by Laila Halaby

During graduate school, I worked at the library with an African American girl named Carmon. One quiet Saturday morning, she asked if I would mind trimming her hair. Carmon had handfuls of thin braids that she wanted layered in the back so there would be a cascading effect.

We sat outside the library--our fifteen minute break--and I snipped away as instructed.I was curious about the texture of the braids and she explained that in weaving you could choose what kind of hair you wanted, synthetic or human and that human hair was usually Asian. When I wondered aloud why I almost never saw braids on White women, she explained that Black hair was very dry, which was why it was more suited to adding braids to than White hair that tended to get oily.

Over the years, this conversation evolved into a larger look at hair choices made by African American women and what it meant politically and socially to have braids or an afro or dreadlocks or to use a relaxer. I learned a great deal about African American culture during those conversations (because it was never only about hair) and I have always been grateful to Carmon for being so open with me.

During those same years, she asked me a lot of questions about the Middle East, about women, and particularly about Islam. I was happy to offer whatever knowledge I had and was often struck by the overlap in what we each had to say: personal decisions often carried larger social or political reverberations; and you are always an ambassador for your culture. To this day I am thankful for those years of talking we shared and I firmly believe that we widened one another’s horizons with our conversations.

In the intervening years, the last few in particular, I have been approached with all sorts of questions about the Middle East and Islam--some of the very same ones Carmon asked me, though usually presented in a rapid-fire sort of way, without any context or conversation to go along with them. The questions range from the simple (why do women cover their hair?) to the more complex (how can you tell the difference between Sunnis and Shiites?--which sounds like it’s going to be a joke rather than a question) to the personal (how are you raising your children?) to the ignorant (does your husband wear a turban?) to the blatantly racist (how can you show that Islam is not a violent religion?).  I am always happy to offer any understanding I can to offset American “jahiliyya,” or generalized ignorance of other cultures, but more and more I am struck by the assumptions that are made in the asking of these questions, first and foremost that any and all questions are acceptable, and second that Arabs/Muslims are almost solely governed by their ethnicity/religion.