Jamad Fiin's Social Influence
Photo: Jamad Fiin / Source: Instagram
By: Arab America Contributing Writer / Carrie Stewart
Jamand Fiin is a basketball player at Emmanuel College in Boston with a huge social media following (over a million on Instagram) and she is using her platform for good! She posts pictures and videos of herself playing basketball in a hijab in observance of her Muslim faith. Many of her followers are a part of the Somali and/or Muslim community. Even the rapper Drake followers her!
She is currently one class away from finishing up her MBA. “A member of the Somali national team, she holds on to a dream of playing professionally, maybe in Sweden or Turkey, even though making content full time — including on TikTok, where she has another two million followers, and YouTube — would be far more lucrative.”
Due to her background, she has recently been focusing on hosting camps and events for Somali and Muslim girls. She has a new nonprofit, Jamad Basketball Camps. Her last camp brought in 75 girls from the Boston Area and they all got sneakers from Puma who sponsored the event!
According to nytimes.com, “before this — before the fame, before the camps, before Drake — Fiin had to fight to play the game. Other parents in the Boston Somali community used to call her mother and ask why her daughter was playing sports and running with boys. It was not until the eighth grade that her mother let her play on a team.”
She even has her own website and on it, her bio about herself reads, “My name is Jamad Fiin and I am currently a Muslim college basketball player. I started basketball at a young age and had to push myself to get better every single day. When I grew up, I had no one I could look up to or even ask for advice on the challenges of being a Muslim girl and playing basketball, so I had to do everything myself. I decided to continue playing basketball while wearing my headscarf because I did not want to give up on something I love.
It was a very tough journey and I refuse to let the younger girls go through the struggles I went through.
This is why I started Jamad Basketball Camps because I wanted young girls growing up to know that they should always stay true to themselves and never let society tell them that they can’t achieve something because they dress differently because, at the end of the day, I want people to judge them based on their skills rather than their looks and how they dress.
I live in Boston and I am the senior captain for Emmanuel College. I am also the captain of the Somalia Women’s National Basketball team and have participated in FIBA tournaments in Uganda and Dubai. Since I started my journey many young girls have told me how they were inspired by my camps and videos and that when they saw that I played with my headscarf, they were able to show their parents that there was someone who looked like them who could both play sports and be a Muslim girl. I want girls around the World to know that their religion or culture should not stop them from doing something that they love to do.”
According to NBC Boston, she said “I just want people to, if they see me with my scarf, just know that I’m a Muslim woman, I play basketball; I can do the same things that other women can do,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if I’m Muslim or not. We have the same rights that other people do.”
Below are some of her social media posts – if you know anyone who might be interested in her camps, tell them to check her out!
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