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NOOR: In the photo, I’m wearing a green turban, and it completely pulls the look together. It’s so quintessentially hijabi chic. I wore hijab for 8 years, starting when I was 11. But, over the years, there was something about it that started to make me itch. I started to see this choice to wear hijab, this personal decision… as anything but personal. I think that has a lot to do with the rise of hijabi influencers.
SARAH: I would literally wear that every day. I still have it somewhere. It has all these, like, tassels. I don’t even know how to describe it. They’re just like dangling off of it but then gives you a nice shape.Okay so this is the time to say this: hijab is complicated. It’s not like any other religious symbol that I can think of. In some places, some people think you’ll be punished by God if you don’t wear it.
NOOR: This is my friend Maryam Jones. She’s a former hijabi influencer. Right now, her Instagram is focused on fashion and sustainability. NOOR: Then in about 2016, that social circle she’d met originally on Tumblr, started migrating to Instagram. It was there that Maryam started regularly uploading her cute hijabi outfits. They picked up steam real quick. Her page was the place that I went to for good thrifting tips.
NOOR: These types of questions from her followers, “How can I be happy with hijab?” started to trigger something in her.NOOR: Like for one thing, Why are people coming to me? These kinds of questions– matters of iman–are things you should be asking a faith leader. But here you are entrusting your religious guidance with a 22-year-old fashion blogger. No pressure.
NOOR: I wanna stop here and say that Maryam doesn’t want to talk about the details of that trauma. We’re not going to get into them here. What you need to know is that Maryam realized that wearing hijab was linked in her mind with some experiences she was trying very hard to move past, and because of that she needed to figure out her relationship with hijab all over again. But, with tens of thousands of people watching, it wasn’t that simple.
CLIP FROM A DINA TOKIO VIDEO: “I hate women like Dina, they are messed up and they make Islam look bad. She took her hijab off to be in hell with her sister and mom.” NOOR: So, a year before Maryam did this, Dina Tokio– that original influencer who inspired me, Maryam, Sarah, and her millions of followers to be fashionable hijabis – also stopped wearing hijab. And the fallout from that, was horrifying to watch.
NOOR: That’s what some of the worst of the comments were like–violent. Most of the other bad ones were insults about her character or expressing disappointment that Maryam strayed from the right path. In the first three days after posting the photo, she lost 2,000 followers. She lost sponsorships and her management dropped her. In a lot of ways, it was a huge blow. But…
SARAH: I just kept having this feeling like… Wow, this is really the first thing that people see about me. That had never struck me before, but then all of a sudden, I think I was just starting to have a lot of interactions where it was just hitting me that like, Oh, people see this before they see anything else.I’d have these like sort of micro aggressive interactions with people.
And I mean, that is a valid fear. I was working in fashion retail when I stopped wearing hijab and my coworkers had the exact horrifying reaction to me that Sarah feared would happen to her.NOOR: A lot of smiling faces. They were just excited for me. Out of all the reactions that you can get, that’s not the worst one, but also I was like, I don’t even want you to be excited for me. I don’t want you to feel anything.
Weirdly, that really worked. I went to work and everyone was just like, “Hey, good morning.” That was it! It was such a relief to have that experience. To not experience any sort of like shock or intrusive questions. I felt so seen and understood. That was really nice.