LONDON – A British Muslim woman who dons the Islamic face-veil received a heartwarming note from a stranger while travelling on a train, giving her unexpected surprise and sense of belonging.

In a Facebook post, Ruksana Ali, who goes by the name Umm Abdullah, described how she noticed a woman who was sitting opposite her kept looking at her.

As someone who wears a face veil, she usually gets people staring at her but she says she doesn’t mind.

“So there was this one woman I noticed in particular sitting opposite me. I could see from the corner of my eye that she was looking at for me for a while. Every time I’d glance back at her to smile, she would quickly look away. As funny as it may seem she wasn’t very good at disguising it,” she wrote on Facebook earlier in December.

Reaching her stop, the woman, who avoided eye contact with Ali, gave her a folded note.

“I guessed we came to her stop when she picked up her bag and stood up. To my surprise she then leaned forward towards me and slipped a folded note into my hands.”

She didn’t know what to expect, what if the woman had left a nasty comment?

So Umm Abdullah opened it to see the following message written on it.

“You look beautiful in your veil just like the full moon in the night sky. Alice,” the note read.

She says it was the ‘most beautiful and heartwarming 15 worded note’ she had ever read in her life.

“This incident made me think that in a world that may often seem harsh, full of war and conflict, there might still be some hope,” she added.