Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter
It took me nearly five years of wearing a Hijab to truly appreciate the depths of this exquisite verse of Keats.
I’m a young woman. 18. Living in the West. I live in a house overflowing with books with parents who don’t just value ‘education’ as a marketable commodity (like most Asians, let’s be honest) but love learning for its own sake. They’re also deeply religious. The latter two points don’t however change the fact that I am a young woman in the West who at times like most girls my age frets about her outward appearance. What young woman isn’t anxious about a dozen different points relating to how she looks?
However what my Hijab has trained me to do throughout the turbulent teen years is to look inwards not out. It is a physical reminder every single day that my purpose in life is not limited to that of a mannequin but is to think, to explore, and to develop my inner character.
Many outsiders believe the Hijab imprisons oppressed, helpless Muslim women. What they don’t however realise is the refreshingly liberating experience of conquering what is as a woman one of the manifold weaknesses we are born with, and learning to hear melodies with the inner not the outer ear. And so I grew to understand what Keats meant by the sweetest melodies in life being those which we can’t even hear at all.
So the reason I wear a Hijab is because there’s more to me than the outer shell and because this simple garment has transformed me spiritually in ways impossible to articulate.
Farid-ud-din Attar, a 12th century Persian mystic poet wrote a beautiful allegorical poem called ‘The Conference of the Birds’, chronicling the journey of a flock of birds who are trying desperately to find the fabled ‘Simorgh’ bird who acts as a metaphor for Allah. Each bird has its own weaknesses which they must overcome in order to complete their quest. The “splendidly arrayed” peacock’s fatal flaw is vanity and obsession with material things. The hoopoe bird, the spiritual leader of the flock has these pearls of wisdom for the peacock:
The home we seek is in eternity;
The Truth we seek is like a shoreless sea,
Of which your paradise is but a drop.
This ocean can be yours; why should you stop
Beguiled by dreams of evanescent dew?
The secrets of the sun are yours, but you
Content yourself with motes trapped in its beams.
Turn to what truly lives, reject what seems —
Which matters more, the body or the soul?
Be whole: desire and journey to the Whole.
Close to the Source 