It started when a high school junior Hind El Buri from Missouri in the US wore the pink scarf along with her friends to initiate dialogue with non-Muslims. She says, “If someone sees us in pink, they would be curious to know about Muslims as social activists, about hijab or about Islam in general.  To me, Muslim women wear their faith on their head. In the West, this is something that already gets a lot of attention and stares and if it’s for a cause it’s better,” she says.

A dear friend died of this disease when she was only 22. She spent five years of her brief life battling between ignorance and misplaced shame. She was horrified at the prospect of letting her parents know and suffered in silence until it became unbearable and she succumbed to it. She added herself as one to the statistics of women who die of breast cancer every year. In the UAE, Breast Cancer is the number one killer of women in the emirates. In Saudi Arabia, around 30 per cent of the patients are under 40 years where as in the US the number is a minimal five per cent. The issue is very serious. Many women die because of the stigma attached to the disease, which prevents them from early detection. 

October being the Breast Cancer Awareness Month had major campaigns rolled out in different parts of the Arab World. In Lebanon, a TV ad showed two rounded, lit candles. One of them gets extinguished as an announcer reads statistics about the disease and talks about doing mammograms. In Iran, two SMSes urging women to take tests regularly were sent daily as part of the health campaign. Discounts on mammograms and billboards suggesting, “Do the test now, for peace of mind” were on display in Saudi Arabia.

In the other part of the world, American footballers dressed in bright pink, played charity matches to raise funds for the cure. Breast Cancer Institute in Australia issues a health diary every year to raise essential funding for researches. And in parts of Europe, free make-up workshops and try-on wigs were given to patients undergoing chemotherapy to instill the lost self-esteem in women.

And Pink HIjab Day is doing just that. Raising self-esteem among women from Botswana to Beirut. A friend wrote to me from Australia, saying that it’s all a sham and wearing a pink scarf won’t save someone’s life. That’s true. Just supporting a cause won’t make it disappear but it raises awareness. Another one from London told me that she went out in her pink scarf and met a lady in a pink Nike scull cap at work. She says, “She saw me and started crying. She said it makes her happy to see a Muslim supporting breast cancer. She was diagnosed last year (is bald) going through chemo and is very sick. I felt so bad for her.”

However, if some women consider wearing a pink hijab beyond their boundary of modesty, wearing a pink ribbon is fine. The main thing is helping them share awareness about the danger of the breast cancer. How many people go to protests and wear T-shirts saying ‘Free Palestine,’ yet people are still dying? And today, as women around the world wear pink hijab, in support of finding a cure for breast cancer. It’s easy to forget—where US football players dress in bright pink to increase breast cancer awareness and raise funds to find a cure—that discussing breast cancer is shameful in my part of the world, and women aren’t getting the treatment they need. Sometimes it’s easy to forget it’s a global problem.  Today, I wear pink hijab to remind us all.

Raziqueh Hussain is a Sub-Editor with Khaleej Times Wknd and can be reached at raziqueh@khaleejtimes.com