‘Kodaikanal Won’t’ rapper Sofia Ashraf’s new video on Hijabis will make you smile

Tamil singer and rapper Sofia Ashraf is back with a hilarious portrayal of the different ways Muslim women carry hijab, the traditional head scarf.

Sofia Ashraf, Tamil singer and rapper of the ‘Kodaikanal Won’t’ fame is back with a hilarious portrayal of the different ways Muslim women carry hijab, the traditional head scarf.

Tamil singer and rapper Sofia Ashraf is back with a hilarious portrayal of the different ways Muslim women carry hijab, the traditional head scarf.(Screengrabs from Sofia Ashraf’s video)

In the video, Types Of Hijabis You Will Meet This Eid, Ashraf can be seen trying out the variations, and making witty comparisons between the different styles of hijab and disco balls, bank accounts, pin cushions, and more.

While for some, the hijab is “like your bank account number,” she says in the video, “it just won’t stay on your head”, for others it turns into a pin cushion, using “more pins than Google maps”. She also sympathises with those who find it difficult to hear things because their heads are wrapped in layers of fabric.

In the video, Ashraf walks a tight rope between being witty and the risk of offending religious sentiments. “I was constantly second-guessing my jokes,” she tells Huffington Post. “There are bits that I’ve mercilessly cut out to respect sentiments of Muslims. Despite that, we were prepared for some negative comments.”

A few people felt that the video was in bad taste and amounted to ridiculing the Muslim tradition, there were over a hundred others who related to the video, tagging each other and the variety they identified with.

Perhaps Ashraf could understand the sentiment attached to the hijab, because she was a hijabi too. Years ago, Ashraf was known as the ‘burqa rapper’. Clad in an all-black head cloak and headscarf, she rapped on stage about prejudices against Islam in a post 9/11-world.

This was before she decided to give the burqa up, and renounced Islam in 2010.

Denouncing religion wasn’t easy, she admitted in a 2015 interview to the Indian Express. “Earlier, a book told me what to do and what not to, what is right and what is not. Now, I had to devise my own rules,” she says.

She hogged the limelight again when she took on Dow Chemical’s handling of the Bhopal gas tragedy at a music festival in Chennai. The news of her performance landed her an opportunity to work with AR Rahman and record a song each in Bollywood movie Jab Tak Hai Jaan and Tamil movie Maryaan.