Ayșe’s Column
Part 4: Struggle Is Real
بِسْمِ ٱللَّٰهِ ٱلرَّحْمَٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ,
(In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful)
(Sequel to Previous Part 3: Summer Green)
Disclaimer:
Attention: Some of the described practices qualify as “edgeplay”, as in proceed with great caution and supervision before attempting to recreate them.
May Allah SWT grant me the strength to get through all the trials and truly make more steps in my new life as a Muslim woman…
As the long-time reader may have guessed, a long series of trials has prevented me from making all the progress I was hoping for when I wrote the last part of my column. Alhamdulillah, I am grateful that real life challenges haven’t entirely stopped me, and, thanks to the support of fellow brothers and sisters who admire my commitment for purdah, I could celebrate the latest two Eid celebrations with a few joyful additions to my wardrobe – a burgundy jilbab set (Umm Hafsa collection brand) and a black Syrian abaya (since I couldn’t find a Palestinian one yet…) with golden embroidery. Time and again, the beauty of Islamic clothing never fails to keep me in awe.
As for my breathing jihad (that is how I call my kind of breathplay, as offensive to many as it may sound), if anyone is still curious about the technicality (and I do still get messages about this), the one recent change is that I have been making less usage of the breathing tubes that I have been using in different configurations – all a bit less than ideal with long-time wear – over the past few years, as I advanced towards an even more radical approach, one that has proved surprisingly more manageable.
Another like-minded sister from our community posted on our Discord, S., some striking pictures that left me a great impression… Under the zentai hood, she’d reveal not just wearing a muzzle gag (with head straps, unlike the panel gag I am wearing, and with a breathable ball inside, instead of a silicone penis), but also have her nostrils blocked with ear plugs (in an admittedly dangerous position – both the base and the tip of the plugs were inside the nostrils; while in theory one can just rip them off instead of removing by the base, I prefer my plugs to have the base sticking a bit outside; to prevent them from getting pushed out, I just reinforce pressure with my cling wrap hood!). I had already been using such plugs, but breathing with a tube in the mouth instead, which is still a relatively safer option!
I have inquired this sister and she revealed to me she had been having difficulties with breathing by nose due to snot, so she figured out she might as well go this far with purdah restraints, and claimed to me that, since the muzzle was not very tightly strapped under the zentai hood, she could still breathe around and really had no problems after getting used to it for the first 30 minutes, despite the immersive feeling being unfamiliar at first, and has been able to stay covered for even 10 hours1! I let her know, in admiration, that she has achieved peak modesty, the way it was defined to me by the purdah wife N., who told me some years ago her husband believed all of our holes should be shut away from this dunya…
While I didn’t go as far as sounding (inshaAllah, looking forward instead to when I will be able to be double plugged…), I then took steps – such as plugging myself in the bottom, despite not having had any attraction for anal sex, which also happens to be disliked if not forbidden by proper Islamic rulings, and I might only let myself penetrated by my future husband if he wants it, otherwise I have discovered I am simply very content just wearing the plug, having another neat incentive for sitting down, another small trick to feel more submissive… – to achieve this dream, in line with my general interest: feeling as thoroughly as possible covered, sealed, protected by warm, humid darkness while piercing the dunya with the light of my mind…
Fantasies aside, I have not been able to dedicate myself to purdah as much as I should be, and I am being honest about it. I appreciate honesty – lying is a sin, period. So I usually only post photographs taken of me in raw form, sometimes with very light edits (though, back in the day, I appreciated Fazliana Ardawi’s artful edits), such as, especially in early years, editing out backgrounds.
Lately, there’s been an onslaught of AI content even in our small world, to the point someone has even produced an AI version of one of my “shahadah” headband selfies2, with the Arabic letters of the “shahadah” being ridiculously mangled (absolutely haram, besides being rather unaesthetic – just look at that over-the-top embossing!). Once in a while, I see some AI pic with latex veiling that looks almost good enough and can look pretty exciting, however the textures or folds –and reflections too – are usually at least a bit “off”, giving a cartoonish feel…
On one hand, with such pictures, we should feel relieved someone is pleasuring themselves over a picture of a real person who did not however consent to it! (In case you were wondering – whenever I post pictures with the main purpose of inspiring modesty, I do accept that implicitly. I am happy if some brother does that and thus keep himself busy with that than with graver sins!) On another hand, these AI pictures have been trained even on those pictures, and with hijab pictures, I guess there are cases of faces of real women that have ended up recycled by AI, which is again a questionable thing…
And otherwise, while the power of fantasies in the mind can be as strong, maybe oftentimes even stronger, the real person is a genuine excitement. I do respect anyone who veils to any degree in this society – however, when I’m saying this, don’t imagine too lowly of me. In this department, I reserve excitement for myself – I am, more or less, the modest woman I want to see and to be myself, with the one caveat of not being able to be as mysterious to myself as I seem to everyone else, as mysterious as anyone else could be to me – and for like-minded sisters who do not mind having our own moments of pleasuring, while not neglecting our duties and deeds…
And then, of course, it’s a joy to “objectify” oneself a bit. It’s exciting to be a sweaty human being deliciously trapped under yards of fabric, and it’s exciting to even just provide a support for those yards of fabric which just look much better covering one’s body. One might be screaming it’s “impersonal”, it’s not humanistic – where are the “human emotions”?! –, or worse, it’s not “compatible” with “Western civilization”. Then again, the West “invented” – or actually not, but still accepted and imposed it – the printed word, texts, paper books. This text, as a literal combination of letters and whitespaces, is lacking in “human emotions” just as much as my faceless form!
One can insert emojis here, and most writers would get photos of their faces printed on the covers, so as to convince readers they exist – but I don’t need anyone to convince I exist under all these layers, I simply do exist, and if you’re still wondering I’m real, I can only be secretly amused, no need for smiles. After all, there is life in any object too, with all the bacteria moving in and around it, and also the electrons… Those who ever wear pantyhose and skirts have felt that playful electricity, just as those of us who were privileged to wear the niqab outside have felt the pleasures of the wind caressing us through the fabric… (Well, except Islamophobic reporters who don the niqab for 2 hours and then say they couldn’t feel any wind or smell anymore!)
Since I have been writing so rarely in the open, perhaps the reader can forgive me for filling the space with musings! Long story short (or tl;dr, in current lingo), AI is –at least at this stage? – not exactly exciting, though maybe not worse than people using pictures of me or other sisters just because, for whatever reason, they don’t have pictures of their own…
It’s a privilege, but being real is important, and I do feel pity for all those who don’t afford that privilege yet. If no one else is sweating a thought about them, at least I am thinking of all those people who are making fake accounts to try convince others they are niqabi woman – surely, many of them will never be, and many might only fantasize. Some might even discover they only enjoy assuming the proverbial main gaze, maybe they don’t consider worthwhile the effort of assuming modesty – especially if you’re sweating even while doing nothing (as it happens to my dearest sister from Indonesia, Mutiara – you know her from “New Indonesian Style” –, who for her husband is permanently wearing the inner purdah suit known as zentai (which I also wear, as you can glimpse), and has to deal with an unbearably humid climate).
As it must have happened to many transgender women like me, I have been told: “why don’t you just be a husband and get yourself a niqabi wife?” Besides the fact I wouldn’t have liked to force any woman to follow purdah to my preferred standards, with most of them unwilling or unable to do so out of their own convinction, and it being hard towards impossible to find such a woman who would gladly accept such rigor, there’s the personal truth that, ever since I started veiling in my late teens, I always ever identified with the veil, with being behind it.
I do fantasize sometimes about being able to lift my vision from within my covered eyes, from within the clothes, and thus enable myself to enjoy in real time all the sweet folds and creases of my fabric. I have heard that in the community of so-called kigurumi cosplayers there are maskers who have worked on hooking their masks to a camera system, so that from within the mask, like with a VR, they could see a third-person view of their body (which must be quite a peculiar experience for the human brain!). Sounds tempting in a sense, but also resource-consuming…
Due to constant financial woes over the last years, I haven’t got around buying a selfie stick – I believe that’s as much as I’ll ever do to “extend” my vision, beyond how I already document my veiling through the pictures. Perhaps I only regret not putting more effort into making my compositions more artful, but I can only do so much with two gloved hands and limited vision – notwithstanding it’s voluntarily limited, and delightfully so too!
Sure, it’s frustrating when, say, the strap in the middle of my niqab’s slit doesn’t align perfectly with my nose, and I wish I had someone to take care of such details for me while I could might as well relieve myself of vision altogether, or reduce it, while still being able to know whether I’m facing the light or not, to a haze of lights and shadows, much like the abstract art I enjoy…
Enough thoughts for now! I might not return anymore to prolonged silences… however, who am I to know? Allah SWT knows best, and without Allah SWT none of this would be possible.
- Do please note, on the cautious side, that while heavy breathing might be sexy for some of us, really having breathing difficulties is not so cool, and one might want to be aware of health risks associated with mouth breathing, especially for such long term. ↩︎
- Shahada headbands reproduce in Arabic letters the shahada, which is the declaration of faith in Islam. It’s commonly used in Islamic art and on the flags of Muslim countries, but also it has become associated with Islamist militants, who wear such headbands in protests or battles.
Some years ago, I was in a relationship with a brother I will refer to here as simply “the Hafiz”. He is the one who encouraged me to take up gagging as part of my purdah discipline, so I was less scared when he revealed to me that he has a particular liking for mujahideen women wearing such headbands…
So I had decided to print myself a few of them – didn’t want to have to explain to customs it’s a fetish, I’m not a literal Islamist – and produce some selfies, fully veiled and restrained as per my purdah custom, yet emulating the style of some of those pictures posted by real Islamist women around Instagram…
Not only the Hafiz appreciated the pictures, but also they ended up being used or edited by some of those Instagram Islamists, likely assuming I might be one of them! I didn’t entirely expect this “success” and in a way I’m ashamed of thus making small contribution to actual online Islamofascism (of which, for good reasons, we should all do mockery), contrary to my actual convictions.
On the other hand, if you’re a TOTV reader, you might agree they’re some of my best pictures, and very exciting expressions of my “dominant” Muslimah side (many sissies I’ve taught were floored by these poses)!
As for those who might be more than offended, all I can say is there are other things with the present state of the Muslim world one should have stronger feelings about. ↩︎
Tales of the Veils 