NEW YORK CITY — A Muslim woman from Queens says she was confronted and harassed by a white couple on her commute last week for wearing a hijab.
Fariha Nizam, 19, was on the Q43 bus Thursday commuting to her internship in Manhattan when she said an older white couple boarded and accosted her.
"I was crying incessantly, looking away, but they did not stop," Nizam said on Facebook. "They started yelling at me and telling me to take off the disgusting piece of cloth on my head, saying that it wasn’t allowed anymore."
Some straphangers started to defend her from the man and the woman, and they started fighting, she said.
The woman then approached and tried to grab the hijab off of her head, Nizam said. She immediately got off the bus, and walked home, she said.
The MTA did not immediately return a request for comment.
Nizam, whose story was first told by Gothamist, is a Bangladeshi-American whose parents immigrated to the United States in the 1990s, and who has lived in Bellerose her entire life.
"I've been taking [that bus] forever: for high school, for college, for work," she told Gothamist. "I've always been taking that bus and nothing has ever happened to me before."
Nizam blamed the incident in part on rhetoric used by President-elect Donald Trump, who has called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States.
One day after Trump won the election, a Muslim prayer room at NYU was vandalized with pro-Trump graffiti.
Nizam said the bus confrontation has left her shaken, but added that she would reach out and support others who felt afraid.
"I never imagined that security and safety were asking too much of a country that claims to be oh so concerned with opportunity, liberty, and love," Nizam's Facebook post read.
