to the development of our cultural concepts of gender identities and nonbinary genders and so on. I'd claim a variant of this which takes it a little further: it's largely because of the development of the internet as a place to exist in full-blown digital social spaces at the time that it did that we've seen our recent fairly abrupt explosion in transgender identification and self-identity-based concepts of gender; I suspect this couldn't have taken place without the internet being in the form that it is.