The past year has been tumultuous for international politics. Citizens of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union (a move usually termed “Brexit”);  Donald Trump became the president of the United States, despite his attacks on liberal media and unfiltered islamophobia, racism and sexism; Saudi women gained the right to drive in the past few weeks, among a few other rights; and more and more media outlets have been covering the Rohingya Muslim Genocide and its effects on the Rohingya population.

Given these headlines, it’s easy to dismiss small victories by considering them trivial. Last month Fatin wrote a piece highlighting this very issue, as well as the impacts that positive representation of  Muslim women in the media may have. For instance, she showed how confident her nieces and cousins are in their decision to wear hijab, partly given to these positive examples, which  demonstrates how essential it is for Muslim women (and racialized women,  as a whole) to have representation in mainstream media and consumer markets. Being able to find your shade of foundation in the Fenty Beauty or Huda Beauty lines, for example, is part of being meaningfully represented for some Muslim women and racialized folks. These may be small victories, but  they’re victories nonetheless.

For me, adequate representation means being able to hear a plentiful and diverse range of stories, from a wide variety of storytellers. I prefer to have people tell their own accounts or accounts similar to their own whenever possible, as opposed to having their narrative manipulated, exploited, or outright changed by another group.  This is why seeing Muslim women, hijabi women and racialized women in mainstream media, books and art can be so important for some Muslim women.

Hence, I had my own personal representation victory last week, while looking at our Friday Features. I saw “Yes, I’m Hot in This,” a series of comics by Huda Fahmy. Until last week, the only Muslims I’d seen in  comics were Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel) and Sooraya Qadir (Dust from X-Men and Young X-Men). It seemed to me that Muslim women mainly existed in comics as patriarch-smashing heros. I’d assumed there weren’t any other Muslim comic strips available, which meant that Muslim women didn’t exist as ordinary people in the realm of comics.

I realize this assumption may be  ridiculous: I studied media in university, and a number of my friends are artists. Among them are several Muslims who also happen to draw the occasional comic, I just didn’t put two and two together. I’d been so brainwashed by the often white images of mainstream American media that I thought anything that fell out of the mainstream was on the fringe and therefore not worth exploring.

Yes, I’m Hot in This Comic- Via Twitter

After discovering Fahmy’s comics, I decided to search Instagram and fill my feed with other Muslim comic artists. I was both surprised and pleased by the diversity of comic art available. I found Nidonite, a Swiss Muslim who posts comics in both French and English, Mvzlamic, who is a British comic artist, and Thaaks.i_comics (Thaakirah Jacobs), a South African artist who maintains her comic account alongside her personal art account. All three of the artist’s main characters have different skin tones, and they all wear different styles of hijab. The comics also feature non-hijabi Muslim characters.