This Is What Being at Muslim Girl for 7 Years Really Does to You
The sole purpose of this statement is to provide, to the best of my knowledge, some context for the current situation at Muslim Girl through the lens of my own experiences with the company. I want to do so truthfully and unambiguously, in a way that is humiliating to none, and I want, honestly, in the aftermath of this, nothing to do with Muslim Girl. I am not sure if any of those things will be possible. But I have since found my true calling in the study of differential geometry, and the specter of the time (it was a lot of time) I spent in the service of or adjacent to this website refuses to die: may this statement lay it to rest.
Three years ago, Muslim Girl’s founder and CEO, Amani Alkhatahtbeh, asked me to write an an article about the origins of Muslim Girl, titled “This Is What Being at Muslim Girl for 7 Years Does to You.” It had to be “on-brand,” of course, meaning sensationalized, SEO-friendly, and sanitized in the frustrating millennial way that precludes discussion of the real difficulties of social justice by limiting the scope of discussion in the first place to only the symbolic, performative elements of social justice.
This statement ought to be read precisely as the Stranger Things’ Upside Down World conjugate to that article, discussing all the things that were too difficult and too ugly to neatly perform in the symbolic language of social justice. Seven years of being at Muslim Girl was a traumatic ordeal, and to this day, engaging with its memory in certain contexts triggers anxiety and depression beyond my capacity to manage.
In 2009, while we were in high school together, Amani launched the Muslim Girl blog. From the beginning, she leveraged our friendship to convince me to help her write for it. I contributed to the site fairly infrequently as a writer and organizational adviser until late 2012, when Amani asked me to help organize its “re-launch” set for New Year’s Day in 2013 — the first of many such rebrandings, each motivated by a decline in the site’s analytics. During that time, I was quickly transitioned into the position of “Associate Editor,” while told privately that the site would be a mutual, cooperative endeavor that involved the both of us equally. What this actually encoded was a subtle, frustrating manipulation that Mehar from Spill the Chai describes with haunting accuracy. In short, Amani appealed to our friendship and the camaraderie of our shared politics in order to limitlessly extend the expected labor of that friendship and camaraderie, which was always one-sided. You had to do a lot of work to be Amani’s friend; you had to do an excruciating amount of work to be her best friend, the role I had occupied during my time at Muslim Girl. All the while, she assured me that I was the only one who could rise to the challenge of engineering the media “movement” of her grand vision.
As “Associate Editor,” I was responsible for the logistics of the operation. I onboarded dozens of writers and managed the entire writing staff. I was the one who scheduled their publications, sent reminders for their article deadlines, and provided feedback for their work. I combed through dozens of applications and writing samples from people who wanted to write for Muslim Girl. I also helped manage inquiries for banner ads, product placements, and sponsored articles. Amani set the prices and designed the brand, which over the years became increasingly focused on her image.
The site grew. In my analysis, much of that growth emerged out of my labor. At some point in 2013, I asked Amani if I could be recognized as a joint owner of Muslim Girl’s intellectual property. I had been a contributor to the site from the start, and I felt that I had proven my commitment to working around her complex schedule. She called me opportunistic and selfish, and thought that it was absurd that I believed I deserved such a thing. Maybe it was opportunistic; I don’t know. What I do know is the sheer volume of work that I dedicated to building the site’s infrastructure and readership, sometimes for over 50 hours a week, all on a voluntary basis. I did much of that work while Amani handled, in her words, the “business” side of things. This essentially meant self-promotion: attending paid speaking engagements across the country, taking media inquiries about Muslim Girl, guest writing Forbes and Huffington Post articles, all centering herself as the celebrity face of the “movement.” She would occasionally write articles for the site in an effort to keep the views up.
In June of 2014, I left Muslim Girl. The stress of Amani’s expectation was too difficult for me to manage, let alone without an ounce of recognition. I did all of that work entirely because I sincerely believed in Amani’s vision of a media platform that could elevate the voices of Muslim women.
In the summer of 2015, Amani asked to meet me in a Panera to help her “strategize” for another “re-launch.” The sum total of this strategizing, which took place over many hours in many meetings, amounted to changing the WordPress theme, tweaking some colors, and Photoshopping some new logos. In any case, so moved by the potential for change that a re-launch held, I returned to the team as Executive Editor, this time with non-disclosure and non-compete agreements as conditions of my employment. (It was later discovered that these documents were never, in fact, signed by Amani, and only invoked to intimidate her staff.)
Since then, over the short course of two years, I’ve occupied nearly every editorial position that has existed at Muslim Girl over its countless re-launches. This includes, after Executive Editor, Managing Editor, Editor-at-Large, Content Editor, and then back to Executive Editor in late 2016 after a brief, fairly unsuccessful tenure as Chief of Staff. It was at this point that I performed all the functional duties of an Editor-in-Chief, the title that Amani had claimed for herself. Once, she jokingly referred to me as her “Damage Control Editor,” which is really what I had been all along — the title just became more or less impressive in proportion to the damage that needed to be controlled.
In spite of the “re-re-re-launch,” very little about the conditions of my work changed, except for the fact that there was more of it. Again, I found myself putting in fifty-to-sixty hour weeks in service of our friendship and the “movement.” It wasn’t until February of 2016 that Amani agreed to pay me for my labor, but even in spite of my history with her and the site, only on the basis of an independent contractor: meaning that I was responsible for all of the income tax. I will honor the spirit of the (unsigned) NDA and not disclose the amount, but it wasn’t much, always late, and well below minimum wage for the hours I worked. My total, pre-tax income for the entire year of 2016 is perhaps best described by a well-known quote from DragonBall: Z.
By late 2016, the combined writing and editorial staff hovered around fifty, and I was responsible for their day-to-day operation. The scope of this work included: materializing Amani’s nebulous ideas, copy editing and reviewing all scheduled content, helping and tracking the writers’ improvement, tweaking the site’s layout and design, moderating monthly discussions about Muslim Girl’s direction and issues, again combing through the (by this point, hundreds of) submissions and resumes in Muslim Girl’s public submission inbox in order to scout the talent that would eventually become our “core” group of writers, and editing the guest submissions therein that were good enough to publish. Of course, I and the other editors also bore the brunt of Amani’s verbal abuse when we failed to produce her target publication and readership goals: the writers were tired of being coerced to voluntarily write for the “movement,” and the quality of the at-large submissions had been in steady decline.
It was also around this time when Amani began to send me to speaking and media engagements on behalf of Muslim Girl that she herself couldn’t attend — in other words, the unpaid ones — as well as call me to impromptu “meetings,” usually with less than a day’s notice, in Muslim Girl’s Brooklyn-based “studio,” which was actually just Amani’s (studio) apartment. Sometimes, these “meetings” lasted through the night into the next day, and the line between my presence there as a friend and my presence there in service of Muslim Girl grew frustratingly vague. It felt like I was expected to be on-call 24/7, both personally and professionally, and this on top of the barely-paid, unrecognized labor pushed me to the limits of my mental health.
Through it all, I retained my optimism for and devotion to the cause of “empowering Muslim women.” I tried again and again to establish a structure around our ridiculous limitations as a for-profit media company — whatever that meant — with a volunteer-run writing staff and no knowledge whatsoever of Muslim Girl’s financial back end. No one who had anything to do with Muslim Girl’s front-end operation knew a thing about where our revenue was coming from or going, and Amani held the vague notion of “fundraising to pay the writers” over their heads like a carrot on a stick to motivate their labor. At one point, I made a suggestion that Muslim Girl should become a non-profit without Amani as its poster child. It was summarily shot down, with Amani citing that there simply weren’t any such not-for-profit journalistic organizations. (The Associated Press is, for the record, one such journalistic organization).
Sometime during the summer of 2017, our writers began collectively organizing in an effort to change the coercive, exploitative culture that drove the production of articles. They approached the editorial staff with a detailed document of demands and concerns, which I unequivocally supported. In her characteristic style, Amani enthusiastically agreed to consider all of them while, in reality, substantially changing nothing. For me, this was the final straw, and in October 2017, I and a number of writers resigned in solidarity from the staff of Muslim Girl.
Finally, and to address one final issue of association: at around the same time of our writers’ organizing, one of our editors secured a partnership with ORLY, a nail polish brand that produced water-permeable (and therefore, marketable as halal) polishes. Someone had found that ORLY’s CEO, Jeff Pink, had posted some now-deleted but extremely anti-black, anti-Palestine opinions on his social media accounts. Eventually, Amani decided to pull the partnership. My sole involvement in the development of that partnership was a bad Harambe joke that became the “Haram-Bae” polish color. I apologize for that.
This is, in summary, my account of my time at Muslim Girl. I have made every attempt to handle the way I narrativize myself and Amani with honesty and grace, and take responsibility with shame and sorrow for the shitty things I’ve done and said during my tenure there. I apologize for it all, and may there be no more. Astagfirullah.
#allahlovesaccountability
