A young Muslim woman riding a New York City bus to her internship on Nov. 10 was harassed by a white couple for wearing a headscarf, according to news reports.
Fariha Nizam, 19, was riding the Q43, when an older white couple targeted her.
“They started yelling at me and telling me to take off the disgusting piece of cloth on my head, saying it wasn’t allowed anymore,” Nizam wrote on Facebook. “I was crying incessantly, looking away, but they did not stop.” The woman even tried to grab the hijab off of her had, prompting her to get off the bus and walk home.
Some straphangers tried to defend her from the couple, which created more fighting.
Nizam, a Bangladeshi-American whose parents came to America in the 1990s, said she blames the incident on sentiment surfaced by the President-elect Donald Trump and his call to ban all Muslims entering the US. One day following the election, a Muslim prayer room at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in Brooklyn was vandalized with pro-Trump graffiti, police told Metro. “I never imagined that security and safety were asking too much of a country that claims to be oh so concerned with opportunity, liberty, and love,” Nizam’sFacebookpost read.
Muslim woman attacked for wearing ‘disgusting’ hijab on Manhattan bus
Fatiha Nizam/Facebook
