When I was a little girl, my dad used to take me downtown to a petshop after eating icecream. It was hidden behind huge buildings, and it didn’t seem to fit into the area. It still was one of my favorite places on earth, so I enjoyed every second of staring at the puppies and laughing at how the birds always chirped when my dad walked right next to their cage.

One afternoon, after mingling around the store, I noticed a commotion happening in the front door. The cashier was leaning against the frame, the manager standing beside him, while a woman wearing something that looked like a scarf around her head was speaking angrily at both men. Her voice was getting louder every second that passed. People started turning around, giving the woman dirty looks and rolling their eyes at her. I had no idea what was happening. All I heard coming from her was, “I deserve some respect too!”

She turned and left without another word.

I later learned that the mysterious cloth wrapped around her head was a hijab, which is a head covering worn by Muslim women in public. That startled me, and made thousands of questions pop up to my 10 year old head. Why won’t she show her hair? Why only in public? Why only Muslim women? But I left the topic untouched, up until this year. The more and more information I received about this religion, the more and more interest I gained of it. Then we started reading Muslim literature, and that changed my perception completely. It didn’t only open my eyes to Muslim culture, but also the harsh realities that many Muslim women have to induce.

Specifically, the graphic novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi shows the extreme change that happened in Iran during the war. Marji, the main character and narrator of the novel, tells the reader her story from a young age until she has to leave her country, at 14 years old. Coming from the point of view of a little girl who only wants equality between all the people, the novel is definitely an impacting one. Marji, since she was a very little girl, wanted equality for everyone, saying that she wanted to become a prophet because her maid didn’t eat at the same table as her whole family, because her father had a cadillac and many other people didn’t. She find unfairness in the mildest of things that many small children don’t understand, and she wants to fight against it.

I knew very little about Muslim culture, and I knew it was strict toward women, but I didn’t know it brought things to such an extreme level. The novel shows the transition between women being free to walk to streets dressed however they liked, to having to wear a veil everywhere they went. Many women don’t approve of this, that it comes to the point where the police are sending women to jail for being “improperly veiled”. I was disgusted. Not only with the gender roles that the book portrays, but with how unfair it all was. I learned men could be with a lot of women at once while being married. I learned that a women have to share all of their belongings with her husband, but men don’t. I learned that men are allowed to rape if the woman doesn’t believe in Allah.

I got to a certain point of the novel that really has stayed with me since I read it. It says that the main reason of women wearing the hijab is to “protect [them] from potential rapists… because this way [they’re] not exposed.”(pg. 120) One might ask themselves, why not teach men not to rape? Why does society have to teach women to protect themselves from rapists? Unanswerable questions. However, I do know that a covered woman is just as likely to be sexually attacked as an uncovered woman. A person does not rape or sexually assault a woman based on her clothing. It is about power, control, and opportunity. Simply introducing a piece of cloth to wear around their head to prevent getting male attention isn’t nearly close to the solution. Men have been raped. Little kids have been raped. It really isn’t a problem of clothing; it’s a problem of education.

It was tough for me, reading the graphic novel. As mentioned before, it’s written from the point of view of a little girl. She doesn’t always understand what’s happening, so the way she explains it is definitely a way that hits you hard. It’s the type of novel that makes you want to take actions. But in cases like this, I ask myself: how? Even if I know what’s currently happening in discrimination towards women, I can’t do anything about it. I could write a book like Marji. But right now, all I can do is scold my friends who tell their moms to make them a sandwich.

After all, all this novel did was remind me of the Muslim woman I saw that day at the petshop. She had a strong character, just like Marji. Thanks to her and Marji, I learned to love the movement of women in this religion. Many Muslim women are not out there to be treated like nothing; they’re out there to represent their religion, but will bite back to anyone who disrespects them.