Jacey Abbott hates wigs. She lives in southern Alabama and finds them hot and itchy.
“I don’t like them at all,” said Abbott, 41. “I sweat really easily.”
Abbott’s hair has fallen out during treatments over the past few years since she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019.
“Losing my hair was more traumatic than losing my breasts, honestly,” said Abbott, adding that she experimented with wigs, hats and just going bald but never felt comfortable with any of the options.
Recently, she wondered whether she could wear a headscarf. She associated head coverings with the Muslim community and said she worried it might be offensive for her, a non-Muslim, to wear one.
“I don’t know any Muslim people to ask in real life,” said Abbott, who was raised in Pentecostal and Baptist churches but no longer practices a religion. “So I decided, hey, I’ll ask the internet.”
She posted on the social media site Threads: “Can I wear a hijab or is that disrespectful?”
The post, which she wrote last Friday, took off, with tens of thousands of likes and comments pouring in, many from Muslim women.
“You absolutely can! I recommend jersey material for softness,” wrote Suzanne Abdelhaq, an author and English teacher in Canada.
Someone else offered to hop on a Zoom with Abbott to give her a tutorial.
Safiyah Kilby, 34, also replied, saying, “OF COURSE you can, my love!” then offered tips on fabrics and wrote that Abbott would be in her prayers.
“Maybe it was not intentional, but it somehow managed to bring a lot of people together,” Kilby said of Abbott’s post. “Muslims and also non-Muslims are feeling really touched by the respect that she gave when asking whether it was okay for her to wear a hijab.”
Kilby said that she has experienced discrimination because of her religion and that she felt moved by a non-Muslim woman wanting to wear a hijab.
“To see people see the beauty in hijab is something that I wish the world had a lot more of,” Kilby said.
Another woman, Samiyah Intan Khoirunisah Zaily, who lives in Essen, Germany, offered to send Abbott free hijabs from the small company she owns. That prompted another wave of kindness, with people messaging Zaily asking whether they could chip in to cover the costs.
Zaily said the outpouring from people in her community felt familiar.
“I wasn’t surprised, because of the way I grew up,” she said. “People are really supportive.”
Abbott said she got so many offers from people who wanted to send her hijabs that she plans to share them with other people who have cancer if she gets too many.
Many of the women who replied to Abbott told her that headscarves serve a religious purpose for some but are a style or comfort choice for others.
“It’s very comfortable,” Zaily said. “Girlies have bad hair days.”
Abbott said she was overwhelmed by the response to her post.
“It was a lot of educating,” she said. “And a lot of telling me which fabrics I should wear, a lot of how to pin them.”
Head coverings aren’t exclusively a Muslim tradition — they’re worn all over the world by people of various faiths, including Judaism, Sikhism and Christianity. The reasons vary.
In Islam, many women wear a hijab for modesty, while others cite piety or pride in their Muslim identity. Just 1 percent of American Muslim women said the main reason they wore a head cover was because someone else required it of them, according to data from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding collected in 2018.
Dalia Mogahed, a senior scholar with the institute, said she wears a hijab and found the thread heartwarming.
“It makes my day to talk about this,” Mogahed said. “This is how the Muslim community is. It’s a very welcoming place.”
Asma Uddin, an assistant law professor at Michigan State University who used to wear a hijab, said there are both religious and symbolic reasons to wear one.
“It’s, like, we’re proud to be Muslim and willing to essentially wear religion on our sleeve,” Uddin said.
She was surprised by the question from Abbott on Threads because headscarves aren’t always religiously significant, and she has known many women with cancer who have worn them.
“A headscarf is a headscarf,” Uddin said. Still, she said she understood why Abbott might have been concerned about wearing one if she was not familiar with Islam and did not know any people who are Muslim.
People who responded to Abbott’s post also sent her thousands of dollars through a fundraiser to help pay for her car, which had broken down, and take care of her three children. Abbott said she is a single mother.
Abbott said she has worn a headscarf out a few times since getting support and reassurance on Threads.
“I am not a stylish person in the least, but they make me feel so classy,” she said. “They’re easy and comfortable.”
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The post A cancer patient asked if it was okay to wear a hijab. Thousands rallied for her. appeared first on Washington Post.
