Katherine Frey/WASHINGTON POST - Safiyyah Abdullah shops in Gaithersburg. She has worn the full veil known as a niqab since shortly after she converted to Islam in 1975.
Safiyyah Abdullah glided through the produce aisle of the Gaithersburg Giant Wednesday, oblivious to the glances that followed her. She no longer thinks about the startling image she presents to other shoppers: a figure clad hair-to-heel in flowing black, at once anonymous and conspicuous amid the apples and onions.
Her face was almost completely covered, only her blue eyes visible through the narrow gap above her black veil. A little boy in the milk aisle took his father’s hand and stared.
“I really don’t notice people’s reactions anymore unless they say something,” said Abdullah, 55.
Which they do, frequently. Abdullah, a Chicago-born, Lutheran-raised social science researcher, has lived in the Washington area for more than 30 years. And in that time, almost no one has seen her face.
She wears a niqab, the same kind of Muslim veil that France earlier this week declared illegal to wear in public. At least one woman there was cited and fined under the new ban, and several others were arrested while protesting it in Paris.
In the United States, some outraged Muslims have called for a boycott of French goods, while others have quietly applauded the prohibition of a garment they see as repressive.
During a round of morning errands Wednesday, Abdullah reflected on her experiences as part of a tiny minority of American Muslim womenwho go beyond a head scarf and wear the full veil. Since she put on the niqab shortly after converting to Islam in 1975, daily outings have been a mix of harassment and compassion, comfort and alienation.
She never knows when leaving her Gaithersburg townhouse whether this will be one of the times she is called a terrorist, invited to “go back to her own country” or stopped by the police for no apparent reason, which she says has happened “dozens of times.”
“I always get pulled over, but I have never gotten a ticket,” said Abdullah, who is both deeply religious and a buster of stereotypes. “And it’s never just one squad car, it’s always four or five.”
Her experience is a familiar one to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington-based civil rights group. CAIR has taken about 40 veil-related cases since 2008, including ones in which banks, stores and schools have tried to ban face coverings on their property.
Just this past Friday, a woman called to complain about being hassled at the gates of Andrews Air Force Base when visiting her ill daughter, who lives there. Malikah Amatullah of Houston, who wears a niqab and whose son-in-law is deployed in Iraq, had been using a visitor’s pass for two weeks when one guard said she couldn’t enter the base. Amatullah ended up spending more than six hours in a nearby McDonald’s and the night in a motel until an officer sorted it out, with apologies, the next day.
“I don’t even eat McDonald’s, so I didn’t have any food,” she said. “I even had to make my prayer there.”
Under suspicion
Abdullah once was heading to Montgomery College, where she is studying for a degree in social work, when county police officers stopped her crowded Ride-On bus and told her to get off, she said. There had been a complaint about suspicious behavior, they told her.
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