Amani Al-Khatahtbeh

Amani Al-Khatahtbeh is an American author and tech entrepreneur. She is the founder and editor of MuslimGirl, an online magazine for Muslim women.
Al-Khatahtbeh grew up in New Jersey. Her family temporarily relocated to Jordan in 2005 to escape Islamophobia. She founded MuslimGirl in 2009 when she was 17 and a senior in high school. With friends from her mosque, al-Khatahtbeh published blogs on the site. Following high school, she attended Rutgers University, graduating in 2014. She then worked for a non-profit based in Washington, D.C. before moving to New York and briefly working for a major media organization.
In the beginning of 2015, MuslimGirl developed a volunteer staff and saw a large increase its readership. The site's traffic grew 90% and logged 100 million hits that year.
Following the shooting of Laquan McDonald, Al-Khatahtbeh did live coverage of some of the protests in Chicago. She gave a sermon at the Women's Mosque of America in Los Angeles. Her sermon focused on the metaphor of "the pit" from the film The Dark Knight Rises. She compared the pit to the experience of Muslim Americans after 9/11.
Al-Khatahtbeh rang the opening bell for the NASDAQ stock exchange on January 25, 2016.
In 2016, she partnered with Teen Vogue for a web series that explored issues of concern to young Muslim women.
Her book, MuslimGirl: A Coming of Age, was released in October 2016.