Rayouf Alhumedhi, a 15-year-old high school student from Berlin, Germany, has started a campaign to introduce the hijab emoji into the world of smartphone conversations.
Washington Post reported, Rayouf ran into the problem when she was conversating with her friends on WhatsApp. During the conversation her friends sent female emojis with their hair out to represent them, Rayouf felt alienated as she wanted to send a woman wearing a headscarf but there wasn't one. Rayouf told the newspaper, "My friends, who don’t wear the headscarf, they found something, For me? I had to opt to not use an image of a woman wearing a headscarf. Because there isn’t one."
Since then Rayouf has begun her campaign to introduce the hijab emoji to the social media world.
She started to learn of how to send a proposal to introduce a new set of emojis. Her researching uncovered that she had to submit a formal proposal to the Unicode Consortium, the people in charge of emojis.
Rayouf conducted her research and managed to put together a 7-page document arguing her points for the introduction of the hijab emoji. She wrote in her proposal,"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." She went on to state that the hijab-wearing women emoji will fit inline with emojis already in place, "The woman in the headscarf would be a terrific addition to the Mosque and Islam symbol emojis, as the hijab is one of the most globally recognized iconic representations of Islam,”.
Rayouf has argued that the hijab is one of the most popular forms of headwear. she mentioned that there is already an emoji for a man wearing a turban, which is a less popular form of headwear in comparison to the hijab.
You can view Rayoufs proposal here, you can also sign the Change.org petition to add a Hijab emoji for Muslims, which has garnered over 2,000 supporters.