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In Detroit Monday the two different Obama volunteers in separate incidents made it clear that headscarves wouldn't be in the picture. The volunteers gave different explanations for excluding the hijabs, one bluntly political and the other less clear.
In Aref's case, there was no ambiguity.
That incident began when the volunteer asked Aref's friend Ali Koussan and two other friends, Aref's brother Sharif and another young lawyer, Brandon Edward Miller, whether they would like to sit behind the stage. The three young men said they would, but mentioned they were with friends.
The men said the volunteer, a twenty-something African American woman in a green shirt, asked if their friends looked and were dressed like the young men, who were all light-skinned and wearing suits. Miller said yes, but mentioned that one of their friends was wearing a headscarf with her suit.
The volunteer "explained to me that because of the political climate and what's going on in the world and what's going on with Muslim Americans it's not good for her to be seen on TV or associated with Obama," said Koussan, who is a law student at Wayne State University.
Both Koussan and Miller said they specifically recalled the volunteer citing the "political climate" in telling them they couldn't sit behind Obama.
"I was like, 'You've got to be kidding me. Are you serious?'" Koussan recalled.
Shimaa Abdelfadeel's story was different. She'd waited on line outside the Joe Louis Arena for three hours in the sun, and was walking through the giant hall when a volunteer approached two of her non-Muslim friends, a few steps ahead of her, and asked if they'd like to sit in "special seating" behind the stage, said one friend, Brittany Marino, who like Abdelfadeel is a recent University of Michigan graduate who works for the university.
When they said they were with Abdelfadeel, the volunteer told them their friend would have to take the headscarf off or stay out of the special section, Marino said. They declined the seats.
Abdelfadeel, after recovering from the shock of the incident, went to look for the volunteer and confronted her minutes later, she said in an email interview with Politico.
"We're not letting anyone with anything on their heads like baseballs or scarves sit behind the stage," she paraphrased the volunteer as saying, an account Marino confirmed. "It has nothing to do with your religion!"
In most work and school settings, religious dress Jewish yarmulkes, Sikh turbans, Muslim hijabs is permitted where secular clothing like baseball caps is not.
"The scarf is not just something she can take off it's part of her identity," said Marino.
Photographs of the event also show men with hats in the section behind Obama and Gore, though not directly behind the candidate.
Abdelfadeel, like Aref, felt "disappointed, angry, and let-down," she later wrote.
She was "let-down that the Obama campaign continously perpetuates this attitude towards Muslims and Arabs - as if being merely associated one is a sin."
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