The thing about horizons is that they are always subjective. Opening your front door will always give way to your immediate horizon, the squeal of playing children and the clamour or alternatively the silence of life in your neighbourhood- most intriguingly the curve of the sky meeting the earth.

For the astronaut finding home inside a space station, horizons don’t signify the ending but rather the expansion of things. A thought put by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, namely that the expansion of the universe means each of us through the ages have been ‘dealt’ a new cosmos or that each of our subjective co-ordinates in relation to the edge of the universe has evolved over the epochs, means that we have all in essence witnessed different skies, different horizons.

As explored by Maria Popova, ‘eating the sun’ was the pastime of blind French resistance fighter Jacques Lusseyran who lived an extraordinary life of light despite the darkness of his physiological reality. I suppose in light of this, sunsets do not have to be- as they were for Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s ‘Little Prince’- a sad affair. For Lusseyran, “radiance…entered into [him], became part of [him]”, symbolising the embodied light and broad horizons of a man with restricted sight, a contrast to our prince who was the only denizen of a planet to witness what he saw as ‘fourty-four’ closings of things, fourty-four cycles of the sun.

Horizons as I say are subjective, emblematic of either beginnings or endings- depending on who we happen and where we happen to be…

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“You have expanded your horizons, but it appears you have been restricted”

Sheikh Abdul Fattah of Nigeria

These were words spoken to me by a Nigerian Sheikh after I donned the hijab. I mulled over the words the Sheikh taught me until an elusive truth revealed itself. The hijab is the only clothing a human possesses that doesn’t belong to this realm.

When draping yourself with it, you are synchronously draping yourself with something beyond an imploded star. You may be draping yourself with something alien, a galaxy or dark matter or with that shroud that separates us from the unseen world. It is a covering whose roots transcend earth and all that we know about the human condition steeped in genesis and multiple unknowns.

The hijab is in effect our first contact after the Holy Qur’an with alien matter. To reduce it to the politically oriented taxonomies on earth that desire to vacuum form and label it as something innately tangible is a gross misunderstanding of the miracle of Divine injunction.

The hijab is steeped in history, victory, sacrifice and justice. It is steeped in a genealogy of truth seeking and truth telling. The more the Muslim woman covers the more she has transcended what it means to be human expanding to a horizon beyond hegemonic modalities, beyond secular modernity, beyond the consumerism of the capitalist market, beyond the sexualisation of women’s bodies, beyond greed and of course beyond earth.

The hijab is not an act of resistance as the vicissitudes of media and politics that have characterised the ages are not the central point of orbit.

The hijab rather is an act of submission and through that, a vehicle to soar past the tangible universe and into the world of unknowns. A strange and silent alien greeting itself in the mirror of the even stranger one who is fortunate enough to drape it over her head.

Expansive horizons then, whilst found beyond rugged coasts and towering summits, can also be found in tales of strange, quiet and alien submission across the human story. And as worded by Dostoyevsky:

“how could you live if you have no story to tell?“