French Montana’s Album Cover Causes Uproar Over Muslim Representation

By: Marian Mohamed
Staff Writer

French Montana, one of the biggest names in the rap genre, has for the past couple of years gotten himself in hot water with his latest album cover release.

It started with a post created by Khaled Beydoun on Instagram calling out French Montana, a rapper, for objectifying Muslim women wearing the niqab on his new album cover. French Montana is sitting in the middle of the row of women wearing niqabs and red thigh high boots. Which other muslim women saw as Montana surrounded by strippers

A niqab is an Islamic form of clothing in which everything is covered including the head, neck and face except the eyes which are shown. Each of these women who are wearing the niqab is also wearing bright red, knee-length boots.

In Islam, it’s required by both men and women to display modesty through their clothing. Hijabs, niqabs, and burkas are the many forms of modest clothing for Muslim women around the world.

The main message for the niqab is about modesty, a Muslim women’s choice in deciding how much she wants to cover up. Yasmine Hussein and Mulki Mohamed wanted to share their opinions on the cover and the general issue of Muslim media representation.

Hussian was asked how she felt when seeing the album cover and this was her reply. “It made me confused almost in a sense where it’s like society has always built this almost factual oppression that doesn’t exist in Muslim women and tries to make them almost freeing when they do something against the religion.” I could understand how she felt when I first saw the album cover. It made me think even more about the media representation of Muslim women.

There is a problem with how little correct representation there is of Muslim women in media. Even though there are a growing number of Muslim women who are creating their narrative through modeling like Halima Aden. It was rare to see a Muslim woman proudly wearing the hijab as she modeled on the cover of Vogue.It wouldn’t be possible decades ago for a Muslim model to exist because of the fashion industry’s ideal image of beauty. If you were to go back to 2004, that ideal image of beauty is mostly western and doesn’t include the hijab in the fashion industry.

What is French Montana trying to do with this album cover? Is it meant to be a political statement or was it to primarily have people confused about what they’re seeing? Or was Montana just not thinking straight? Mohamed pointed out that seeing the album didn’t make her feel angry nor frustrated in any way. “It’s the way that the artist is expressing himself.”

People will never understand what he’s trying to say and all they can do is just consume it. Is it possible to discuss about the meaning between each other.

As Hussein described, “I guess it’s somewhat artistic and visually confusing as to like seeing a niqabi in red boots. But when I see him standing there just smoking and looking at them as though they’re prostitutes just being covered until they’re sold. That’s what I see.”

Hussein is referring to the video that French Montana posted of his album trailer. But, if Montana, who is also a Muslim, were to use his platform in representing the Muslim community then he should educate himself with people with the right information and message.

In order not to further fuel steryotypes about Muslim women, Montana should have more cautious with his album cover. It would have been in his best interest to cover less senstive subject matter and not cause such an uproar in his own commuinty.