The Hijab Emoji Project

Roughly 550 million Muslim women on this earth pride themselves on wearing the hijab. With this enormous number of people, not a single space on the keyboard is reserved for them.

Hijab in Arabic translates to “partition” or “barrier.” The hijab symbolizes modesty, privacy and religious identity. Excluding family members, the hijab is worn in the presence of men. Women all across the globe choose to wear the headscarf because of its evident indication of their faith and identity. However, the hijab stretches much further than a piece of cloth on your head. It also influences the way you talk, the way you act and ultimately, your lifestyle. To say it’s an integral aspect of women’s lives is an understatement.

We need the hijab emoji for Muslim countries. This includes Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world, where the Muslim population is 202 million. And in Egypt, the 15th most populous country in the world, the percentage of women wearing headscarves is 90%.

You can read about the hijab emoji on this AMA on Reddit and our draft proposal to the Unicode Consortium.

When Rayouf Alhumedhi, 15 at the time, was creating a new WhatsApp group chat with her friends last year, the group wanted to make the title of the group a series of emojis: one to represent each girl. But Rayouf had a problem—none of the emojis really looked like her, because she’s Muslim, and wears a hijab.

Given the millions of women in the world who wear a headscarf every day, this seemed like a gross oversight.

So she set out on a mission to fix that. First she fired off an email to Apple, but never heard back.

A few months later, in August 2016, she saw Mashable's Snapchat story on how to submit an emoji proposal to Unicode. She then spent two days typing up the proposal, using the dumpling emoji and female runner emoji proposals as models.

After she sent it in, she heard back from Jennifer 8. Lee, a member of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee who had been thinking about the need for a hijab emoji. Rayouf's initial submission was a well-formed proposal, Jenny thought, as anybody who mentions Fitzpatrick modifiers knows what they are talking about.

Together, they began further changes and improvements to make the proposal more robust.

However, all emoji proposals need example glyphs. So Jenny asked Aphee Messer, a designer from Lincoln, Nebraska to work on the hijab emoji designs. After several revisions, they found ones that worked.

Jenny mentioned it to her friend, Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit, who then arranged for a Reddit AMA on TwoXChromonies submitted for Rayouf. Alexis himself also signed on as a co-author.

Rayouf plans on taking time off from school to present her proposal at Emojicon and the Unicode Technical Committee meeting in November.

If the hijab emoji proposal passes n November, it would become an emoji candidate for Unicode 10, which will be released in June 2017.

Vendors like Google and Apple often update their emoji in the fall after a Unicode release. So if all goes smoothly, the hijab emoji will be coming to a phone near you in fall of 2017.

The whole idea of the hijab emoji is to provide representation to people, so naturally we want it to represent as many people as possible. My first attempt at the emoji had the woman in a dark purple headscarf; during revisions, we decided that a more neutral, fawn color would work better. Giving the headscarf a neutral color ensures that the emojis can apply to as many people in as many countries as possible, which is an important goal for us.

Of course, technical considerations are also important—namely, making the emoji look good at a small size. That's the main limitation of emoji design. You have to think in terms of simple, recognizable shapes, resisting the urge to throw in a bunch of cute little details. But I've found that having a limitation such as this pushes me to think more creatively, which is a good thing for any design.

Show your support for the Hijab Emoji on EmojiRequest.com.

Sign onto the Change.org petition for a hijab emoji.

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قريبا.. إيموجي لفتاة بالحجاب والفكرة لشابة سعوديةقريبا.. إيموجي لفتاة بالحجاب والفكرة لشابة سعودية​

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Nuove emoji con hijab per le donne musulmane?

15 साल की लड़की बोली, हिजाब की भी बनाओ इमोजी