Two years
For a person who has bad memory I still remember the day I started wearing the hijab, it was a bit more than two years ago on February 18th 2010, and I was 20years old. None of my friends were wearing it at that time, but my sister was, however she wears it backwards and I chose the more traditional kind of hijab. Everyone was happy for me but at the same time I knew they thought I lost my mind, some people even told me that they thought I would be the last person to wear the hijab, and to be honest I thought so too. Sometimes people were really happy for me but at the same time they tried hinting that I should not be wearing it, especially when I had job interviews to attend since they thought I would not get the job. However, it was not that bad when I started wearing the headscarf since I was still “me” in the sense that I still was wearing jeans. The big blowout came when I started wearing the abaya a few months ago, and since I moved away a few months after I started wearing the headscarf (2010) people only found out I wore the abaya when they came to visit, so I got phonecalls from people telling me that I am not going to make a good living while others just had disappointment in their voice because they were too afraid of telling me their opinion. What did I do? Well, I chose to ignore all the negativity and just focused on the positive. My advice to the sisters contemplating on the hijab/jilbaab etc is to just do it. My biggest regret was that I was thinking for two whole years, and I was still not sure about wearing it the day I put it on but it felt so good alhamdulilah. With the risk of sounding sentimental, I felt complete. My biggest push for wearing it was because I asked myself: Allah gave me two years of thinking regarding the hijab, but what if I do not get another day to live and I die without ever wearing it? I did not even feel like sleeping that night, I remember it was around 3-4am and I just wanted to go to my mums closet and pick out a scarf and wrap it around my head and step out just to prove to Allah that I chose the hijab because I thought thinking to myself “I am going to wear it tomorrow” and I die, would not be enough on the Day of Resurrection. And now? Some of my friends have started wearing the hijab aswell, and the others are thinking about it, alhamdulilah. May Allah make the decision easy for them and the rest of my sisters who are struggling with this hard, but yet so beautiful and life-changing decision.
