Religion and Politics

This Prom Has Everything, Except for Boys

The New York Times’ Patricia Leigh Brown goes to Hamtramck High School’s first all-girl prom. “The dense scrappy working-class city of 22,500 encircled by Detroit,” Brown writes, “once predominantly German and Polish, has become one of the most diverse small cities in America.” The decision to exclude boys from this classic American teen “rite of passage” was meant to accomodate this growing diversity, in particular the religious beliefs of the city’s Muslim population, which forbids “dating, dancing with boys or appearing without a head scarf in front of males.” Brown writes that this boys-free space allowed many of the Muslim teenage girls, “normally concealed in a chrysalis of hijab and abaya, the traditional Muslim cloak, [to] literally let their hair down in public for the first time.”

Read at The New York Times

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