Facebook’s Potential Muslim Emojis

Rayouf Alhumedhi, a 15-year-old teenager from Saudi Arabia living in Germany, recently caught the media’s attention by sending a proposal to the Unicode Consortium, a computer standards organization for approving new emojis. For the uninitiated, emojis are little pictures or pictograms that can be included with online messages to express emotions, concepts or identities.

Most emojis are accessed by typing special character combinations, such as “:)”, which transforms into a smiley face automatically on many systems when it’s entered. Until recently, most emojis approved by the Unicode Consortium have been fairly innocuous, with entries for food, playing cards, astrological symbols and the like.

But with Alhumedhi’s potential entries of faces wrapped in headscarves such as hijabs and keffiyahs (which have been popular amongst declared terrorists such as Yassir Arafat or Osama bin Laden), there would now be official emojis representing only one of the world’s dominant religions.

That just one of the world’s religions would be represented this way by emoji is likely to be controversial. That the religion is Islam is for some no doubt seen as “politically correct,” but had the chosen religion been Catholicism, for instance, with pontiff’s mitres or nuns’ habits instead of Muslim headscarves, there almost surely would have been condemnation from angry former or even current Catholics.

In fact, Muslims have been critical in the past about invasive visual representations of Catholicism such as crucifixes or rosary beads, claiming that such artifacts are symbols of the Crusades and the Christian invaders who slaughtered Muslims centuries ago.

For there now to be Muslim characters given an official stamp of approval by world standards bodies ignores the political aspects of Islam in the today’s world and the terror, torture and strife brought about by radical Muslims and Islamic states.

Indeed, while the hijab and the keffiyah may be seen as sartorial expressions of Islam, one wonders if Alhumedhi’s proposal included emojis for Muslim-identified practices such as female genital mutilation, child marriage or the restriction of women from schools that it would be looked upon as favorably.

News outlets such as The Huffington Post and The New York Times positively glowed about Alhumedhi’s proposal, with the former happily noting that “the hijab… is a prominent feature of observance for millions of Muslim women around the world.” Alhumedhi was encouraged to follow up on the proposal on online forum site Reddit, where she asserted, “The headscarf gives me power.”

However, notably included in the discussion was the fact that for many women in the Muslim world, the wearing of headscarves and facial coverings is not voluntary, but mandatory under Sharia law, and for these women, headscarves are likely not seen as empowering, but as symbols of oppression.

Many Muslim societies teach women that to not cover the head means an automatic loss of modesty, respect and privilege (which in many cases are diminished to begin with by Western standards). Additionally, there is some evidence to support the idea that wearing a headscarf as a feminist statement is a propaganda concept that was promoted by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood beginning in the late 1990s.

In Iran recently, the government has cracked down on incidences of young women posting “selfies” on social media of themselves defiantly wearing no head covering. Offenders have been punished by being lashed and/or jailed, with threats of worse punishment for repeat offenders. The state has attempted to shame those violating its laws while young Iranian women have attempted to glorify their peers who rebel against them.

It’s an open question how many of the world’s Muslim women would wear headscarves if the choice was 100 percent up to them. In ISIS-controlled areas of Iraq and Syria, the punishment for not wearing the proper head garb is stoning or disfigurement by acid.

Women who escaped ISIS-controlled areas have burned their hijabs as one of their first acts of newfound freedom. One has to wonder if Alhumedhi in Germany wears her hijab by choice, or because her family has forced her to wear it.

Another reason why the Unicode Consortium might want to think twice about Alhumedhi’s proposal is that graphic depictions of devout Muslims or anyone appearing to look like the prophet Mohammed are expressly forbidden in Islam.

While Alhumedhi lives in the fairly liberal country of Germany, even cartoon drawings of Mohammed or figures in Muslim dress have literally gotten people killed as they did when gunmen stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris in 2015, murdering the publication’s editors.

Commodifying or trivializing depictions of Muslims is not an issue computer users should take lightly. Although Alhumedhi may have innocent intentions (if her proposal truly originated with her), not everyone in the world may see it that way.

~American Liberty Report


Most Popular

These content links are provided by Content.ad. Both Content.ad and the web site upon which the links are displayed may receive compensation when readers click on these links. Some of the content you are redirected to may be sponsored content. View our privacy policy here.

To learn how you can use Content.ad to drive visitors to your content or add this service to your site, please contact us at [email protected].

Family-Friendly Content

Website owners select the type of content that appears in our units. However, if you would like to ensure that Content.ad always displays family-friendly content on this device, regardless of what site you are on, check the option below. Learn More



Most Popular
Sponsored Content

These content links are provided by Content.ad. Both Content.ad and the web site upon which the links are displayed may receive compensation when readers click on these links. Some of the content you are redirected to may be sponsored content. View our privacy policy here.

To learn how you can use Content.ad to drive visitors to your content or add this service to your site, please contact us at [email protected].

Family-Friendly Content

Website owners select the type of content that appears in our units. However, if you would like to ensure that Content.ad always displays family-friendly content on this device, regardless of what site you are on, check the option below. Learn More

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *