Wearing Hijab Without Losing Your Identity (Part 2)

One of my readers, Putri Ayuningtyas, sent me a picture of her and her friend wearing Hanbok, a Korean traditional dress. She is an Indonesian, but right now she lives in Germany. She likes Korean stuff, and also have a blog, titled In Her Shoes.

Her pictures and some articles from Islamic Horizons I read recently have motivated me to write this post (Wearing Hijab Without Losing Your Identity part 2) as an addition to the the previous one. If you miss the part one, here is the link to read it.

As human being, we have a multiple identities. One person's identity (or 'identities', for more accurate) might include all of multiple significant social categories. The identity is made up of his/her ethnicity, citizenship, political view, religion, and so on.

In term of citizenship identity, sometimes there are some people who do not want to wear hijab because they think they might lose their personal identity as a citizen/ethnic of some country. They think if they wear hijab, other people will assume that they are Arab, or wearing other culture's clothes that do not suit with their country.

As we already know, wearing hijab doesn't mean that we will losing our identities. We still could show our identities through, for example, our clothes.... whether we are a doctor, an engineer, a teenager, a mother, an American, a Russian, an Indonesian, a Japanese, a soccer fan, etc.

We need to build a healthy sense of identity that allows us to be defined for who we are. We could be an Indonesian-muslim, a Korean-muslim, an American-muslim, etc. We could be a muslim-baseball fan, a muslim-engineer, a muslim-lawyer, a muslim-mother, etc.

Islamic Horizons, an Islamic magazine in America, raises this identity issue in their March/April 2010 issue. You could read the online version here. There are some articles about identity issue on Islamic School in America.

In one of articles on that magazine, titled: Serving Tawheed and Turkey page 44, Erik Erikson, a famous child development expert, said that:

"Failure to achieve an identity can lead to confusion and despair".

 So, it's important for us to develop our unique identity or self.

A picture from the cover story

(Photograph courtesy of The American Youth Academy)

As a muslim woman who wears hijab, there is a whole new realm of possibility for our clothes, from traditional clothes to urban or modern outfits as long as you love it, there aren't any rules on what styles it should be...

So, what do you think about this?

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