These Millennial Muslim Women Are Clapping Back Against Stereotypes

"Kill them all, and let their Allah take care of them."​ Laila​ Alawa was just a teenager in Potsdam, New York, when she spotted a guy wearing that slogan on a T-shirt and hoped her 6-year-old twin sisters couldn't read it. Alawa​ had started wearing a headscarf when she was 10, a year after 9/11, and endured people on the street telling her to "go back to Iraq" and calling her a terrorist. She was used to being the outsider — born in Denmark, she'd moved with her family often — but then the kids in her grade school refused to associate with her, and the isolation got so bad that her mother decided to homeschool Alawa and her siblings.​ "I made a vow as a 13-year-old that when I grew up, I'd make sure no girl or no woman ever felt alienated," she says. 

Now 24 and living in Washington, D.C., Alawa is making good on her vow as the creator of the feminist Muslim website The Tempest. The site, originally launched as Coming of Faith in 2013, publishes personal essays and editorials advocating for gender and ethnic equality like "Confessional: My High School Counselor Was Racist" and "Aisha Saeed Talks Diversity in Publishing" alongside jokey listicles like "10-Year-Old Me, Don't You Dare Shave Your Arms"​ ("I  know Abu's razor is right there, but you'll only leave behind an impossible mess for me to have to deal with ten years later.") "My work with The Tempest comes out of a fierce refusal to allow anyone to be silenced," Alawa says.

Alawa is one of a handful of young Muslim women trying to flip American media's portrayal of Muslims as male terrorists or oppressed women from faraway lands. There are 3.3 million Muslims in America, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center (Pew estimates that number will more than double by 2050), and a significant portion of them are Millennial women. A 2011 Current Population Survey by Pew found that 59 percent of adult American Muslims are 18 to 39 (compared to 40 percent of non-Muslim adults), and 45 percent are female. Alawa and her cohorts at MuslimGirl, MissMuslim, and #GoodMuslimBadMuslim are using their publications to show the complexity of the Muslim experience by producing Muslim-centric viral content around dating, faith, makeup, music, body issues, family, and politics for their booming audience. 

[pullquote align="C"]We didn't get a seat at the table, so we built our own.[/pullquote]​​

The fastest-growing Millennial Muslim startup for women is MuslimGirl (tagline: "Muslim Women Talk Back"), founded by 23-year-old Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, who was just named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 list. The New Jersey native launched MuslimGirl in high school as a LiveJournal community. "We wanted a place to talk about things that might have been too embarrassing for mom, like getting bullied in school or our periods, and to eliminate stereotypes through the spirit of interfaith sisterhood," Al-Khatahtbeh says. One thousand girls joined her LiveJournal group in the first five days. 

In 2009, she bought a domain name, and now Al-Khatahtbeh's bedroom operation has grown into a New York-based company with five paid staffers and more than 50 freelance writers. Al-Khatahtbeh says thousands of loyal followers now read the site's features, like "Top 10 Instagram Looks of the Week," maps of anti-Muslim attacks that have occurred in the presidential campaign cycle, and sharable GIFs of Al-Khatahtbeh speaking on a panel recently with former President Bill Clinton. One of MuslimGirl's most viral hits is a 2015 video response to the inflammatory "draw Muhammad" contest in Garland, Texas, that asked people to sketch the Islamic prophet, resulting in obviously offensive submissions. MuslimGirl deflated the power of the campaign by riffing on the theme: They offered people on the street the chance to draw a picture of any Muhammad they know. (Muhammad is one of the most common boys names in the world, so there's no shortage.)​ "We didn't get a seat at the table, so we built our own, and anyone can sit with us," Al-Khatahtbeh​ says. "Our goal is to become the first mainstream media network by and for Muslim women." ​

New York-based MissMuslim is the newest site in the group — it launched Feb. 29 this year — and tags itself "the halal Cosmo." Co-founder Jenan Matari says she likes to cover topics that are stigmatized in the Muslim world, like the decision not to wear a hijab, the subject of a recent editorial by co-founder Mehar Rizvi. "One of the most common comments we get here on MissMuslim is something along the lines of, 'Muslim? Most of the girls working behind this site don't even wear hijab,'" Rizvi wrote. "What a disservice it is to boil an entire religion with immense history and meaning down to nothing more than a piece of cloth. Islam is about the soul." ​MissMuslim focuses on international social concerns as well; a young nurse who works directly with Syrian refugees overseas​ writes one particularly moving column. "Most of us are children of immigrants or immigrants ourselves," Matari says. "International news is a big part of our lives. We grew up watching Arabic or Pakistani TV because our family is abroad." 

These Millennial Muslim platforms are all spiked with humor, but witty political commentary is the driving force behind the hilarious and thought-provoking monthly podcast #GoodMuslimBadMuslim. Bay Area comedian Zahra Noorbakhsh and L.A.-based activist/artist Tanzila "Taz" Ahmed first met as contributors to the Muslim anthology Love, InshAllah. Now on their podcast, launched January 2015, they riff like two BFFs on the increasing violence toward Muslims incited by Republican presidential campaign rhetoric and the recent stabbing of a teenager in Huntington Beach, California, who was speaking Arabic. "The humor that we have really gets across the humanity in the Muslim community," says Ahmed. Noorbakhsh and Ahmed declare cultural fatwas against silly things like "Auntie stare-downs," an inside joke about judgmental Muslim relatives. During their recurring "Awkward Ask a Muslim" segment, Ahmed told a story about a trip she'd taken to Big Bear with friends where she constantly had to explain why she doesn't drink.​ The women also reclaim slanderous terms like "creeping Sharia," which is the name of an Islamophobic blog that claims Muslims are taking over the Western world — in #GoodMuslimBadMuslim, it's the name of a segment about the positive ways Muslims are being embraced culturally. (Most recently they called a new Simon & Schuster imprint for Muslim children a "creeping Sharia.") 

"It's really fun to be able to [take] back these terms that a lot of media has used in a negative sense to talk badly about Islam and say these are all the ways that we're winning," says Noorbakhsh. "I get so sick of this idea of a Muslim community as an avatar of this one type." Their fans, who have downloaded their episodes more than 140,000 times, agree. iTunes reviews rave about how relatable their humor is, a quality that just earned the podcast a shout-out in Oprah's magazine and a segment on NPR.

Despite the exponential growth of young Muslim population in the U.S. and the popularity of these sites, the women behind them have had a lot of trouble finding investors. "People have said, 'I don't think your platform is big enough yet, you shouldn't be thinking funding," Alawa says. "But at the same time I see men getting funding for things that aren't as valuable." She's gotten feedback from funders asking why she isn't dividing The Tempest by ethnicity (The Tempest has branched out to all women of color, not just Muslims), and many are surprised that her site covers topics beyond "being oppressed or wearing head scarves." So far the only funding she's gotten for The Tempest is $10,000 from an anonymous donor. But her response is to just keep pushing forward. "There's no other way," she says. "Someone's been telling me no my whole life and I've figured it out." ​

Al-Khatahtbeh and Alawa currently run their sites on shoestring budgets procured from successful crowdfunding campaigns, while the co-founders of MissMuslim work on the site outside their day jobs. The women of #GoodMuslimBadMuslim raise money via ticket sales for live recordings of the show. All three sites and the podcast have plans to launch advertising partnerships to help pay the bills but haven't yet.

[pullquote align="C"]Look we're all different, we all practice differently, but we all consider ourselves Muslim.[/pullquote]​​

And there are emotional challenges on top of the financial ones. As their content goes more and more viral, the sites have to deal with vitriol from both inside the religious world and from Islamophobic commenters. Matari says MissMuslim gets backlash in the comments from more conservative Muslims who have strict ideas about wearing headscarves or praying five times a day. "A lot of it is just from obnoxious people telling us that we've shamed Islam and don't represent Muslim women," Matari says. ​"We're trying to prove to people that, look we're all different, we all practice differently, but we all consider ourselves Muslim." The comments on MuslimGirl videos are peppered with nasty slurs. 

"It's very triggering," says Al-Khatahtbeh. "The kinds of things people say to us, it's very dehumanizing. But it only empowers our cause and makes it more evident why our work is needed now more than ever." Despite their struggles, all three site directors are making active efforts to pull other Muslim women up with them, via unpaid programs ranging from mentorships and editorial fellowships to tiered contributor positions.​

The Millennial editors and podcasters are all adamant that the work they're doing is for the greater good of removing shame from the discussions that are vital to young Muslim women. Al-Khatahtbeh says that, like Alawa, experiencing the increased Islamophobia of post-9/11 America has pushed her to take action and create a space where diverse Muslim voices are welcome. "We were the ones who had to grow up through Islamophobic society. It's only natural that it's prompted proactive responses," she says. Matari is more motivated by the dated norms imposed on young Muslim by their own parents. "I see a lot of girls who are above the age of 18 and have never seen a gyno because it's inappropriate in our culture to go get a pap test," she says. "And I'm over it."

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