BOSTON - "I've been called oppressed and depressed and repressed and every other kind of pressed you can imagine," says Milia Islam, as she counts off the adjectives with an amused smile. The subject of such "pressing" concern is the head scarf that the young Missouri woman wears over her hair.
The scarf, better known as the hijab, the Arabic word meaning "to cover or screen," identifies Milia publicly as a Muslim. So, it has become more than a curiosity in the weeks since Americans began an intensive course in Islam 101.
After Sept. 11, many American Muslim women experienced their own kind of "profiling." Some put aside the hijab out of fear. Some had it pulled off their hair by angry strangers. Others were merely labeled "oppressed, depressed, repressed."
Milia is one of three American Muslim women, all graduate students at the Harvard Divinity School, whom I have talked with about the head cover that has taken on such heightened meaning. A 22-year-old whose head is covered this day in an olive print scarf pinned under the chin, she was born in Bangladesh and raised in the only Muslim family in her small Missouri town. She started wearing a hijab in college, where the reactions of others sent her on a journey from pre-med to sociology to religious studies.
A second woman, Melinda Mott Krokus, Massachusetts-born and raised, began wearing the hijab when she was studying in Turkey, where some women praised her scarf and others said, "Take that thing off." Back home, Melinda no longer covers her head because, she now believes, "in my culture, modesty is not connected to my hair."
The third, Pali Kakar, wore a hijab in her Islamic school in Seattle but not in Pakistan, where she went with her parents - U.N. doctors. Today she is wearing a brown scarf, embossed with the designer name Versace, tied in the back of her neck.
These three graduate students in religion are by no means "typical" Muslim women, but that is the point. They insist there is no typical, although there certainly is stereotypical.
In Islam, it turns out, there is no uniform cover and no single reason for covering. The Quran has no rule that women wear a blue burqa or a black chador, a veil or hijab. There is an injunction to dress "modestly," but modest dress is defined in that murky interface between culture and religion.
