BALTIMORE — Amara Majeed founded a website called The Hijab Project, aimed at combating discrimination against Muslim girls and women who wear headscarves in public. She self-published a book of short biographies of 17 peace-loving, law-abiding Muslims from around the world. She provides online commentary for CNN and, starting earlier this month, for the Huffington Post.
It’s worth noting that Amara is 17 years old and is still in high school. What will she accomplish when she’s 18?
“I want to transform myself into an idea,” Amara, a senior at Towson High School said during a post-school chat in the bookstore that has become a second home for her. “I want to transform myself into this concept of liberty and equality. People die, but ideas don’t. I want my ideas to live on long after I’ve left this world.”
Even before she has earned her driver’s license, Amara Majeed is rapidly becoming a force to be reckoned with as a fresh new voice speaking on behalf of an under-represented and frequently misunderstood minority. The 2,770,000 Muslims living in the U.S. in 2010 represent just 0.9 percent of all Americans, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.
So Amara can’t help but stand out from the crowd — though the impression she makes stems more from her unusual initiative and drive than it does from her black hijab.
For instance, after months of fruitlessly pitching various editors at the Huffington Post and getting no response, Amara sent a long email plea directly to the website’s founder, Arianna Huffington, describing her great desire to work for that organization.
The email went on to explain how Amara had gradually learned to embrace her identity as a Muslim feminist.
It described her decision to start wearing a hijab as a high school freshman because she didn’t think a woman’s merit should be judged solely by physical beauty. It described how two years later, she ignored her classmates’ stares while offering up Islamic prayers each morning on the school bus.
According to an email passed along by Amara, Huffington responded by thanking the young woman “for sharing your powerful personal story” and added that she would “love to feature your voice on the site!”
Amara’s debut HuffPost post on Feb. 6 was a meditation on skin color and arranged marriages in South Asian culture. (Amara’s parents emigrated to the U.S. from Sri Lanka, and the family, which also includes her two older brothers, has made several long trips to visit relatives in the island nation.)
“She’s always saying that she’s not that special,” said Amara’s close friend, Sarah Sulkowski, 18. “And we’re like, ‘Oh yeah?’ Who else do you know who gets emails from Arianna Huffington?”
Charlene DiMino met Amara in the fall of 2013, shortly after being named Towson High’s principal. Every morning, DiMino would walk into the high school cafeteria before classes began and find Amara sitting alone with her head bent over her schoolbooks. Frequently, Amara was at her table at 7 a.m., or an hour before the first bell rang. Every day, Amara would spend her lunch period writing in the school library.
“She was so focused and disciplined,” DiMino said. “I remember thinking, ‘There’s something special about this young woman.’ “
Amara describes her website, The Hijab Project, as a social experiment. Muslim and non-Muslim women were encouraged to wear a headscarf to the mall or other public place and then record their experiences on the site (thehijabproject.org).
In part, the website was a response to the animosity that headscarves have incurred in much of the world, where they are perceived incorrectly as a symbol of Islamic fundamentalism. Quebec, for instance, considered banning public workers from wearing headscarves and other visible religious symbols such as crosses as recently as 2013, only to have the proposed law trounced at the polls.
“As a Muslim woman, I can’t watch the news without feeling criminalized and misinterpreted,” Amara said.
“I feel like I need to show the world that not all Muslims are horrible people who kill innocent civilians and rape girls. The way Muslims are portrayed by the media is dehumanizing and it’s brain-washing.”
Sociologist Christopher Bail, who studies the way Muslims are depicted in the American news media, says that Amara isn’t over-reacting. He analyzed more than 50,000 newspaper articles and news broadcasts between 2001 and 2008 and found a disproportionate number of negative portrayals.
“We see images of the attack on Charlie Hebdo or the Boston Marathon bombing, and they contribute to the perception that terrorism inspired by some version of Islam is on the rise,” said Bail, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina. “In the U.S., there’s very little evidence of this. There’s a huge gap between perception and reality.”
Amara’s mother, Ayesha Jabbar, says that her daughter’s example helped her summon the inner fortitude to resume wearing her own hijab and to brave occasionally hostile glances and remarks.
“I love this country,” she said. “After 9/11, people started staring at me, so I took it off. But when my own daughter started wearing her hijab, I was so proud of her. She helped me be strong and show that I’m proud of who I am.”
