Rowaida Abdelaziz

Courtesy of HuffPost.

AGE || 28

COMPANY NAME || HuffPost

JOB TITLE || reporter

YEARS LIVING IN NEW YORK || 5

SOCIAL HANDLES || @Rowaida_Abdel

COMPANY WEBSITE || HuffPost

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

I always had an inclination towards being a journalist, so I'm glad I got that part down. But I wanted to also be an educator, I saw myself going into academia, and really wanted to be a college professor specifically.

How did you get started in journalism?

I studied journalism but when I first entered the field I was actually doing more foreign policy and international news work. I'm fluent in Arabic which was super helpful breaking into the field. So, I started off working for Al Jazeera, based in the United Nations, where I was covering security briefings and UN meetings. I was doing that as a freelancer for awhile. Then I was at the Committee to Protect Journalists, where I was documenting press violations in Syria, in specific, when the war began. I was talking to a lot of journalists on the ground and doing a lot of reporting and talking to folks there. I did that before I joined HuffPost, and was briefly still on the world news beat here. With the 2016 election, I shifted over and started doing more national politics, national news, and national social justice issues. Now I’m focusing more on problems we have inside the country than outside the country.

What was your inspiration for the article ‘Muslim Survivors Of Domestic Violence Need You To Listen’?

I cover social justice issues and Islamophobia here at HuffPost and one of the things that I've been noticing every single time that we talk about anti-Muslim rhetoric or Islamophobia, or hate crimes specially, is that it was always Muslim women who were on the forefront of that hate. It's especially women who cover or wear the hijab or the head scarf, they were walking targets. Muslim men can sometimes come off as racially ambiguous so women were the ones who were going through this awful intersectionality of bigotry. They were facing racism and Islamophobia on the outside and they were still facing sexism and misogyny, both from men inside and outside their community.

But, despite all the odds stacked against them, Muslim women were thriving. I was researching and documenting and talking to Muslim women who were doing amazing things in their fields of politics and activism and medicine and STEM and the arts. I really wanted to dedicate this year to talk about the American Muslim women and the various challenges they face because I felt that they were always on the bottom of the ladder and were dismissed for so many reasons. I was so inspired to document them, to talk to them, and to do a series that was based off of that.

Earlier this year I did a piece documenting Muslim women's experiences swimming in America (When Swimming As A Muslim Woman Becomes A Political Act). I talked to dozens of women across the country and all of them were sharing with me the different anxieties and the stresses and what it was like swimming in their modest swimwear. Some of these women were black women so we discussed anti-blackness. It was just an amazing piece to put together and it's something that many people don't think about, right? When you go swimming, you put on a bathing suit, you're going to have fun and just have a good time. But this was something that was causing a lot of stress and was an emotional burden to a lot of these women.

Continuing on with that theme, I started talking about domestic violence in the Muslim community. Domestic violence is something that doesn't discriminate. It affects people of all races, all faiths, all ages, all genders. What makes it particularly challenging for Muslim women is that there are all of these obstacles and barriers that they face and I wanted to highlight that. Even when looking for basic statistics in research, I barely could find any because it was something that people were not talking about. It was something that people didn't want to talk about. It was extraordinarily difficult to get these women to talk to me and it was a long journey where I had to establish trust and I would talk to them and I would meet with them. I think they found comfort in the fact that I was not just a reporter but a Muslim women myself, so they were able to share some of these really difficult experiences with me.

What has been the response you've received from the piece?

It's been overwhelming. When it comes to Muslim women, a lot of them have come out and said that they were thankful that a piece like this was out there. I had one Muslim women email me saying that she was sitting in her driveway, in her car, unable to get out, just having come out of a court meeting attempting to find safety for her and her children from her abuser and that she had read this piece and it gave her that motivation to continue on through this journey. I've had other Muslim women say similar things to me and, honestly, receiving emails like that just gives me goosebumps and makes me realize the impact of seeing my reporting. Especially, I had a women who was able to talk to me on the record and able to establish trust with her to be photographed and to tell her story in such a public way.

The reason some women don't speak publicly is because they don't want to reinforce the stereotype that Muslim men are violent and that Muslim women are oppressed. So, talking about this on a national scale, they don't want it to feed into that narrative. I had this immense job and responsibility to portray a story that doesn't do that, that doesn't say that Muslim men are more violent than other men who are abusers or that Muslim women are more helpless than other victims of gender-based violence and striking that nuance. Of course there are going to be some people who use the piece to perpetuate whatever stereotypes and conspiracy theories that they believe in, and I did see some of that. People were like, of course this happens in a Muslim community, Islam is so violent, despite the fact that statistics show that domestic violence is not any more or less prevalent in the Muslim community than in other faith-based communities.

What have your experiences been as a Muslim American women and journalist?

It's super important for me to go into this field because there was, and there still is, a huge disproportion and overwhelmingly negative coverage of the Muslim American community, especially with Muslim American women. For the longest time, the Muslim community has been vilified and demonized by mainstream media. There have been statistics that come out and show us that anytime we talk about Muslims we're either tying them to terrorism or national security or war somewhere in the Middle East. Anytime we talk about Muslim women it's about them being oppressed and how the head scarf is forced on them, and a really basic one-dimensional narrative. It was one of my main motivators going into this field, experiencing it myself and saying hey, I'm someone who's a part of this community, and I can only establish this trust with this community and begin to change that narrative.

I'm just one journalist and, unfortunately, journalism is still a field that is overwhelmingly white, that is overwhelmingly male. I am someone who is neither of those things. I'm a woman, I'm a Muslim woman, I'm a visible Muslim woman as someone who wears a hijab myself. I have challenges just existing in news rooms, let alone in the reporting. But I think it's my own personal experiences and the experiences of those around me that continues to fuel me to have and to get compelling stories that maybe other reporters simply can not get because of the way the media culture has treated this marginalized community. It's been so important for me to take up this space and to own this space and to have other Muslim women own this space as well and to support women. There's so few of us in this industry. It is changing. We are seeing narratives around Muslim women changing, but we still have a long, long way to go, that's for sure.

What are the challenges and rewards you feel of reporting on such topics?

I think the personal cost can be quite high. I think that being someone who is visible in this field I face a decent amount of trolling and threats and harassment myself. A lot of it comes online. It's not usually very pretty. So I do have to take certain precautions being in this field about what kind of personal information of mine is getting out, especially with my family. I have to be checking in with our cyber security team here in our newsroom to make sure that they're monitoring it with me and, worst case scenario, us being able to be in contact with police.

I do attract a fair amount of attention from extreme right wing blogs who like to write hate pieces about me and my reporting. Journalists face backlash regardless, but I think mine tends to be a little bit more nasty because of the intersections of my identity and because of what I report on. People want to say anti-Muslim rhetoric isn't a thing, Islamophobia isn't a thing, it's made up, that we’re always crying and being the victim. But then I'm getting death threats in my email. It's sometimes difficult to navigate personally and I have to find time to tap out, tune out, and really take in this concept of self-care. At the end of the day I do love my job and I did choose it but I think these are some obstacles that everyone wishes there were less of in the world.

What do you wish people realized about treatment of Muslim American women?

I wish that people realized that Muslim women are just that—they're just women who are trying to be their best selves. They're mothers, they're daughters, they're sisters, they're lawyers, they're doctors, they're teachers, and they're as diverse as any woman is. I think people tend to put Muslim women in a box and it still tends to be quite one-dimensional. Also, Muslim women have an incredible amount of stamina to take gut punch after gut punch. Whether it's from people outside their community, whether it's challenges inside their community, and they continue to succeed and thrive.

I am in awe being surrounded by Muslim women who are leaders and trailblazers every day and I think that we don't talk about that enough. We only talk about Muslim women when something awful happens. Whether she is a victim of a hate crime or people want to put this label on her for how she chooses to dress. We continue to police Muslim women's bodies like other women. I wish people gave them their agency to speak on their own behalf and to listen to these narratives that they have because it's incredible.

If I could continue to write about just Muslim women I would be ecstatic because I feel like there is an endless amount of stories that come out of the community. What's so unique about covering a faith-based community is that nobody is the same. Muslims in America have no majority race and that, within itself, means I'm talking to black Muslim women, latino Muslim women, Arab Muslim women, South Asian Muslim women, white Muslim women. And they're all so incredibly different. I think Muslim women are often talked to or talked for but never listened to. I wish we could take the time and give them their agency that they deserve.

Which women inspire you?

I'm going to be cliche and just really start with my mother. She is someone that I think embodies the point I was making early about Muslim women taking in these different gut punches and going through various obstacles and continuing to succeed. My mom came to this country as a young, Arab, Muslim women with no prior knowledge of what America was like and has managed to raise three incredible, strong Muslim women, and my brother/ She put us through college and consistently reminds us of our self worth and our value. I think it's one of the hardest things to do as an immigrant, who her, herself, was going through doubts of self-worth and self-value and dealing with obstacles, whether it's language or it's assimilation or whether it's finding her place. But she still managed to do that as a wife and as a mom and as a homeworker and a career woman. I'm immensely grateful for her and for planting the roots. I continue to look up to her. I think of all the women around me who continue to succeed in politics and writing and journalism, if I start one name, I will go down an endless list. But if I were to pick one person it would truly be my mother.

What’s the best piece of advice you were given when starting out?

I don't think anyone really sugar coated it for me—they told me the difficulties and the challenges. I think, at the time, maybe I felt it was unhelpful, but looking back I am immensely grateful for people telling me to go in with my chest puffed out and be able to be a punching bag. I think sometimes this industry sometimes can really knock you down in various ways and it's super hard to break into. It's extraordinarily unstable, the pay is awful. But I think knowing all of those challenges made me able to prepare, to be mentally prepared, to be emotionally prepared, to be strategically prepared for everything that came with it.

What advice would you give to other Muslim women trying to find their path, as well as those also reporting on injustices?

I would say that you're going to hear a lot of nonsense. There's going to be a lot of white noise around you. I think it's extraordinarily important to trust your own gut. Often times, Muslim women don't want to go through this industry, or any similar field, because they feel like they're not cut out for it or they don't have the support of their friends and their family. Or they don't see their representation of role models so they think, if there's no one there, how am I going to be the first one? I'm here to say, sometimes it takes for you to be the first one, I certainly wasn't the first one. But if you are, know that you're not alone. I think it's important to be confident in who you are and be confident in the experience that you bring and the credibility that you have. I think that means so much more than we think. We're constantly undermining ourselves.

My advice would be trust your gut and don't undermine yourself. Seek out other women who are in a similar position that they are because a strong sisterhood is unbreakable. I think you will find so much advice and love and grace when you tap into other women and are confident in who you are. So surround yourself in the people who are going to lift you up and cut out the people who are only going to bring you down.

What are your goals moving forward personally and professionally?

My goal is to continue to be the best journalist that I can. I want to bring on more in depth investigations like my Muslim swimming story, like my domestic violence story. I hope it brings change and it brings impact and I get more emails from people who say, I've read your piece and it's changed my life—even in the smallest way. I hope to continue to do that at HuffPost and any other newsroom that I decide to go afterwards. I hope to continue to be confident in who I am and to be happy with the work that I put out. I never want to put something out that I'm not immensely proud of and can stand by 100%. So, my goal is to muster up the courage, the motivation, and the confidence to say it and to also act upon it.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Sarah FieldingDecember 4, 2019