How i became a Muslim Nudist

"The first time I saw my daughter Hafsa run naked through the garden after rain, her small feet slapping against wet grass, her newly budding chest bare to the world without a trace of shame, I wept." The memory of my own childhood pressed against me like a too-tight shawlhot, suffocating. At ten, I'd been wrapped in layers when my nipples first darkened against my school blouse, my mother's sharp fingers pinching my arms as she hissed about modesty. Now, watching Hafsa shake water from her hair like a wild thing, her laughter unburdened, I felt the ghost of those layers dissolve in the humid air.

Naturism had found me in the quiet hours of insomnia, scrolling past pixelated images of European women hiking bare-breasted through alpine meadows, their skin golden under the sun. Their freedom was a language I didn't know how to speak yet, but my body recognized ita primal hum in my ribs. When I finally dared to step naked onto our balcony at dawn, the morning air licking my thighs, I gasped at the sheer *aliveness* of it: the chill, the daring, the absence of fabric whispering *haram* against my skin.

Hafsa's father called it corruption when he discovered us. "You're making her *wild*," he spat, as if wildness was something to be leashed. But I remembered the way his eyes had lingered on covered women in the market, the hypocrisy of his hunger. Hafsa, thoughshe didn't flinch when boys stared at her swimsuit at the pool. She'd simply peeled it off last summer, declaring the straps itchy, and dove in. The lifeguard's shocked cough was almost as sweet as her splash.

Praying nude became our rebellion. Without the barrier of cloth, my forehead pressed directly to the cool prayer mat, the surrender felt purer. Sometimes Hafsa would giggle when her belly stuck to the surface during sujood, and I'd let her. God, I reasoned, had seen Adam and Eve before the fig leaves. What was more sacred than flesh without secrets?

Her father's rage arrived voicemailsstatic-laced diatribes about Western corruption, how I was turning her into a "white man's plaything." As if modesty had ever protected anyone from hungry eyes. I remembered the way our imam's fingers had lingered too long on my shoulder at twelve, his breath hot through his beard as he praised my piety. Now, watching Hafsa climb trees bare-limbed, her knees scraped and glorious, I wondered who truly defiled innocence.

The first time she bled, she came to me holding the crimson smear between her fingers like a curious treasure. No whispers of shame, no hurried lessons about purification. We sat cross-legged on the bathroom tiles, her skin still damp from the shower, as I showed her how to fold a cloth pad. "It's just blood," she said, shrugging. I kissed her temple, tasting salt and freedom.

At the naturist beach last summer, an elderly couple complimented her sandcastle. She stood, unselfconscious, grains sticking to her wet thighs, and chatted about moats. The man's gaze never dipped below her chin. Later, she asked why people wear clothes at all. I traced the sun-warmed curve of her shoulder, where my own mother would have sewn a hijab pin. "Because," I said, "some people are afraid of how beautiful the world really is."

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