A 24-year-old Muslim woman is organizing self-defense classes to teach women how to protect themselves if someone tries to grab their hijab. “In this postelection hate-crime spike, self defense is more important than ever,” she said.
Zaineb Abdulla says she was about 8 years old the first time someone spit on her for being Muslim. The 24 year old – who wears a hijab, weighs 105 pounds and stands just over 5 feet tall – is used to feeling the need to protect herself.
Through her role as vice president of an organization called Deaf Planet Soul in Chicago, Abdulla had been teaching basic self-defense classes to help other women – including those who are deaf or who wear a hijab – feel prepared and empowered to fight back, she said in an interview with The Washington Post. The morning after Donald Trump won the presidency, a number of Muslim women called Abdulla, asking her for a specific type of self-defense training: What could they do is someone tried to grab them by their headscarves?
That same Wednesday, and in the days that followed, Muslim women in cities across the country reported being targeted for wearing hijabs. A Muslim student at San Jose State University reportedly struggled to breathe as a man yanked her headscarf from behind. A San Diego State University student wearing a hijab reported she was robbed by two men who made comments about Trump and Muslims.
Abdulla immediately recruited help from a trainer, Misho Ceko, of Chicago Mixed Martial Arts, to teach women a set of moves to defend themselves in case someone tries to pull on their hijabs. On the Sunday after Election Day, Abdulla taught nine mostly Muslim women a 2-hour “hate crime survival seminar,” during which they learned how to escape a “hijab grab,” how to identify and report hate crimes, and what steps to follow as a bystander.
“It gives us confidence,” Abdulla said of the self-defense classes. They help women realize that “if someone grabs you, you have the ability and the right to fight back.”
She decided to post videos of the moves on Facebook, and urged her friends to share the videos widely. “In this postelection hate-crime spike, self defense is more important than ever. Practice this move until it becomes muscle memory and teach your body to react before thinking,” she wrote.
In one of the videos, she shows women how to react if a perpetrator grabs a head scarf from behind. Enacting the scenario with a partner, and using sign language to explain the steps, Abdulla steps back, creates an “overhook” with the perpetrator’s arm, and elevates her elbow upward to lock him in a hold.
By the time she woke up the morning after posting the videos, they had already gone viral, she said. About a week later, one of the videos had received more than 3.5 million views and had been shared more than 57,000 times. She has since received nearly 75 requests for similar classes, from Muslim women in countries as far as the United Kingdom, Morocco and Nigeria.
She already has two self-defense seminars planned for early December, and hopes to help coordinate sessions in other parts of the country as well.
“I have a lot of messages from women saying they didn’t think it was possible to fight back,” Abdulla said.
In the days following Trump’s election, at least three organizations – The Southern Poverty Law Center, Council of American-Islamic Relations and Anti-Defamation League, tracked a notable spike in hate-crime incidents, The Post reported.
In all of 2015, hate crimes against Muslims hit the highest mark in more than a decade, which experts and advocates say was fueled by anger over terrorist attacks and anti-Islam rhetoric on the campaign trail, Matt Zapotosky reported in The Post.
Law enforcement agencies nationwide reported 257 anti-Muslim incidents in 2015, an increase of 67 percent from the year before, according to FBI data released last week.
Many Muslim women have posted on social media describing “hijab grab” attacks similar to those enacted by Abdullah.
