I've been working for my current employer for over 10 years and I've never seen any of my female Muslim coworkers come to work wearing a hijab till a couple of days ago. To be honest with you, having mixed feelings about this and let me explain why.
As you all know, I'm not exactly a fan of the hijab. In fact, I've come to despise it in recent years, because it has become a political statement more than anything else.
Well, now they've just hired this beautiful young girl to work as a cashier in our junior department, she couldn't be more than 16 years old and she wears a hijab....which in itself is totally wrong if you ask me,
but I'm a little bit confused because the company does have a dress code in place and strongly encourages its employees to present themselves as "fashion role models" when they're out on the sales floor.
Now granted, this is an equal opportunity employer I'm talking about, so yes, the girl should be hired based on her qualifications, not her looks, but I still strongly believe that they made a mistake putting her in a frontline position given the nature of the business, but more importantly I think it's unfair to her to put her in that position because it's very likely she's going to be subjected to some sort of abuse by the kind of customer base she'll be dealing with, which I know all too well.
Last Friday I picked up my daughter from school during my lunchtime and took her back to work with me. Her dad couldn't pick her up, because he was out of town on a golfing trip for the weekend. I just wish my girl didn't wait till late Thursday night to tell me about this, so that I could have planned for it properly, but that's a whole different story.
Anyway, when I was finally done working my shift, as fate would have it.....I was leaving the building with my daughter when the new girl with the hijab was coming in. I held the door open for her, motioned her to come in and said "go ahead".
She looked at me for a split second, said "thank you" and proceeded to walk by with her head down. My daughter was standing right behind me, so I looked over my shoulder to see her reaction to this rare, but exquisite siting of a hijabed girl. She gazed at the girl for a few seconds, almost in awe and said "WOW I like your outfit!"
I was like "huh?"
The girl turned around shyly and said: "Oh...thank you!" and then hurried up the stairs.
The door closed behind us and my girl went on an on commenting about each part of that girl's outfit as we proceeded to walk through the parking lot towards my car. I said: "WOW I thought you were just trying to be nice, but you really are impressed by her aren't you?
My girl said "Mom, did you see that head thingie, that BELT and those AWESOME jeans?!!! Even her make-up was perfect!"
I said: "Yea I saw the belt, very nice....but she wasn't wearing any make-up, honey. THAT I know for a fact. AND I don't like it at all when little girls are forced to cover up like that".
The "forced cover up" part didn't seem to register with my girl, so I left it at that for now....she said: "Really? WOW if that's all natural, then she's even more beautiful than I thought."
I have to tell you though, where I live and work it's almost just as rare to see hijab clad woman out on the streets as it is seeing Bozo the clown.
Via Puppeteer
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