As a filmmaker I embrace my truth in an unwavering compulsion to share my authentic story as an American Muslim woman.

American. Brown. Muslim. Woman.

That is the heart of my story. Many of the narratives we see today that are put forward are ones of the foreign Muslim voice, and do not address the American Muslim perspective. Muslim = Foreign. That’s the stereotype that is continually reinforced. I want to move away from the “typical Muslim stigma” about a hijabi woman who is stuck in traditions from which she can never escape. American.ish normalizes “others” that are perceived as different. The film is a comedic ensemble about American Muslim women living in the world of Jackson Heights Queens in New York City. It’s a coming of age story where three young women learn to balance their American identity with old world cultural expectations. The objectives of this narrative are two-fold; to increase diverse female representation off screen as well as on screen, and to share a more nuanced view of the American-Muslim experience. I rely on comedy as the device to reach audiences to deconstruct this bias and to reveal the humanity we all have in common.

I’ve devoted my life to portraying brown American Muslim woman as real human beings: people with hope and yearning; people who struggle with being true to their religion and true to themselves. My mission has always been to give the world an alternative narrative for the Muslim woman. Present day content seems to be in love with portraying us as either unwitting prisoners of our parent’s culture or hyper-sexualized, “empowered” Muslim women. Too often it seems that the characters are written to fill a diversity quota. In reality, American Muslim women are real people, with a specific American experience that deserves to be heard. We love, laugh, cry; we are, at times, strong, at other times, frail – but always…real.