Feminist Hajar J Woodland says:

I was five when I first decided, without parental pressure, to wear the hijab to school – because when you’re a half-Iranian Muslim at an all-white primary school, what will really help you fit in is a foreign name and people asking “why have you got a tea towel on your head?”

It started as the equivalent of a child trying on heels, but the hijab became a central part of my identity when I started my period and officially became a woman – a whole six years later.

I was the only girl in a headscarf at my Peterborough school, until my sister started to wear one and then two other anglo-iranian friends moved to the area.

Despite the strong Islamic association, Muslims don’t have a monopoly on scarves, and in parts of the Islamic world the scarf wasn’t enforced as a way of guarding modesty, but of signifying social class.