Word: madinah
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...high school girl's basketball tournament, but for the fact that the players are all wearing loose-fitting sweatshirts and Islamic hijab scarves - and there are no men in the crowd. Instead, it is at the Islamic Games 2008 that the girls of New York City's Al-Madinah school team are struggling to contain the marauding forwards of the New Jersey private school Noor-Ul Iman. The Games, held in New Jersey last weekend, are the largest community sporting event for Muslims in North America, and basketball for teenage girls was a new feature of this year's event...
...Madinah girls owe their presence here to Jasmina Zekic, their coach who arrived in the U.S. from Kosovo in 1995 with a business management degree, but instead went into teaching. "Sports was always in my heart," says Zekic. Last year she became the gym instructor at the Brooklyn private school where there were no organized sports for girls. So she started the basketball team. "Just because girls have to be covered I did not want them to feel different or discriminated," she says...
...players of Al-Madinah, the hijab is just part of the uniform. "Its like WNBA - our hijabs are like their headbands," says 17-year-old Emtiaz Hussain, originally from Yemen. Hussain plans to come back and coach the girl's team when she graduates high-school next year. But for most of these girls, their involvement in sports is an all-too-brief phase through which convention requires that they pass. "They cannot play in college," says Coach Zekic. "Our religion does not allow playing in shorts, exposing our skin and body movements to a male audience...
...Many of the Al-Madinah girls willingly accept the limits, even when they chafe: "Allah comes before basketball, before a million dollars and before everything," says team captain Fatima Benfakiah, 18, who moved to New York from Algeria at age 2. Benfakiah admits that living with restrictions can be frustrating, at times - "It's not fair, but it is something you can get over because this life is not eternal; it is the afterlife that counts...
...imagine playing basketball in her country of origin. She says that many Muslim parents from conservative countries still find it unacceptable for their daughters to play sports. "They bring their cultural baggage with them," she notes. "But this will change with time." Perhaps. But for the girls of Al-Madinah whose days on the court may be numbered, their time in Coach Zekic's gym class will provide a treasured memory of a brief, but exhilarating season in which gravity was the only restraint on their freedom to soar...
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