Have you seen the new Arab emojis?

Courtesy Halla Walla app

Score another one for #womenintech. Two Dubai-based entrepreneurs have set out to show the world that there’s more to the Middle East than, well, the usual cliches associated with the region. Cue the launch of Halla Walla, a new collection of emojis typifying life in the Gulf, or as it’s known locally, the Khaleej.

“We wanted to capture how diverse our society is; we believe it is important to them [for us] to show the rest of the world a side of Arab culture that often gets misrepresented and misunderstood,” said co-founder Yasmine Rasool, and added that she often encounters the word ‘conservative’ in descriptions of the Arab world.

“From Saudi Arabia to Qatar to Kuwait to Bahrain, there are all kinds of differences. This region might be small, but we’ve got bold personalities,” she continued. She and her friend Eriko Varkey realised that the best way to show the world the lighter side of Arabian culture was through an app.

The result is Halla Walla, which translates as “what’s up?” in the Gulf dialect. It’s a collection of 200 ideograms playfully expressing everything from ‘shway shway’ to performing raqs sha’ar, the traditional hair dance. Food, culture and phrases from the region all find a place: there’s a shawarma roll, a belly dancer, a flying slipper, text bubbles with words such as ‘mabrook’ (congratulations), ‘inshallah’ (God willing) and ‘habibi’ (beloved), and what is not an uncommon sight for the region’s residents, a pet tiger in a car. 

In the span of three months, the Halla Walla app has clocked nearly 10,000 downloads across iOS and Android. It is available in Arabic and English. A separate sticker pack is available for Apple’s iMessage, and a new pack is to be released every month.

Courtesy Halla Walla app

CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

Rasool grew up in Bahrain, so many of the emojis come from the fertile ground of her childhood memories, such as Chips Oman, chilli-flavoured potato crisps that are layered into sandwiches, rolled into flatbreads or eaten on their own. “With the ‘shway shway’ image you get the ability to show an array of emotions. The exact translation is ‘wait, wait’; it can be used for any occasion. Everything will happen in good time.”

Courtesy Halla Walla app

Rasool and Varkey often had to take their own advice during development. With a designer based in New York and the friends themselves travelling between Los Angeles, London and Dubai, the app was the result of “endless Skype calls” and “plenty of insanity.”

Halla Walla isn’t the first Islamic-themed set of emojis, nor the first to cater to Arabs. Since Oxford Dictionaries first listed the word in 2015, the region’s flags have sat alongside religious emojis, from Apple at first, and later WhatsApp and Google’s Android. The Kaaba, a mosque, a star and crescent and the misbaha are all available now.

Courtesy Halla Walla app

But that wasn’t good enough for a young Saudi-born girl living in Berlin. Last year, 15-year-old Rayouf Alhumeidi successfully petitioned Unicode, the Japanese consortium that creates new emojis, for one featuring a girl in a hijab. It will be available as part of a new set later this year. “The addition of the hijab emoji will prove to be a step forward in tolerance and diversity,” she wrote in her formal application.

Rasool and Varkey are driven by many of the same values. “I’m from an open-minded Muslim family, but many people do not understand how that is possible,” she said. “There are 1 billion Muslims in the world. To have the perception that all of them are the same in terms of their conservatism is a generalisation, and one that is incorrect. Every culture and religion has many different facets to it, and the under-represented facet of Muslims that are tolerant of other cultures, open-minded in their approach to life, is one that we wanted to highlight through Halla Walla.”

© MySalaam.com 2017 All rights reserved