In October of 2016, Noor Tagouri posed for Playboy magazine, as hundreds of women have before her. The controversy? She is a hijabi.

Noor Tagouri, the first hijab-wearing woman to ever appear in Playboy Magazine

Playboy magazine, an institution notorious for the objectification of women’s bodies over the past sixty years, has recently made efforts towards being “progressive.” In 2015, the publication announced that they will no longer be including full nudity in the magazine (although of course, this decision has since been reversed). And the October 2016 issue was released as a special “Renegades” issue, advertised as a celebration of “eight unconventional men and women who aren’t afraid to break the rules.”

One of these eight unconventional men and women was Noor Tagouri. Tagouri is a Libyan American journalist who became a social media icon after a photo of her at the ABC 7 newsdesk in 2012 went viral. The photo that garnered her internet fame was smartly captioned “the first hijab wearing news anchor on American television.” In her Playboy spread, Tagouri posed fully clothed and veiled — in jeans, a leather jacket, and converse. In the article attached to her photo shoot, Playboy writes, “as a badass activist with a passion for demanding change and asking the right questions, accompanied by beauty-ad-campaign looks, Tagouri forces us to ask ourselves why we have such a hard time wrapping our minds around a young woman who consciously covers her head and won’t take no for an answer.”

Tagouri snaps a photo at ABC 7 News, writing “the first hijab wearing news anchor on American television”

However, as to be expected, the reactions to Tagouri’s participation in the publication have certainly been mixed. Many young women across social media sites have lept to celebrate her bravery and her ability to stand by her values in spaces of female objectification. These tweets, trending with #letnoorshine, quickly sent Tagroui’s story to viral levels. 

But at the same time, many female activists — Muslim or not — have bemoaned Tagouri’s photo spread, arguing that this is problematic for a number of ways, from exhibiting un-Islamic values, to supporting Playboy‘s misogynistic institution, to simply being the wrong manner through which to pursue hijabi representation. Nishaat Ismail, another Muslim American activist and journalism, published such an article protesting Tagouri’s photoshoot. She writes, “Do we really need to go down the route of associating with an institution based on the objectification of women in the name of challenging perceptions and celebrating female empowerment? Is this really how we reclaim our own narrative?” And some members of the Muslim community were critical to the extent of verging on hateful. In opposition to the supportive #letnoorshine, another trending tag at the time was #hoejabi.

I cannot help but be somewhat reminded of our recent discussion of Aliaa Elmahdy. However the differences are stark. These photos are published in a world famous, controversial magazine. Elmahdy did pose nude, whereas Tagouri is entirely covered in her photographs. What do we, as a class, think?

Furthermore: do we really have the right to think anything about what another woman chooses to do with her body…?

Food for thought. #LetNoorShine