“It is a part of who I am, and I believe that it allows people to see me for my voice and not necessarily how I look”, she said.
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“I played different sports growing up and my mom and I just happened to be driving past a high school and saw fencing from the auto window”, she recalled.
“She saw that the athletes had on long tops and long trousers and she didn’t know what the sport was but she wanted me to try it because she thought it would be accommodating for my religious beliefs”. She clinched a spot on the USA team when she won bronze at the Fencing World Cup in Athens, Greece, earlier this year.
Ibtihaj Muhammad, a fencer, is the first hijab-wearing woman to qualify for Team USA. A two-time Pan American Games gold victor, five-time Senior World team medalist, and 2014 Senior World Team Champion, the 30-year-old is now ranked as the no. 2 US fencer, and no. 12 in the whole world.
While Muhammad is the first hijabi member of Team USA, she’s not the first hijabi Olympian. She became an All-American in the sport at Duke, where she graduated with degrees in International Relations and African and African-American studies.
Her role as an Olympian and medal hopeful gives Muhammad a platform to raise awareness, break down negative perceptions of Muslims throughout the country and make a serious impact.
“It’s a tough political environment that we’re in right now”. “Muslims are under the microscope”.
“I know that Muslim women are very, very diverse, especially here in the United States”.
“For me, this is just who I am”, Muhammad, 30, tells PEOPLE. Ibtihaj Muhammad, a U.S. Olympic competitor, is taking a stand and calling out presidential nominee Donald Trump on his “very dangerous” words.
Despite these threats, AFP noted, “Muhammad diplomatically declined to speculate on what life for American Muslims might be like if Trump is elected to the White House in November”. “I knew that I had it in me to qualify for the Olympic team, and I wanted to hopefully be that change, that other minorities could see that with hard work and perseverance, anything is possible”.
She told CBS News, “It was the first time I was in uniform with everyone else and I didn’t have to adjust it in any way by, like adding length to the sleeves or wearing trousers when everyone else had on shorts”. Can I influence the debate? “I don’t know. I’m just trying to do well in Rio”.
The toxic climate has brought practical concerns.
“I feel like my hijab is liberating”. After Trump called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the USA late previous year, Muhammad told TIME: “When you incite hateful speech and rhetoric like that, the people who say it never think about the repercussions and how that affects Muslims”.
“I think that his words are very risky”.
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“I remember as a kid, people telling me as a kid that black people didn’t fence”, Muhammad said.
