“Look at these ridiculous women, traipsing around a muddy assault course in full-length abayas!”
The jeering cuts, online and off. It stings differently because the critics are not the usual suspects. No, they are Muslim women who wear the same flowing garment themselves.
A garment they know well
They know the abaya intimately. They wear it to work, to lectures, to the school gates and to long afternoons with friends.
They know how it falls from the shoulders and moves with the body, how it can be dressed up or down, and how it frees a woman from clothes that pinch and cling.
Worn as an expression of faith and modesty, it brings a quiet peace, a touch of everyday luxury and a sense of belonging to a sisterhood.
Where the line is drawn
Yet for some, there are limits. The abaya may be a joy in daily life, but on a muddy obstacle course it looks out of place. How impractical! How daft!
The participants had the same thought. Many said so aloud when they signed up, not only because of the impracticality, but because they could already hear the coming ridicule.
But they went ahead anyway. The discomfort of mud and mockery weighs little against the reason behind it: walking in solidarity with refugee women.
In the clothes they left home in
When a woman flees danger, nobody tells her to change into something more practical first, least of all other modestly dressed Muslim women.
She sets out in whatever she is wearing and crosses unimaginable hardship in the clothes she left home in.
To stand with her, the participants choose to wear theirs, however out of place it looks to onlookers. Then they face the course.
Mud, wire and rope
They crawl on their stomachs beneath cargo netting and barbed wire, hems dragging through cold mud, and climb fences and walls with fabric snagging and swinging beneath them.
They swing over ditches, trudge through thick, squelching mud and wade through water that darkens and weighs down their skirts. They edge down steep, slippery banks, then haul themselves back up on ropes, hand over hand.
No regrets
Yes, they do all of this in garments never designed for an assault course. They finish with hems heavy and dark with clay, proving it can be done. And they are glad they did, whatever anyone says.