#bayramoglu

Meet Aylin: A contestant on Oxygen's The Glee Project Season 2, Aylin Bayramoğlu "comes from a very traditional Turkish family and, being Muslim, she has had trouble balancing who she is with who her family expects her to be. She constantly pushes those cultural boundaries in her life and music." source: glee project wiki

To see one Muslim girl, especially one who clearly identifies herself as such, make it to the finale of Glee project makes me super excited. Here is a real Muslim girl presenting American viewers  with an idea of the kinds of challenges we face, not just with our families, but with our religion and our identity. Aylin's story is clearly compelling. It's a fresh, untouched area for the show and it's one that television in general hasn't really explored. It's a story that American viewers could learn from and that American-Muslim viewers could identify with.

In episode 10 "Actability," the contestants showed their acting talent by filming a trailer for a fictional show. Aylin was asked to portray a Turkish-American girl who had fallen in love and become pregnant with an American boy in town.  As I watched Aylin tear up after donning the Hijab for her role, I felt myself becoming emotional with her. She stated that the sight of herself wearing the headscarf reminded her of the constant struggles she deals with in her Turkish Muslim family. 

The writers brought in to judge her performance immediately recognized the story potential in Aylin--after all, her role in the trailer had taken elements from her actual life. Unfortunately, with the excitement that came from seeing the writers' realization of the "freshness" of the Muslim element, a degree of apprehension arose in me. As open-minded and barrier-breaking a show that Glee is, it is also one that proliferates stereotypes by creating loud, over-the-top characters. If Aylin were to be on the show, would she become a girl tearing up at the sight of herself in hijab, at what appears to be the removal of her freedoms?

Because whereas perhaps a girl from a Turkish immigrant family would look at wearing the hijab as a step backward, what the hijab represents in the West is a changed concept. The hijab can mean freedom, it can mean independence. It's a choice that expresses love for God and firmness in faith, in who you are as a woman and who you are in society's eyes. Not an object to be sexualized, but a symbol--that you can't touch me.