MIAMI -- Growing up in Davie, Fla., Sahar Ullah remembers the awkward interactions, confused looks and frequent questions about her hijab, the head cover she chooses to wear, and her religion, Islam.
There was the boy in high school who would playfully jostle her between classes before realizing that she avoided touching nonrelated males as a matter of Islamic modesty.
There was the University of Miami staffer who, expecting drunk students at his building's door during a football game, was perplexed to instead find Ullah and a friend looking for a place to pray.
And there was a Catholic friend who did graduate work in Middle Eastern Studies with her at the University of Chicago and asked the common question: "Why do you wear it?"
"After listening to yet another one of my stories about life as a Muslim-American who wears the hijab, he said, 'You know what? We need hijabi monologues,'" says Ullah, 26.
"Hijabi Monologues," a three-woman production, describes the experiences of young Muslim women who wear the veil. Ullah staged the hourlong show, which takes its name and attitude from Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues," three years ago in Chicago. It's also shown in Los Angeles and Washington.
In 11 monologues based on stories Ullah has heard through acquaintances as well as a few pulled from her own life, the women on stage share experiences that range from comic to sober.
One is about the type of men who hit on hijabis -- slang for women who wear the hijab. Another is about a teenager whose father is arrested on charges of terrorism. A story that often gets a response is about a Muslim teenager who gets pregnant, a taboo topic in many Muslim communities.
"Where Ensler takes something private and personifies it by giving it a voice and puts it in your figurative faces," Ullah says, "we've decided to take something public, something which everyone seems to have an opinion about, and push it out of your figurative faces by giving the entire woman a voice."
Ullah, who recently returned to South Florida after two years of Arabic study at the American University in Cairo, is working full time to take "Hijabi Monologues" on a national tour, which includes a November show at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
For each performance, she involves local Muslims, such as South Florida performer Jamarah Amani.
"When I read the script, it came to life for me. I said, 'Oh yeah, I've seen this happen to me,'" says Amani, 29, a midwifery student at the Miami Maternity Center.
"Being Muslim is not about what you externally represent, but that's how people superficially reduce it. The beauty of this show is that it represents so many different voices and backgrounds."
"Hijabi Monologues," a small production organized largely by Ullah, has an extended cast that's growing, much like its popularity in Muslim circles. The show is being organized along with a monologue-writing workshop at the University of Miami, as well as a service day for Project Downtown, a Muslim-organized effort that distributes food, toiletries and clothing to the homeless.
For May Alhassen, a Syrian-American who first attended the show in her hometown of Los Angeles a year ago and now flies around the country to perform in it, the show is about exposing non-Muslims to Muslim experiences and "confronting the fact that I have had my own Muslim-American stereotypes that I carry."
"We hope that the non-Muslim audience can see a common human bond in the stories and can start to question what they see around them," says Alhassen, 27, an American studies doctoral candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles.
