I knew that there had to be other girls who were going through these experiences, who also wanted to have conversations that were directly relevant to our Muslim lifestyles in today’s society. I wanted to find them, and felt like there was no space online where we could connect. Most of the existing Muslim LiveJournal communities were inactive, or barely operating. The ones that were did not offer safe spaces for conversations that specifically centered on women. Of those that had large Muslim women memberships, the age group was either slightly or much older than my own, and not distinctly Western; thus the conversations were not always relatable to the distinct issues we were facing. So, given that I was already obsessed with LiveJournal and web design and coding layouts, and I felt this space was missing and we really needed it, I thought, Why not? I would make a new community entirely.
MuslimGirls is a place where you can ask those questions regarding Islam that you don’t know who else to ask, where you can talk about random issues or girly topics that are a little too embarrassing for mom, where you can share articles that you find helpful or inspirational, where you can discuss current events regarding Muslims in the world, or simply where you can meet and get to know other Muslim girls online.
That was the first official mission statement that our teenage selves came up with in 2009. Within its first five days of going live, MuslimGirls garnered more than 1,000 new members. LiveJournal highlighted it on its homepage as an exciting new community to watch. Membership requests came flooding in, and what was most interesting to see was that many of them came from non-Muslims, eager to learn about our religion from fellow netizens to whom they could relate. The community was bustling with dozens of new member posts per day. The first few, posted by us moderators, were focused on hijab styles in addition to Islamic resources that we found useful to our lifestyles—like health tips that were taken from the Qur’an—and references for members unfamiliar with the basic tenets of Islam. As the community grew, it became flooded with users’ questions, often about easy ways to implement or practice Islam in their daily lives. One post that started a lot of discussion early on was one member’s confusion about the differences between Sunni and Shi’a Islam. We watched in awe as the community took on a life of its own. We could only assume it meant that we were cultivating something that many of us were yearning for.
Noticing that the increased attention also exposed us to more bigots, we stepped up our moderation and individually screened every single member request before accepting, in order to fiercely preserve the community as a safe space. At the time, we felt like Muslim girls were already experiencing so much abuse in the outside world that we wanted there to be one place online that could be our little haven. Many men were interested in joining and insisted they would just be flies on the wall—but, as the main post on the community stated, we rejected all requests from men in order to maintain a space exclusively for women and girls. After realizing that, wow, there was a real public interest here, and that Muslim girls wanted a platform like this and that others wanted to learn from a platform like this, I decided that it would be a good idea to move the conversation to its own website where it could be easily and publicly accessible. That’s how Muslim Girl was born.
Years later, when one of our earliest bloggers and Maha’s little sister, Sara, would see me on CNN debating Don Lemon and Alan Dershowitz, she would tell me that that was the vision we always had for Muslim Girl. That it would bring talking heads on the news that looked like us, speaking on our own behalf and leading the conversations that pertained to our lives. I’m not sure if there was ever an explicit moment when we knew Muslim Girl was going to become a cultural phenomenon. We knew the work that we were doing was important since day one, because we were filling a void and addressing a need that no one had identified yet but was so crucial to our lives. Our goal was always to increase our media representation and reclaim our narrative. And we always knew that if we were going to survive in today’s society, there was no other option but to succeed.
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6http://www.muslimahmediawatch.org/.
Chapter 5
Muslim Girl’s own coming of age took place in 2015, during what I will forever remember as the Summer of Hustle.
In May that year, I was packing up my apartment in Washington, DC, where I had moved straight out of college for a media relations job at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. It was Faris’s birthday. I had just completed my last day of work and officially resigned from the position that formed the foundation of my postgrad life, and was starting my first day at my dream job at Al Jazeera America in New York City in mere days. Uprooting the entire life I had started to establish for myself in DC was one of the most difficult decisions I had ever made, but the opportunity was one I felt it was worth dropping everything for.
While Baba was on his way down from New Jersey with a moving truck to help me pack my things, I received a call from Al Jazeera America’s HR office in NYC.
“We need to postpone your start date,” they said on the phone.
Naturally, I started freaking out. I was moving to Brooklyn that day, was suddenly unemployed, and expecting a ton of moving expenses. Now I’m suddenly hit with uncertainty about two whole weeks of salary—and maybe even my dream job altogether.
“You know, if you’re nervous, it’s not too late to undo all of this,” Baba said. “You’re still here. You can unpack your boxes. You can just go back to work tomorrow and tell them you changed your mind. You can stay here.”
It wasn’t until I graduated from Rutgers in 2014 and moved to DC that I decided to actively cultivate Muslim Girl as a publication. I developed a volunteer staff of editors and writers who were pure #MuslimGirlFire—a league of superwomen who were passionate about contributing to this labor of love for the sake of our collective benefit. We started shaping a regular publication schedule, storyboarding the contemporary topics we felt needed to be addressed, and got to igniting the conversation.
Prior to that, Muslim Girl had been a constant presence in my life and the lives of my friends, but it was always just a hobby for us. Interestingly enough, in that way, Muslim Girl grew up with us. When we got to college, we were introduced to feminist literature from titans such as bell hooks and Audre Lorde. In our archives, you can witness how the content on our site shifted from the daily musings of high school girls to more introspective criticisms of our lived experiences in the context of our society. That development continued postgrad as it sought new answers and experiences, inspiring new feminist analysis. In this way, Muslim Girl organically became a real-time chronicle of the evolution of our identities during one of the most pivotal moments in our modern history.
During this time, I was obsessively working on Muslim Girl like a second job. I’d wake up at mind-numbingly early hours of the morning to edit articles on the site before heading to work at nine a.m., then come straight home from work at five p.m. and continue developing Muslim Girl late into the night. When people asked, “Where is Muslim Girl based?” I’d jokingly respond, “Your nearest Wi-Fi hotspot.” Just a scrappy blog, our hustle was coming at the world live from diners and coffee shops, anywhere with free internet and coffee refills. Digitally managing a team meant that borders melted away. It became like a virtual manifestation of badass superwomen taking on societal ills one blog post at a time, assembled through iMessage group chats and constant e-mail threads. Our initiative came with built-in sisterhood, and as we grew, so did our mentorship among one another; not only were we really cultivating a source of refuge for Muslim women online, but, in doing so, we also found it in each other. We were hooked.
It’s during this time that our tagline became “Muslim Women Talk Back,” because that’s exactly what we chose to do. One of our first articles that went viral was about Mia Khalifa, the Christian Lebanese porn star whose most popular video featured her in nothing but a headscarf while performing sexual acts on
a white guy. She had become one of the most popular porn stars on the internet that year, and blogs and news outlets were eager to paint Mia’s story as one of women’s empowerment and defiance against religion and culture. Of course, we had to disagree. Muslim Girl became one of the only sites to offer a critical analysis of Mia’s success, garnered by what we argued was using a religious garment as a prop to portray colonial sexual fantasies. The article spread like wildfire and catapulted Muslim Girl to a new stratosphere, earning the attention of mainstream media outlets we otherwise never accessed.
Shortly after, our first major republication request came from Fortune magazine for an article on First Lady Michelle Obama’s visit to Saudi Arabia, during which she chose not to cover her hair. This was not newsworthy anywhere in the world except America, apparently, where the media transformed her gesture into a grandiose statement for Saudi women’s rights. Muslim Girl pushed back against the misconstrued coverage with an essay arguing that Saudi women have been organizing, mobilizing, and advocating for change in their society on their own without the need of any outsiders’ help. The attention the essay received indicated to us that more and more people were interested in hearing what we had to say.
Muslim Girl reached even wider audiences a few months later when we decided to speak up against anti-Muslim bigot Pamela Geller’s hatemongering. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, she planned to host Draw Muhammad Day in Garland, Texas—an occasion for, I guess, other bigots to compete over who could draw the most offensive cartoon of our prophet for a cash prize, and then put all submissions on display in an art gallery. While never a justifiable incitement of violence, this was insulting to Muslims and our religion itself. But we figured the only way to talk back to such ridiculous hate would be with humor and love. So, we made a video in which we invited everyone to draw a Muhammad that they knew. Muhammad is the most common name in the world, after all, so we figured everyone must know a Muhammad! Our campaign effectively drowned out any negativity surrounding the event, heralded as a youthful and peaceful response to Islamophobia, and garnered us our first mention on Time magazine’s website.
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“I think I’m still going to go,” I told Baba. “Everything happens for a reason. I’m sure everything will work out.”
I didn’t exactly realize the level of comfort and security I’d be leaving behind in that moment. The only clarity I had was that I felt a strong pull toward New York City that May. I felt that there was a reason life was taking me to one of the media capitals of the world, in spite of whether I consciously felt ready for it.
A few weeks later, I got a bleaker call from HR while enjoying a shish kebab dinner with my friend at my favorite restaurant in Paterson, New Jersey. Al Jazeera America was postponing my start date again. At that moment, my friend could see that not even our kebab could keep me from the brink of tears.
“Listen, maybe it wasn’t meant for you. Maybe the best thing is that you focus on Muslim Girl. I think you’re supposed to be one of those amazing entrepreneurs. I think this moment is the hiccup in your story that changes everything.”
Thus began the Summer of Hustle. I made the painful and terrifying decision to throw Al Jazeera America out the window, give everything I had to Muslim Girl for just one summer, and see what would come of it. I rented a cheap room in a brownstone apartment building deep in Bed-Stuy in the same neighborhood as Imam Siraj Wahhaj’s congregation. I burned through all my savings from the past year in DC within two summer months to work on the website full-time. By the end of the summer, Muslim Girl had gone viral and landed its first major profile for the viewership it garnered.
The following summer, a video of comments I made during the White House’s United State of Women Summit went viral on social media. My voice was being given a platform as a speaker at the summit alongside media titans like Oprah Winfrey, Meryl Streep, and Tina Fey, along with the most powerful women in our government. When we were taping the commercial film that would end up covered in every major news outlet on the entire planet, dubbing us “Michelle Obama’s Kick-Ass Lady Crew,” I was sitting in the VP of marketing’s office in the PepsiCo headquarters in Manhattan, staring at a moving camera and a crew of filmmakers.
“She has such powerful eyes,” one of them said. “Shoot a close-up of her eyes the way that we did earlier for Shonda Rhimes. Give her the Shonda Rhimes treatment.”
What? Shonda Rhimes?
The day of the summit, I was seated between Shonda Rhimes and Gloria Steinem on a panel about media representation, and we spoke about diversity. I suggested that it’s crucial for us to keep representation in mind when we think about who’s included in the process. I was referring to the case of Hollywood employing white actors to play positive minority roles, while brown actors are relegated to negative roles perpetuating racist depictions.
During the summer of 2016 I also traveled to France for the first time to attend the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. I was the sole visibly Muslim woman speaker invited to speak on the main stage among the global makers and shakers of the industry. It wasn’t until the chief creative officer of the ad agency that had invited me there referred to it as the “Oscars of the media world” that I realized just how big of a deal this was. It was a milestone. Because Muslim women haven’t had a presence in a space that pretty much dictates the way we perceive the world around us, it’s no wonder our misrepresentation has gotten this bad. If media is the ultimate lens through which we distort our views of different people—which, as I learned early on, could perpetuate harmful misconceptions as fodder for war—then this is one of the most potent avenues of getting at the root.
Now that I’m being exposed to the culture of who’s running our ad and media world, I could say the same for this space. When I was walking through the Palais des Festivals, I stopped at the wall on which the names and photos of award nominees that year were exhibited. Of the few categories highlighted, not only were women scarce, but I didn’t see the name of one single black person. When we consider this, it becomes easier to understand how our media simply does not look like the world around us. The people included in the process are not representative of the marginalized people who would most benefit from more accurate and positive depictions of them.
During my visit to France, the UK voted on seceding from the European Union—to #Brexit—and won. My British hosts were heartbroken, stunned that the unimaginable had suddenly, overnight, become reality. The morning after the decision came, we met up in the Guardian’s speakers’ lounge to prepare for a rehearsal. The idea of Brexit passing seemed so unlikely that our organizers were visibly moved, with a somber pall of confusion washing over everyone as they attempted to comprehend what country they’d be returning to. They were from London, which had voted to remain, along with Scotland and Northern Ireland. “I just didn’t think it could ever actually happen,” they kept repeating.
The campaign to Brexit was not unlike that of Donald Trump. Both used fallacies about immigrants and the refugee crisis to illustrate a racist idea that our collective identity has been manipulated by minorities entering our borders. This idea echoes familiar age-old notions of racial purity. Trump has especially homed in on ostracizing the Muslim community as a central part of his platform, such as by asserting that the San Bernardino shooters were only able to commit their heinous act “because we let their families” into our country. Further, the Brexit campaign just as stupidly assumed that a supposed solution as simple as leaving the EU would fix the economy. In the U.S., Trump was touting the mind-numbing suggestion that we erect a physical wall between the U.S. and Mexico. And in both of our great nations, nobody had been heeding any warning of the consequences that would result from either outcome.
Not everyone felt the same way though. Walking through the festival, a British duo pointed at me, for some strange reason, and cheerfully exclaimed, “We’re not part of the EU anymore!” I
can only assume it was a celebratory announcement that they wouldn’t have to deal with people like me anymore. I immediately flashed back to the tensions we were witnessing in the United States as a result of our own issues with race. While I was experiencing this historic development in Europe, across the pond my newsfeed back in the U.S. was flooded with shock, and, even more, with fear. As the East Coast woke to a different world, thought pieces started pouring out about the parallels between the Brexit referendum and the rise of Donald Trump, and one reality was staring us in the face: As impossible as we were hoping—imagining—the rise of racism to be, it can, in fact, win. The UK’s decision was a clear demonstration of that, and, at worst, it was a sign of what was waiting for us come November.
In response to Brexit, Trump said, “I hope America is watching.” Watching what, exactly? Maybe the tragic spectacle that exploiting racism among racists for a national campaign, that otherwise would have no standing, works.
Muslim Girl Page 8