Profile Rough Draft

Here is my rough draft of my profile on my friend Laura.  I have a lot of information (some of it hasn't even been included yet, like the interview with her mom), but I am having trouble organizing it all into a cohesive narrative.  As readers, if you could help me decide what's important and what exactly you want to know/take away from the piece, it might help me to decide what to nix and what to fix :)  Thanks!

Title: TBA

LAURA BOWERS WAS sitting cross-legged on her bed.  A long, black abaya dress was hiked up around her hips, revealing a pair of faded GAP blue jeans.  Her laptop rested comfortably on her knees.  She was logged in to Facebook.

“There is an 8:40 and 9:20 showing of the Hunger Games,” she said, flipping through her iPhone.   “Which one do you wanna go to?”

“8:40,” I replied, flopping down on the bed perpendicular to hers.

We were on the twenty-first floor of a Chicago high-rise apartment complex.  The one-bedroom unit Laura shared with three other girls was modestly decorated and messy with undergrad intellect.  Old notebooks and “A” papers scattered the room in frenzied disarray, while a roommate’s aversion to a chemistry class was scrawled sloppily across a whiteboard; “Orgo sucks!”  An enormous book titled “The Oxford History of Islam” lay lazily on the bedroom floor.

Half an hour before, Laura had met me in the apartment lobby, her face flushed with excitement from having just returned from a meeting with Ta’leef, a student organization at Loyola University geared toward connecting with and practicing Islam.  Momentarily, I was shocked at how visibly different my friend looked.  The girl I had met nearly four years ago during a 2008-2009 gap-year in Spain, who donned white Diesel high-tops and silk-screened Vespa jackets when we hit the Barcelona bars, now stood in front of me fully covered, expect for her face and hands.  The girl was glowing.

Just months after our return from Spain and as a freshman at Loyola, Laura converted to Islam, originally telling no one except her mom and one close friend.  “It’s not something I wanted to spread around,” she said.  “I was so afraid of people’s reactions."

In our post 9/11 climate, it's not hard to understand Laura's apprehension.  “After 9/11 everybody wanted to know what is Islam?  Who are these terrorists?  Who are Muslims?  What is all this?” Laura said.

In part, these questions fueled Laura’s own search for Islamic knowledge.

“Laura always used to ask me questions about my spirituality,” said Salwa Shameem, one of Laura’s close friends.  “She would ask, ‘Why do Muslim women cover?’ or ‘What do you think happens when you die?’ She was always asking questions which really speaks to her character.”  However, Salwa recalled that Laura’s questions were always focused on the reason for doing something and not necessarily the action itself.  “She wasn’t so much effected by what we (Muslims) did, but why,” Salwa said.  The reasons behind not eating pork, not drinking, and why we covered ourselves were so much more important for Laura than the acts themselves, she said.

The conversion took place at a banquet dinner at the end of Loyola’s Muslim Awareness Week in 2009.  “I kept thinking, ‘I’m white, can I even do this?’” Laura recalled.  However, the attendees of the ceremony supported Laura with hugs and smiles as she stood up in front of a podium and publically accepted the Islamic God into her heart by declaring: “I testify that there is no God but God and that Muhammad is His last witness.”  Afterward, shouts of “Allah wak-bar! God is great!” reverberated throughout the room, she said.  “I felt nervous and scared,” she said.  “But I knew my heart that I had done the right thing.”

The support Laura received from the Muslim community that night, however, could not stand in sharper contrast to the reactions of some of her friends and acquaintances immediately following her conversion and even now, two and a half years later. Many people are offended and angry at the image of a covered Muslim woman, Laura said.  There are so many people who are misinformed and don’t understand what covering really means, she said.

“I think everybody has this idea that Muslim women are oppressed and that they are not allowed to have personalities and opinions and passions.  It’s not like that at all."

My friends at Loyola only saw my physical transformation, Laura continued.  “They didn’t understand the internal transformation that went along with the external one,” she said.   “One day, they just saw me come down to the cafeteria wearing a hijab.”

Laura recalled that the friends she was supposed to meet that evening for dinner decided to sit elsewhere once they saw what she was wearing.  “A girl yelled at me that wearing a hijab was oppressive.  [Another friend] told me that he didn’t want to sit with covered Muslims.  I had just converted,” Laura said.  “I wasn’t ready for all that.  I wasn’t ready to debate.”

In the following months, Laura consistently struggled with her identity, at times wearing the hijab proudly, others times, removing it completely.  Salwa remembered how Laura had trouble identifying as both an American and a Muslim.  It didn’t help that others tended to perceive her differently, depending on how she was dressed.

“I think people perceive her as Middle Eastern,” Salwa said.  “People naturally associate wearing hijabs with being an Arab-Muslim.  Someone’s outward appearance automatically effects how they are perceived.”

Laura described a time when she went to lunch with her dad in Schaumburg, the suburb of Chicago where she was raised.

“We walked in and my old “lunch mom” was there.” (A lunch mom, Laura explained, was the mother of a classmate who helped out during the lunch period in elementary school.) 

“She didn’t say anything,” Laura continued.  “But she didn’t have to. She went out of her way to stare daggers and was just so appalled and offended that a covered, oppressed, Muslim woman would have the audacity to walk into this Schaumburg diner.  I was I sitting there like, you don’t even know who I am.  You were my lunch mom and I was your favorite and everyone knew that I was your favorite student.  I didn’t say anything and I didn’t tell her who I was. But someone who I had such good memories of, someone who I thought was such a sweet, older woman, was just this hateful, violent, angry person who wanted nothing but harm for me because of the way I was dressed.” Laura said that this isn’t the first time she has felt this way.  

“People will just stare and whisper,” she said.  “And you can tell they are making comments about the men I am with. Like I can tell that they assumed that my dad is my husband because I am a young, covered Muslim woman and he is just this older man who had snatched that up without my consent. It a really disgusting feeling and you can’t say anything.  You can’t just launch into a speech about Islam.  People don’t want to hear it.”   

There is so much more I'm planning to say with this piece.  Specifically I want to include:

-more about her childhood/upbringing

-more about her family

-more concrete scenes in which she has experienced racism/sexism

-maybe adding in how her conversion changed my relationship with her (if it's relevant) 

What else do you (my readers) want to know?