“These are for girls only”: Experience, Authority, and the Practice of Naṣīḥa in Online Contexts

When the “these are for girls only” meme went viral on TikTok in 2021, many Muslim women in North America used the meme to create content that comically addresses the commentary they receive about their Islamic practice and the boundaries they’ve established around it. This paper focuses on the concept of naṣīḥa, understood to be a discursive mode of communal regulation in accordance with constructed ideals, in digital contexts. It examines several TikTok videos in which Muslim women address their audience about who is or is not authorized to offer social commentary on their Islamic practice on the basis of shared experience. I explore these videos as sites of contestation surrounding authority, arguing that these women use their videos to counter hegemonic conceptions of who has the authority to determine proper practice. How might focusing on the concept of naṣīḥa, or social commentary, complicate scholarly understandings of top-down models of Islamic authority? This paper attempts to address this question.