A Muslim Teen Has Officially Proposed An Emoji Of A Woman In A Head Scarf
If accepted, it would appear on keyboards in fall 2017.
A Muslim teenager in Berlin named Rayouf Alhumedhi has proposed a new emoji that depicts a woman wearing a head scarf. The New York Times reports that Alhumedhi, who wears a hijab, was prompted to do so after failing to find an emoji to express her true self while talking to her friends. She sent a letter to Apple with no response and then reached out to the overseer of standards on keyboards, the Unicode Consortium. Former Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee then joined with her to draft a proposal that included history of and research on the hijab.
The proposal states,
“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.”
Alhumedhi will be heading to California in November to present her proposal to the Unicode Consortium in person. If the design is accepted it would become a “candidate emoji” and would be put onto keyboards in the fall of 2017.
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