By Sharanya Gopinathan
Mona Haydar is from Flint, Michigan, USA. If Flint, Michigan sounds more familiar to you than most American towns, it could be because it’s been in the news since 2014 now, when it was revealed that the city’s principal water source was insufficiently treated and basically full of lead. There were also pictures doing the rounds on social media of water from Flint’s taps running a weird brown-black colour, and activists and news reports said that the issue wasn’t being fixed with immediacy because it was not a predominantly white city.
Mona Haydar is an activist from Flint who’s been doing some good work over the years to attack Islamophobia, like when she and her husband started ‘Ask a Muslim’, where she stood with a sign outside a library in Massachusetts bearing those words and offered a doughnut and a cup of coffee to people who wanted to stop and ask her questions about Islam. But none of her earlier projects compare in sheer swag to this new video she’s released. The music video, called Hijabi, features a eight-months-pregnant Mona Haydar rapping about her hijab, Islamophobic comments, women all over the world and a feminist planet.
You can read the lyrics to the song here, and watch the amazing video below.