In the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan’s best friend, Nakia, has a beautifully rich storyline, where she explores her identity as a hijabi, her place as a young Muslim woman in the mosque ecosystem, and the very real, underexamined emotions that accompany this demographic of teenage girl. For this, the streaming television series truly should be praised as a vehicle for authentic representation. How strange, then, that these same characters function in a very different way when they move to the big screen. Kamala Khan herself is shockingly underused in the larger scope of the MCU films. Worse, however, is that all the depth of Ms. Marvel’s culture, religion, and race—the sort that we know Disney can achieve when it sets its mind to it on the small screen—is erased. Instead, the big-budget films simply settle for the box-office win: a superhero who is both brown and female. Not exactly groundbreaking.

Such a dichotomy plays out in more than just Marvel. Still, why is hijabi representation divided between small-screen success and big-screen blunders?

Writers, executives, and the whole production studio chain seems to refuse any investment in a hijabi-focused narrative, out of fear of financial repercussions. There is a chance that a white-majority audience won’t resonate with or enjoy a prominent spotlighting of the hijab, and consequently tank performance and profits. This is most likely what holds Hollywood back from tailoring the big-screen blockbusters to the real-life cinemagoers.

It’s often argued that television is a safer space for risk taking due to smaller budgets and viewerships. Some of the most iconic soaps, comedies, and sitcoms in both British and American spaces have been incredibly adept at finding a strong loyalty in their audiences and pulling them through the unsuspectingly rich and diverse storylines they have to offer.

Despite the persistent modern dilemma around the diversity and inclusion of Muslim women and hijabi women as a right-wing red herring, it’s the streaming platforms—not the Hollywood executives—that have consistently taken a chance on such characters. The most recent examples of hijabi in films have been documentaries that problematize the hijab and don’t really contribute to the authentic representation that is needed, and the more positive straight-to-streaming projects.

Naturally, streamers have less pressure to appeal to a homogenous audience congregated within movie theater screenings and more flexibility to dip into alternative tropes, fresh storytelling, and a well-rounded lineup of representative content. For every 10-second-long hijabi Barbie film cameo (yes, we really did only see hijabi Barbie, played by the Muslim philanthropist and activist Dr. Fatumina, once), streamers like Hulu, Disney+, and Netflix have respectively invested in entire shows, like Ramy, Ms. Marvel, and Elite.

Granted, these shows come with their own shortcomings: even Muslim-led productions like Ramy have attracted criticism for shallow representations of Muslim women. Nevertheless, it’s hard to disagree that TV is doing the work Hollywood is failing to carry out. Perhaps the most crucial stepping stone on the path to change lies in the writers’ rooms, behind the camera, and just off the sides of the set. In today’s filmmaking landscape, representation on the big screen is best cultivated by representation on the sidelines.

It’s funny, because even the internet knows there’s room for improvement. Back in January 2025, if I Google searched “hijabs in films,” the automated overview  politely let me know that these images are pretty bad. It informed me that the portrayal of hijabs in films has been “criticized for reinforcing stereotypes and misrepresenting women” and suggests some mid-budget independent documentaries that supposedly challenge said stereotypes (they don’t), as an overly complex, somewhat evasive answer to my simple search for examples of the Muslim headscarf on the big screen.

Once again the AI annoyingly told me what it thought I wanted when I searched for “hijabs on tv” instead. I was met with some brief yet outdated examples of hijabi TV presenters, news anchors, and reporters, but no mention of Nida Manzoor’s groundbreaking We Are Lady Parts, the long-standing British sitcom Citizen Khan, or the British teen drama Ackley Bridge—three core examples of hijabi representation on the small screen that were birthed in the UK but are popular worldwide.

It’s ironic, looking at the results of the two searches. Such an incredible aggregator of knowledge can’t pull together some of the most famous examples of hijabi representation in the UK, but can mention low-budget, minimally marketed, poorly watered-down documentaries. It seems every time the hijab is successfully portrayed onscreen, the evidence is buried—unless it was the focus of a short-lived controversy.

If you’re a Brit who grew up with the BBC soap opera EastEnders, you’ll remember well when Shabnam Masood, the show’s first hijabi, was introduced in 2007. It wasn’t widely celebrated, nor can you find much in the way of public opinion shunning or praising her inclusion: she was just a new character, one who happened to wear a hijab.

Whether “chronically online” or “digitally detoxed,” we are hyperaware of how representation is used and misused, whether it’s present or absent, forced or natural. It’s undoubtedly true that the reception of Shabnam’s inclusion on a British cultural staple would be worlds different between 2007 and 2025. Whether tabloids or tweets, today, any and all non-normative representation is now viewed through an inaccurate, magnified lens, inadvertently isolating demographics from their fictional counterparts.

When Shabnam first debuted in July 2007, there was minimal to limited dissatisfaction with the character, played by Zahra Ahmadi. The casting change in 2014 to actor Rakhee Thakrar coincided with a change in the character’s storyline, bringing in harsher themes of stillbirth, arranged marriage, and cultural alienation. EastEnders was accused of racial discrimination for the 2014 Shabnam having shown discomfort with her Pakistani father being in a relationship with a white woman. (There was no such outrage in 2008 when EastEnders clumsily included the suggestion that Shabnam and other modern Muslim women made for “great entertainment” but weren’t marriage material.) Identity politics was certainly not as divisive and inflammatory before the turn of the 2010s, which most likely contributed to the dramatic contrast in the reception of Shabnam’s story.

As the Shabnam of 2007 transitioned into the Shabnam of 2014, EastEnders simultaneously became a safe space for the hijabi viewer to seek allyship and representation from something so inherently British, and a scapegoat for the supposed eroding of British values due to the depiction of a realistic cultural clash. In 2007, outward Islamophobia was less popular in the average British city, but there also wasn’t a barrage of tweets heralding the introduction of every new character in EastEnders, potentially nudging online verbal discrimination toward the edge of real-life racism. Much has changed since then.

A soap opera like EastEnders can get away with this fleeting controversy (fleeting because it accrued less than a hundred broadcasting complaints) because of its serial nature. A new plot point will come in, a new family will take focus, a new shock twist will dominate the entertainment headlines of the Daily Mail instead. Whether in 2007, 2014, or 2025, it’s clear that the haven of the TV show provides the Disney+ writers, the Marvel storyliners, and streaming researchers of our favorite serials with the opportunity to dip their toes into the ever-muddying waters of media’s diversification.

There is a wealth of hijabi stories to be told. The storytellers just need the money to give them a chance.

Of course, the American obsession with politicizing Muslims in an unhealthily high number of thriller-action narratives has contributed to the tiptoeing around creating hijabi characters. Still, the American soap opera has fallen victim to the Shabnam effect: the performative backlash that comes with modern-day representation. As modern politics started to once again focus on the rights of Muslim women, the everyday use of the headscarf, and restricting religious freedoms, responses to images of the hijab on TV became more pointed.

If you’re a die-hard Grey’s Anatomy fan, you’ll remember the iconic scene with Dr. Qadri, the first hijabi doctor on the show. During the 13th season in 2018, she used her hijab as a tourniquet for a patient in an emergency. Nearly 10 years after Shabnam in EastEnders, a decade after Twitter’s launch, and more than half a decade after the first modern European hijab ban in Belgium, Dr. Qadri’s character and removal of the hijab was a hot topic, much more dissected than Shabnam ever was. Grey’s Anatomy and EastEnders couldn’t be more different, and their initial hijabi characters came at very different times in the cultural zeitgeist, but there’s a curious similarity between the reception of 2014’s Shabnam and that of 2018’s Dr. Qadri.

After all, 2018 was far from perfect. By then, the “Social Justice Warrior” abbreviation had made its way out of right-wing forums and into the international Twittersphere, which opened up more avenues than ever before to foster division. Even so, the reception of Dr. Qadri’s religious “sacrifice,” as it was deemed, was overwhelmingly positive. The American viewer had started to wake up, as overplayed terrorist plots from shows like Homeland were finally being reprimanded for their constant barrage of Islamophobic tropes. Tweets praising Dr. Qadri’s declaration of Islam as a religion of kindness and sacrifice—as a reason for her impulsive, yet thoughtful removal of the hijab—were well received. Indeed, they felt like a quick but simple way to combat unsavory online discussions around hijabi women that have extended long past the 2010s.

Whether it was British or American writers weaving the hijab into their subplots, both EastEnders and Grey’s Anatomy were household staples, making it categorically impressive that these predominantly white shows changed with the times. Of course, as the breadth of online forums and digital engagement has increased, so has the variety of views on the merging of 2000s TV cultural mainstays and the rightful contemporary surge in more inclusive fiction.

It seems, then, that there has occurred a dedicated increase of viewers paying closer attention to diversity on screen. Yet film financiers and their CEO counterparts still don’t seem tempted to pick up on TV’s successes and translate them into film.

I’m sure there are deeper, more intricate explanations for the systemic exclusions of hijabis in films that aren’t common knowledge to average content consumers like me. However, those explanations don’t and won’t affect my belief that films could and should represent us better. It’s certainly true that TV doesn’t always get it right: there’s room for debate on whether Nadia from Netflix’s Elite was ever a good decision to begin with and whether the streamer learned from the backlash to her character’s storyline, and similarly, there are nuances to the differences between the Muslim female representation in Ramy Youssef’s work on the A24 comedy Mo and in his self-titled writing that are worth looking at. This raises the question: If even a Muslim man, so optimally aligned to create a show instigating change, can’t get the hijabi representation right 100 percent of the time, how can we expect a predominantly white board of executives to come anywhere close?

This is why it seems hopeless to expect better representation on the big screen, at least, if Muslim women aren’t first allowed to take charge and tell their own stories. In turn, this succinctly explains why the TV series is a much more hospitable medium for the marginalized narratives to thrive: these spaces are actively created.

Once again, the Google search holds all: If you Google “Muslim film fund,” you’re supplied with links to small-budget, hyperspecific funding opportunities that haven’t realized any major projects. Google “Muslim TV fund” instead, and the omnipresent Gemini AI overview will show you a list of funded initiatives that capitalize on the organic Muslim narrative, supporting and spotlighting the hijabis carrying these tales along the way.

While you’re Googling, search for the film Rocks. Independently funded and created, made by a white woman with the right intentions, featuring a locally casted group of young Black girls, the film features one of the UK’s strongest examples of how a hijabi character doesn’t need to be defined by her religion. Representation does not have to be obvious, violent, oppressive, or belittling, all of which Rocks avoids. Watch it and realize that there is a wealth of hijabi stories to be told. The storytellers just need the money to give them a chance. 

Featured image: Juliette Motamed, Anjana Vasan, Faith Omole, Sarah Kameela Impey, and Lucie Shorthouse in We Are Lady Parts (2021). IMDb