From NBC News
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“I don’t really care how people see me. It’s more like I care how I see myself,” Aprar Hassan said.
By Farah Otero-Amad
A whistle blows and a young woman in a white robe and a black belt jabs a one-two punch and shouts “Hiyah!” The sound echoes throughout the gym.
“Keep your hands up!” her coach commands from the sideline. Her bare feet bounce back and forth on the hardwood floor. Her right foot in front of the left, she strikes a high kick in the air.
Aprar Hassan, 17, stands strong at 5 feet 2 inches. She’s won national championships in karate for two consecutive years. In her bright red hijab, Hassan is also a trailblazer: the first Muslim girl to compete on the Amateur Athletic Union’s USA National Karate Team. She most recently competed in the girls 15 to 17 division.
The World Karate Federation (WKF) only approved the use of hijabs in competitions within the last five years — before that, girls could not compete wearing a head covering.
The only girl among three brothers, Hassan grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Her father immigrated in 1996 from Egypt, where he had competed with the Egyptian national karate team. She tried her first karate class at the Muslim American Society (MAS) Youth Center when she was 3. By age 5, she was already competing in the U.S. national championships for karate. Ten years later, in 2017, Hassan won her first national title.
“I was so nervous because I was like, wait what if I don’t place, what if I don’t do good, what if I mess up?” Hassan told NBC News. Yet as soon as she stepped on the mat, she said, all of her doubts disappeared, and her lifetime of training kicked in.
Karate competitors can score points throughout a round, until someone reaches six points. Hassan won her final championship round 6-5, knocking her opponent to the ground after just two minutes and 30 seconds.
“It’s an awesome thing to have a daughter and a student wearing a hijab and being part of the national team,” Hassan’s father, Yasser Salama, said. Hassan credits her dad with teaching her everything she knows. Salama is a full time karate sensei, or teacher, with his own dojo.
Salama coached all four of his children in karate, sometimes finding it more challenging than teaching others. One might tell him: “Dad, stop right there! You can’t make me do 100 pushups,” he said. “Sometimes when you push them, they don’t look at you as a coach, they look at you as a dad.”
Hassan credits her success with hard work despite some critics saying she’s only gone this far because of her father’s influence. “I say no. It’s ‘cause I work hard and I go for it.”
She doesn’t sweat the strange looks she sometimes gets from her opponents, who haven’t encountered a girl wearing a hijab before. In competitions, she wears an athletic cap and a white turtleneck underneath her robe.
“I don’t really care how people see me,” she said. “It’s more like I care how I see myself.”
