a new wave of tik tok hijab discourse

moral outcry resurfaces after influencers take off their hijabs. will muslim tik tok ever get over this repeated grief?

I haven’t been on tiktok for the past few months, but I occasionally log on to see what I’ve been missing. Yesterday, I found out that I haven’t been hip to the newest wave of hijab discourse. With a little contextualization from my sister, I discovered that summer 2024 has seen an onslaught of Muslim influencers taking off their hijabs, resulting in moral outcry in their comments from other Muslim women. 

I remember when I first started wearing the hijab in 2012. There weren’t a lot of people on the internet making content about their life and fashion tastes as hijabis. The two I remember clearly were YouTubers yazthespaz (now The Real Yazmin) and amenakin (now just Amena). It was the early 2010’s, the era of poofy hijabs with folds like an elaborate cake decoration. Yazmin and Amena didn’t talk very much about their lived experience, but what they showed was much more important to me at the time— I perceived them as beautiful, affable, stylish Muslim women who were making more space for people like me on the internet and in the world. 

Amena took her hijab in 2020, initiating the first wave of hijab discourse in the tik tok era. I was twenty years old at the time and had been wearing the hijab for eight years. I was surprised. Her situation was particularly curious. She was married with two children, quite settled in her life, and had built a strong business selling hijabs and modest wear on pearl-daisy.com. No one could understand why she removed her hijab. Her YouTube video about it (no longer online) didn’t give reasons, but opined about an orientation towards her decision. She said “it was a fairly spur-of-the-moment decision,” and that her previous content has made it clear that “your goodness or your religiosity cannot be measured by external things.” At the end of the day, she underscored her deep subjectivity and lack of authority: “I am not a religious figure.”

But the internet never really recovered from the shock of a visibly Muslim woman choosing not to be so visibly Muslim anymore. And something similar is happening on tiktok right now, after many prominent hijabi content-creators and influencers removed their hijabs. The discourse is unfamiliar to no one— they make a video about how the hijab is a personal choice, one between an individual and God, and how the struggles they face are their own. And then some authoritative voice comes online— usually an older Muslim woman with a thoughtful, reflective air about her— and says something like, “Well, the point is for the choice to be difficult, that is the trial Allah has given us with regards to our beauty is one that demands a sacrifice” or something like that. There’s also a pseudo-feminist wave of criticism alongside all this championing women’s choices and bodily autonomy with the political language of abortion rights. The comments range from unironic idolization of influencers to feelings of betrayal to people pouring out their own personal journeys to mini fatwas. 

My sister was saying that a lot of the discourse in the comments, though, are young girls, who, like me at age twelve, just wanted to look upon someone to pin their hopes on. I think what makes me really sad is that fact, more than anything else: that we have come to rely so heavily on constructs and images to define a lived experience, that even something so personal and complicated as the hijab can be aestheticized in order to sanitize its struggle. The sense of betrayal these young Muslim women feel is real and personal. It feels wrong to just condemn women for unfairly judging other women— and it’s a boring analysis, too. For many Muslim women, there is a sense of solidarity they feel when they witness another on the same path as them, connected through the struggle of veiling. That connection is broken when someone removes its symbol. 

But at the same time, the hijab shouldn’t be a symbol for that connection, nor should it serve as a proxy for a joint struggle against exposing one’s beauty. Sharing a basic identity generates pride and belonging, but that is not what it means to wear the hijab. The enmeshment of one’s personhood and morality with a piece of cloth is a dangerous tokenization of religiosity. 

I’m not here to define what the hijab is or is not. There are enough people regulating that discourse already. But I am curious about how personal the hurt becomes when a Muslim woman on the internet makes an entirely subjective decision based on factors the general public will never have access to. 

Religion often gives us comfort in the absolutes: God is absolute, theology is absolute, Islamic law is absolute. But then the contrast between those and the painful subjectivity of human beings can be shocking and disappointing, especially when someone is perceived as representing something so infallible as faith. Muslim women are always judged against these absolutes, and people celebrate their symbolization as the face of Islam. It’s unfair. 

Then there’s the trickiness of feminist discourse rearing heads with all this religious language. Comments about “women’s bodily autonomy” and “her right to choose” feel borrowed and anachronistic. Contemporary and historical political orders demand control over women’s bodies, and Muslim women are not exempt from that. But is that really the issue here? It seems like the moral outcry over the hijab removal is centered on something beyond politics, though it borrows its language. It signals a grief about a world of crumbling absolutes in which people face the reality that Muslim women can, and indeed will, do whatever feels personally right for them. That appears to be an inherently threatening fact; that even “religious absolutes,” at the end of the day, cannot inform their most personal choices. 

It is this grief and confusion that drive people to express moral judgment against once-lauded hijabi influencers. It sours into hurt and vitriol, and then devolves into discourse about the correct, Islamically legal way to wear hijab. That grief makes people hold on tighter and faster to those religious absolutes and aphorisms. And then another wave of symbolization emerges— some new influencer who finally represents everything people want, who finally reflects the absolutes. But then they inevitably disappoint the masses, and the cycle of grief and confusion and judgment starts all over again. 

It would be wonderful if that grief didn’t result in this cycle. If instead it became a way for people to reckon with the complicated realities of religious practice within themselves, which aren’t always problems to solve, but paradoxes to live with. Many of these paradoxes mean coming to terms with conflicting personal interests, and learning, slowly, to make confident decisions that reflect one’s ability to live faithfully to their beliefs. This is the real hard work— trusting ourselves to live according to our values while supporting others to do the same. I think it requires a lot of discernment, patience, and most of all, bravery.