“Dude, hurry up and come over,” Amani Al-Khatahtbeh texted me. I wanted to say no, but no is never an answer for the 23-year-old founder of MuslimGirl.net, the number one online publication for Muslim women in the United States. Amani wanted me to join her on a humid summer night to produce a vlog for her site, and I was a bit too concerned with the way my face would look on camera. But if Amani wants something, she’ll get it. And it’s exactly that moxie that has driven her to successfully forge a powerful media presence for an underrepresented group.

Muslim women lead diverse lifestyles and have vastly different experiences, yet we live in a society with too few positive examples and too many caricatures of Muslim women in the mainstream media. Although female Muslim journalists often write critically-acclaimed takes on current events related to their faith, the mainstream news rarely includes their voices on the issues that affect them the most. Amani sees this blind spot, and, rather than accept it, has decided to do something about it. Her successes include taking on Pamela Geller, who organized the now infamous Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest, with a viral video that garnered a mention on Time magazine’s website, and a frank article on the Lebanese adult film actress Mia Khalifa, which received enough attention to crash MuslimGirl’s server.

Amani and MuslimGirl have been on the forefront of our society’s missing discussion on the intersection of Islam and Muslim women’s feminist identities. The site is not afraid to hit the strongest voices of the anti-Islam movement; as MuslimGirl.net’s tagline boasts: “Muslim Women Talk Back.” So here’s Amani, in her own words, talking back about anti-Islam sentiment and the stellar growth of her website.

What sparked you to create this site, in 2009, when you were only a senior in high school?

I launched MuslimGirl out of my bedroom when I was 17. It was after years of feeling like my voice as a Muslim woman was marginalized and neglected during a time when all the media could talk about was, ironically, Muslim women. September 11 happened when I was 9 years old, and we were well into the Afghanistan War by the time I was 10. By the time I was 11, we had invaded Iraq. When all I could understand was that innocent people are dying, the news on the TV in my home in Jersey was flooded with talking heads that didn’t look like me, who were justifying the war by saying that I was oppressed, violent, and different.

Growing up, I felt so alienated by society for my religion that I would lie about being a Muslim. Starting MuslimGirl was not only my response to the lack of accurate representation of Muslims in the media — it also became my way of asserting my narrative as an American Muslim to the public and reclaiming my identity.

"Islam" and "Muslim" don't seem to be mentioned in the news without “ISIS,” “Boko Haram,” “Al-Qaeda,” and “counterterrorism” in the same sentence, or with a discussion about how oppressive the religion is toward women. Why do you think that is?

It’s easy to marginalize an entire group of people when they’re not given a platform. People like to conveniently cloak their anti-Islam sentiment through sweeping generalizations and misguided headlines. No one ever talks about how Muslims make up the largest victims worldwide to fringe terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Even the media’s definition of terrorist is only applied to people of the Islamic faith, even though terrorists belong to every religion in the world. In that way, most people watch the news and come to have a distorted conflation of Islam and terrorism. It’s almost like manufacturing hate. MuslimGirl will always have fun taking on these types of stories.