On the comfort and humour of Muslim Tiktok

Our guest columnist writes: "The pressure on young Muslims to always be spokespeople of Islam in their online presence is exhausting."

Anmol Irfan is a freelance journalist and the Founder of Perspective Magazine. She has written for VICE, Sunday Long Read and others. Here, for The Hyphen, she writes about Muslimfluencers, fun doses of TikTok and how our favourite joyful corners of the Internet can make us feel seen and supported in meaningful ways.

I wanted to engage with the issues Muslim women were facing both online and offline so I started following Amaliah, a media platform amplifying these voices. A lot of these issues often took a serious tone because of the negative impact they had on Muslim women.

While I may have first come to Amaliah for information, community and the support it offered me, I ended up staying for the daily Tik Tok doses. Despite not being a massive social media user initially, I found myself being drawn into the comfort and humour that “Muslim Tiktok” awarded me. Here was a place where I could feel seen and connected without the emotional exhaustion that often came with engaging with identity issues. 

I quickly fell down a rabbit hole of other Tik Tok accounts. When I first came across Munera for example (described by Buzzfeed as one of “the three most charming sisters on TikTok” with over six million followers) I was immediately hooked. I love how easily she incorporated conversations around the hijab into her content, making it intrinsically about her and not about some larger discourse that is often being imposed on Muslims. This comes alongside her main focus on skincare, her relatable excitement to the existence of a hijabi avatar, and her video on the struggles of seeing other people eat when you’re fasting in Ramadan. She’s managed to take difficult conversations and present them in a far easier way. In the comment section there is mostly a cry-laughing emoji.

Because, of course, not all the content on Muslim Tik Tok is related to Islam, and why should it be?

The pressure on young Muslims to always be spokespeople of Islam in their online presence is exhausting. Muslims should be allowed to be all other parts of their identity as much as their religious beliefs without having to constantly justify Islam to viewers.

Instead, to someone like me, these TikTok accounts I love are far more appealing because not only is their humour far more relatable to me and my experiences but at the same time it’s also easily understandable enough to outside audiences for whom this content serves as a way of self education and awareness. By making their own experiences relatable, these content creators are in fact challenging generations worth of Islamophobic and harmful notions around Muslims that have long villanised and exoticised Muslim men and women more into caricatures than actual ordinary people. 

For so many young Muslims often navigating their intersectional identities and finding their way between cultures, being Muslim and the experience that comes with it is so much more than observing prayers or fasting or being limited to visits to the mosque. It becomes an intrinsic part of their own individual culture they build in this increasingly connected world.

Equally as systems of power continue to fail Muslims across the globe, whether that be through white feminist saviour narratives imposed on Muslims where they are not needed or traditional patriarchal structures of power in Islam silencing Muslims who don’t fit the norm, these seemingly small spaces of joy and visibility gain that much more importance for Muslims around the world. So many of these seemingly more transient spaces online, like TikTok, represent so much more than we think they do.