Firm in Faith: Young Muslim woman will not give up her scarf

Everything seemed to be going well, recalled Dena al-Atassi, a young college student planning a career as a diet consultant. Then her prospective boss caught sight of the head scarf that she wears as a devout Muslim.

"She said something like, 'What the heck is that on your head?"' Atassi said in an interview at a recent Muslim conference in Chicago. "I don't remember the exact words, but I will always remember the derogatory tone."

Atassi, 21, said she argued that her head scarf would not interfere with her work, that the fleshy women who flocked to the Maryland office of the Jenny Craig diet chain where she had been a trainee seemed to appreciate the fact that she dressed modestly and avoided flaunting her own slim figure.

But the supervisor in the Jenny Craig office in Florida where Atassi hoped to start work last summer was not moved, she said, and the job never materialized.

"She wanted her office to look all-American," recalled Atassi, who reported the incident to a prominent Muslim advocacy group at the time.

Norma Hubble, Jenny Craig's vice president of operations, said that the supervisor in the Florida office no longer works for Jenny Craig but "to the company's knowledge, neither Atassi's religion nor her religious dress was a factor in any employment decisions affecting her."

Jenny Craig "has a policy of nondiscrimination on the basis of religion," Hubble said in a statement, "and it complies with all federal and state laws regarding employee requests for religious dress accommodations." Cozette Phifer, the spokeswoman for Jenny Craig, confirmed that some staff members wore head scarves.

Before Sept. 11, Muslim women who wore head scarves in the United States were often viewed as vaguely exotic. The terrorist attacks abruptly changed that, transforming the head scarf, for many people, into a symbol of something dangerous, and marking the women who wear them as among the most obvious targets for those who consider Islam threatening.

Muslim leaders call discrimination a problem for many of the faithful, particularly for women like Atassi who wear head scarves and who say they face widespread discrimination in their careers and in their daily lives.

Born to a Syrian father from a prominent political clan and an American mother who converted from Christianity, Atassi was the only Muslim at Flagler-Palm Coast High School in Bunnell, Fla., a wealthy area in the northeastern part of the state. During a three-year stay in Syria as a teenager, she began taking private religion classes and, she said, noticed that veiled women showed a self-confidence lacking among American women, who seemed to her to be trying to transform themselves into a Barbie-doll ideal.

"I would meet women who were not attractive by Western standards," Atassi said, "and when I told them, 'You look beautiful,' they would say, 'I know, thank God.' They really believe it. The veil facilitates inner strength, a greater feeling of self-esteem."

Atassi began wearing a head scarf, or hejab in Arabic, at age 16, along with a floor-length trench coat.

About a year later, in July 2002, she said, she was passing through the airport in Amsterdam on her first trip outside the Arab world after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the security screeners singled her out, questioned her and made her remove her coat. Feeling violated, she said, she tore off her scarf in a bathroom and wept.

"I had gained such a strong relationship with God that I didn't want to do anything to distance myself from him, and I felt like I was doing just that," she said.

The head scarf stayed off for eight months. But she said she felt like a hypocrite as, bare-headed, she waged a campaign against anti-Muslim stereotypes at the University of Central Florida, where she is the chairwoman of the Florida chapter of the Muslim Students Association. After she began wearing a head scarf again, she said, death threats and other offensive telephone calls salted with expletives started the very next weekend.

Discriminating against people because of religion is illegal in the United States.

But it is difficult to prove, and many victims avoid even speaking about it publicly out of fear it might affect job prospects or bring other unwanted attention.

Not Atassi. "I made the decision when I put it back on that I will never take it off again," she said.

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