Why Amani Al-Khatahtbeh created Muslim Women's Day

Now, eight years later, MuslimGirl has tens of thousands of followers across its social networks. 1.7 million people visited the website over the last year, according to Al-Khatahtbeh.

On March 27, 2017, MuslimGirl launched the first official Muslim Women's Day, to celebrate Muslim women and amplify their voices.

This year it's happening again. The theme is "Muslim women talk back to violence."

CNN spoke with Brooklyn-based Al-Khatahtbeh, now 25, about the idea behind Muslim Women's Day, and how the narrative around Muslim women is changing.

Amani Al-Khatahtbeh: "Growing up [in the United States], by the time I was leaving elementary school, we were already embroiled in two wars in the Middle East. And even today, we elected a president largely based on assumptions of the Muslim community. A lot of these policies impacting Muslims worldwide are largely based on a lot of misinformation.

One of the reasons why MuslimGirl became such a necessary space is, first of all, to cultivate a presence for our voices in the media in the hope that ... it will make it more difficult for that misinformation to lead to those policies.

One thing I'm really proud of with MuslimGirl is that we have never attempted to cater to any specific outside audience... And in a very beautiful way, naturally, half of our audience became non-Muslim -- people outside of our religious background that started to come to Muslim Girl as a resource."

Al-Khatahtbeh: "We wanted to create a day where we just celebrate Muslim women... and engineer a new precedent for Muslim women's representation in mainstream media.

Muslim Women's Day is a call to action to... center Muslim women's voices for the day, to empower us, to flood the Internet with new, diverse, positive stories and Muslim women's voices, and basically just pass the mic."

Al-Khatahtbeh: "My favorite part about Muslim Women's Day last year was how it really afforded us an opportunity to change the culture around how we talk about Muslim women and how we cover their stories.

And this year's going to be even bigger. We have even more partners involved, more social media networks that are elevating these conversations on their platforms, more organizations that are tapping into this really pertinent conversation."

Al-Khatahtbeh: "Our theme for this year is 'Muslim women talk back to violence' so, whether it's gun violence or a #MeToo or #TimesUp movement, these are obviously themes that impact women from all backgrounds, across the board.

But this day is specifically to center Muslim women's voices that often get drowned out of the conversation."

Al-Khatahtbeh: "When we moved to Jordan that was a very transformative moment for me, because that revealed to me just how much of a contrast there was between how reality was in the Middle East, this vastly misunderstood region, and how it was being portrayed in Western media.

And while I was there I became acquainted with this religion of Islam from a land in which it is practiced ... I really just fell in love with it.

I decided to start wearing the hijab on my own because I wanted that to be my public defiance of Islamophobia and my personal reclamation of my identity."

Al-Khatahtbeh: "I think I've become very blatantly aware of the certain privileges... that I have that other individuals don't, that other Muslim women in other parts of the world might not necessarily have access to.

And so it motivates this feeling of needing to use those privileges and those resources... to enact change and to make those things accessible to more people around the world.

We don't try to speak on behalf of women in other parts of the world. We try to empower those voices. You know, a lot of times MuslimGirl gets touted as being a voice for the voiceless. But our philosophy is that nobody is voiceless, they're just voices that are more systematically silenced than others. And if we truly want to be empowering for women, we need to empower those women to use those voices and speak up to their own experiences."

Al-Khatahtbeh: "I think people are definitely more interested ... Especially right now where people do care more about women's empowerment and gender equality. I think it's so important for us to be included in that conversation and to be able to ... expand the definition of what liberation means for different women."

Al-Khatahtbeh: "One thing that we launched last year is our Getty Images partnership and that's something that I take great pride in. It's crazy to imagine how something as simple as the availability of visual imagery can impact the way that we view an entire group of people, especially in today's digital age.

So we created this Getty Images collection of stock photos of Muslim women that are shot by Muslim women, led by Muslim women.

We're a millennial startup, so the digital environment is definitely our arena. That's our battlefield, that's what we're good at. And so we're trying to find innovative ways to really just completely deconstruct what people expect and break out of this box of what Muslim women look like or how they're supposed to sound."