Subversiveness

One can't miss the young girl with the black and green t-shirt. In gigantic letters it reads "Every day I'm a Muslim". She looks hip. Her t-shirt seems a deliberate act of subversiveness.

How far removed we are of the days when I was a young kid in a Catholic school and renouncing the faith we grew up in was our act of subversiveness. Nowadays things are suddenly the other way around. The believers feel they are left out because they aren't taken seriously. Saying you are a Muslim, every day again, suddenly is a statement.

But what does such a statement mean in a city with a certain majority of Muslims? In a country that still considers its Catholic heritage as one of its assets? It means nothing more than wearing a silver cross in your neck or a veil. You show yourself as being part of a certain group. In such a context of endorsed religiosity it is strange to consider this group a suppressed group. Religious people do see oppression in those instances where they can't wear their religious symbols because of neutrality. State schools are an example of such neutral grounds. Then the girl's t-shirt would become a statement again. She has to be neutral and isn't wearing any religious symbols. Still she's able to show to which group she belongs, simply by declaring it for all to read.