Alayki Al Salaam

In fifth grade with pink prayer clothes, a crown that said يا زهراء, and a microphone.

They had chosen me to introduce the girls at our takleef ceremony. I was ten. All my friends were wearing the scarf that week, so I was too. I don't remember why they picked me. I don't remember most of what I said.

I remember the first sentence.

سيّدتي الزهراء، عليكِ السلام.

My Lady Al-Zahraa, peace be upon you.

And then something happened that I have never been able to explain properly. I felt crowned. Not like a girl in a paper crown, but like actual royalty. I felt confident, as though the whole world was standing beside me. As though Sayyeda Fatima was standing behind my shoulder, and all I had to do was speak.

I didn't understand why that feeling was so massive, but it was there. It was grand; it was bigger than me. I was out of my body, fulfilling a duty, a job. It was not about me at all.

For years, that was the whole of my relationship with her. A sentence I said once, in a hall, in pink.

I was twenty-seven when I started wearing the hijab.

But it wasn't the first time.

The first time was that week in fifth grade. And it ended in a car.

My uncle had a special place in my heart. He teased me constantly about that scarf, said I was too young for it, and wanted it off my head. I wouldn't take it off. Then one day we were driving, and he reached over, took it off my head, and threw it out the window!

And just like that, it was gone.

I felt both relief and shame at the same time.. nothing but a confusing feeling of what happens when someone chooses for you.

Part of me was relieved. It was almost as if someone had taken that responsibility away from me. I hadn't made the decision to take it off myself. Someone else had made it for me. We laughed about it. But somewhere inside, I felt ashamed.. and guilty. And those feelings stayed with me for years.. I even forgot where that feeling started.

Then I had Julia, and something changed..

I was talking to Erika, a former coworker and one of my forever soul sisters. I told her there was one thing standing between God and me, and it was the hijab. Or rather, the fact that I wasn't wearing it. I wanted to. I was afraid of being judged, of being seen, of losing opportunities, of what might change.

She said: "Girl, you're in America. You can do whatever you want."

It hit me like an axe on the forehead.

Here I was, in the country of nobody-tells-me-what-to-do, waiting for permission. Waiting for someone to hand me back the thing I already knew I wanted. And underneath that: how long had I been waiting, and who exactly was I waiting for???

I went to the hijab store. I walked out wearing it. Just like that.

And the person inside me was finally liberated.

I could stop being the pretty girl with the long eyelashes and the long black hair and the cute jeans. I could just be Farah. Farah who wants to talk about God, space, science, and people, and how to help them. The inside of me could finally be the thing that defines me.

Hijab truly liberated me from an image that imprisoned me.

And about Erika... when she found out, she said: "This is such a blessing. I need a hijab to do for me what it did for you."

This year I was going through the Maraseel designs, and I noticed something that stopped me.

I have a card for the Prophet Muhammad.

I have a card for Imam Ali.

I have cards for the ordinary yous and mes, for the births and the weddings and the losses.

But nothing for Sayyeda Fatima al-Zahraa.

Sayyedat Nisaa al-Alamin, the Lady of the Women of the Worlds. The daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him and his family, the one who so closely embodied his character. The piece of heaven.

I sat with that for a while.

Because who am I? Who am I to put a name that size on a piece of paper with a floral border and call it honoring her? What would she want me to say? What would she want me to remember?

I did what I always do when I'm too small for the task. I read about her.

The woman who gave away her wedding dress because she had nothing else to give. The woman who spent her nights praying for others. The woman who stood before those in power and delivered a speech whose words are still remembered centuries later.

And then the story I couldn't get past. Her son asked her why she prayed for everybody else before she prayed for her own house.

يا بُنَيّ، الجار ثم الدار

My son, the neighbor first, then the home.

Even in prayer, she thought of others before herself.

And that was the answer to every question I had been asking. If I was going to create a card in her honor, perhaps the most meaningful thing I could do was create something that encouraged us to carry one of her lessons into our own lives. I couldn't honor her by making her the subject. She would want the card pointed at somebody else entirely.

So inside the card I wrote:

Sayyeda Fatima taught us to pray for others before ourselves, for those near and those far. And you, my dear, are always in my prayers.

Simple. Diwani calligraphy, because she deserves elegance. A small floral rosette for Al-Zahraa, the radiant one. And one sentence that means something entirely different now than it did when I started.

Very personal, for reasons I did not expect.

To my surprise... I just recently found photographs from that ceremony.

From that night. The crowns, the pink prayer clothes, me. Photographs that somehow survived our house in Lebanon, which was recently destroyed.

I wonder why those particular photographs survived.

I don't think I'm meant to know. I think I'm meant to notice.

There was a little girl who once said a sentence she didn't understand and meant every letter of it, and she had no idea that she would spend seventeen years not wearing the scarf and another decade learning what that sentence was actually asking of her.

I wonder if she sent my salam back.

سيّدتي الزهراء، عليكِ السلام.

And after all these years, I still wonder if you sent your salam back.