"There was no family pressure -- I just felt like I had to start wearing it," she said. "Now, it's almost like a test for myself. You have to go around your daily life and not hide the fact that you're representing a whole ethical system."
Ludin, the president of Dartmouth's Al-Nur Mulim Student Association, was joined by two other Dartmouth female religious leaders in a panel discussion Tuesday, titled "Women of Faith."
Ludin, along with Meredith Druss '08, the former president of Dartmouth Hillel, and Haley Bolin '08, a leader of the Christian Navigators group, spoke about their struggle to understand women's traditional religious roles in a modern context.
Druss said that she has encountered a degree of "gender hypocrisy" within the Jewish tradition.
"Females are told that we are elevated above men simply because of the biological ability to bear children," she said. "But then we're also told that we cannot enter into religious studies because it's all males."
As a Conservative Jew -- which she termed "the middle denomination" -- Druss said she has encountered a progressive movement to grant Jewish women a more prominent position in the culture. She added that she has found Dartmouth to be particularly open to including women in significant religious roles.
"I will say that [Jewish women] are lucky enough here at Dartmouth to be allowed to come out and identify with our Judaism religiously as well as culturally," she said.
Bolin stated that understanding gender issues and tradition -- specifically in a religious context -- is particularly important for the Dartmouth community.
"My faith is an integral part of my life, and when I see that faith being manipulated and contorted to be something that's a source of discrimination or inequality, that is the exact opposite of how I see my faith," she said. "In my life, I see [my faith] as an incredibly empowering thing and a source of liberation for all people."
Ludin said she finds her sense of modesty, which she said is a more controversial aspect of Muslim tradition, serves a similarly liberating role.
"If you think about it, modesty enables sensuality," she said. "If we couldn't cover ourselves, what would there be to reveal?"
The idea for Tuesday's panel came out of a discussion on faith and sexuality that arose in a Multi-Faith Council event last year, according to Kurt Nelson, adviser to multi-faith programs at Dartmouth. Nelson said he was surprised to find that female religious leaders in the Upper Valley were scarce, but that females held many of the leadership roles within Dartmouth's religious communities.
Nelson also cited Dartmouth's gender politics as a motivation for creating the panel, noting that, "there is a general consensus that Dartmouth has gender issues."