CONWAY -- Nancy Allen is a librarian, a published author and a member of the St. Peter's Episcopal Church choir in Conway.
She also wears a hijab, a scarf many Muslim women wear as a sign of modesty.
For Allen, the hijab has become a spiritual way for her to support Muslim women.
She first began wearing a hijab in December 2015 when President Donald Trump was still candidate Trump and called for the United States to ban all Muslims from entering the country.
"Everything hit me all at once," said Allen, an adult services and reference librarian at the Faulkner County Library.
"I started channeling the [Lutheran minister and Hitler foe] Martin Niemoller quote" about how the Nazis first arrested socialists, then trade union members, then Jews. Each time, Niemoller said, "I did not speak out" because he was not a socialist, a trade unionist or a Jew.
"Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak for me," said Niemoller, who spent seven years in Nazi concentration camps.
"I had that thought, and I was thinking of the poem on the Statue of Liberty," Allen said. "It was about that time we were seeing these horrible images of [Syrian refugee children] being washed up" ashore in Europe.
There also was the United States' own history of forcing Japanese-Americans to live in internment camps during World War II.
"All of that came together like a flash in my head," Allen recalled. "I said, 'I've got to do something.'"
For a while, Allen became somewhat of a YouTube sensation after an online program, "The Young Turks," learned of her effort and aired a story in late December 2015 about her. As of Thursday, the YouTube story had received 108,606 views, 4,000 "likes" and 412 "dislikes." Beneath her picture on the screen, the program carried the words, "Mighty Christian Of Her."
"A lot of persons in primarily Muslim countries heard about it," she said.
Since then, Allen has drawn support from as far away as Istanbul, where a merchant learned of her and sent her two jeweled crosses -- the second bearing an image of Jesus and arriving recently after she lost the first one.
The first cross fell off one day when she was at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Medical Center in Little Rock, where she is on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. No one returned the cross, and the Turkish merchant heard of the loss through another person.
Allen's husband Dan, their two adult children and many other non-Muslims have been supportive, but she said the largest portion of her support has come from Muslims.
"I will never forget that the Islamic Center in Little Rock donated turkeys to our food pantry at St. Peter's Episcopal Church because one member remembered me and what I was doing. Or the amazingly elegant woman at Whole Foods who, out of the blue, gave me a Chanel scarf," she wrote in her Facebook blog titled "Between the Veils."
Allen also has been the target of stares and hate.
"A lot of people [on the Internet] were distraught by my choice and said I should be taken back to Saudi Arabia and be killed," she said. "A lot of Americans were uncomfortable with my choice."
"I have to admit that sometimes I'm confusing. I look like an elderly Heidi in a hijab," Allen said.
"I am an extraordinarily privileged person, a white woman of a certain age," she said. "I can do anything I ... please, including wearing a hijab if I want to. But in so doing," she must "stop and evaluate" new stores and other places she enters for the first time and ask herself, "Do I need to know where the exits are?"
She takes care not to disrespect the Muslim faith, so she removed the hijab briefly while drinking a glass of wine during a recent vacation.
When she first decided to wear a hijab, Allen did a Google search for "hijab store."
"I came up with a company called The Hijab Store," she said.
Always ready to laugh at herself, Allen put on her first hijab and remembered thinking, "'This is a great way to hide my double chin.'"
She wore a hijab daily until Easter of 2016.
"At Easter, I felt uncomfortable with the kind of attention I was getting," she said. "It shouldn't have been about me wearing it [but] rather a message of inclusiveness. So, I quietly put it away."
Besides, she said, at that time she "had a different idea of what the outcome of the election was going to be. When the president was elected, I put it [back] on the following day and I haven't taken it off " for significant periods.
Allen wasn't always an activist. As a teen, she said, she was sympathetic to Vietnam protesters but didn't consider herself well-informed on the issue.
"In more recent years, I have had the leisure to try to understand what's going on in the world," she said.
Allen believes her activism developed the most in the past year and a half because of the United States' political climate, and she's grown more serious in connecting her spirituality with her activism.
Despite some leisure and awaiting the kidney transplant, Allen is busy. In addition to her job, she is a writer. She blogs, and earlier this year Pelican Publishing Co. published her short book, A Down-Home Twelve Days of Christmas, illustrated by Apryl Stott.
The work may look like a children's book, but it's likely to appeal more to adults who can better appreciate the laugh-out-loud satire. Gifts in the book range from "a possum in a sweet gum tree" to eight Wal-Mart shoppers and 11 Baptist preachers. Characters include Cyndi Lou, Billy Ray and, originally, three hunting dogs that weren't neutered. (Their number quickly escalated.)
Today, almost a year since Trump's inauguration, Allen said, "I can visualize my wearing this [hijab] for the rest of my life if I feel like it. I also can visualize there will be a time when I can take it off," but still stand up for inclusiveness without having to "make such an in-the-face demonstration."
Jay McDaniel, a professor of religious studies at Hendrix College, praised Allen's decision to wear a hijab "in a very humble way."
"She does not pretend to be Muslim or to speak for Muslim women," he said. "She knows that Muslim women can speak for themselves, but nevertheless she wants to express her solidarity with them."
McDaniel described Allen as an "ecumenical Christian," whose role "is to extend welcoming love to anybody and everybody" rather than trying to convert everyone to her religion.
NW News on 01/02/2018