Thursday September 5, 2024
by Natasha Delion
Miss Minnesota USA 2024 and Miss World Somalia 2023 want to inspire other young women to see themselves in the fashion and beauty industries.
Miss World Somalia 2023, Bahja Mohamoud, and Miss Minnesota USA 2024, Muna Ali, hope to break stereotypes about beauty pageants and bring Somali representation to the industry.
Bahja has held the title of Miss World Somalia since 2022 while Muna began her reign as Miss Minnesota USA in June. Both aim to inspire younger generations by being the representation for young Somali girls. They are both first-generation college students pursuing a career in the health care industry.
“Being a Somali American woman living in Minnesota, I know there’s a lot of young women who want to try something different but there’s no representation and nobody who’s breaking these barriers,” Muna said. “I want to be able to be that person not only for the Somali community but people who feel as if they have a dream that they want to accomplish and they feel like they can’t reach it or they want to give up.”
Muna, 27, competed in Miss Minnesota USA four times before being the first Somali woman to be crowned as Miss Minnesota. She later competed in Miss USA on August 4 in Los Angeles. The Edina resident didn’t win Miss USA but said since she reached her goal of being Miss Minnesota and Miss USA would be her last pageant.
Now that she holds the title of Miss Minnesota USA, she discussed how she got into pageantry, charity work and what’s next for her now that she won.
Muna Ali
What was your upbringing like?
A: I moved to America as an immigrant and when I moved here I didn’t speak any English. My family had a hard upbringing. My mother was a single mother and I have two younger sisters. I’m proud to be able to say I’m a first-generation college student. My younger sisters just got their master’s, so they’re following in my footsteps. I’m the first in my family ever to start a business and the first in my family to have done a lot of different things, so I’m proud to be paving the way not only for my family, but other people that are looking at my journey and it’s giving them hope that the American dream is possible and all your wildest dreams are possible.
What made you interested in beauty pageants?
A: I’ve always loved modeling, glitz and glam and pageantry. I didn’t know anyone who was involved in pageantry, so I was taking a big step and trying something new. I was excited to do so because I was able to combine my passions of volunteering and doing community service while having a platform where you can advocate for things while including the glitz and the glam, so it was like the perfect thing for me and I immediately fell in love with it.
You own two home health care companies, how and why did you start those?
A: I graduated with my bachelor’s in pre-med and have a year left to complete my master’s and plan to finish it when I have more time. I have always been interested in the health care field, so once I graduated my goal was to go to school to become a physician assistant. There was a gap in between with COVID-19, so I paused with that. It ended up being the best thing because I was able to take a leap of faith in the entrepreneurial world and become a business owner and that’s something that I completely fell in love with. My mother and I wanted to do a home care business and I already had a background in health care, so it was perfect. On my own, I did a sea moss business, which is health, wellness and herbal medicine. I’ve always been an advocate for taking herbal medication versus over-the-counter medication, so that was very important to me.
What does it mean to you to be the first Somali-American woman crowned as Miss Minnesota?
A: It is a really big deal to me. It’s something that I worked hard for. I’m not only the first Somali Miss Minnesota, I’m the first Somali woman to have competed on the Miss USA stage, which was an amazing experience, and the first Black woman to win Miss Minnesota in over 15 years. Having that representation and people being able to look at that and say ‘Oh wow. She did it. I’m able to do it too.’ is important to me.
What’s next for you in the beauty pageant industry?
A: I think this is my last pageant. I’ve reached my goal of wanting to be Miss Minnesota and competing in Miss USA, but I’ll continue to do other things around it. As much as I love pageantry, I see it as a stepping stool to my next ventures in life. I do a lot of work in Haiti. I’ve been working with a nonprofit organization since 2018 where we work with orphans and I’ve been involved in a lot of other community service activities before pageantry was even a thing for me. So being able to now have that platform to talk about these things that I care about is important. I want to continue to work with those programs on a bigger scale and be able to bring more attention to them. The things that I’m passionate about other people may not necessarily be passionate about, but there is something every single person connects with on their own. I want to make volunteering, community service and outreach programs cool again. I want people to want to be a part of these things in their free time, not only because they’re helping other people but also because of what it does for themselves.
Bahja Mohamoud
Bahja said Halima Aden, the first woman to wear a hijab in the Miss Minnesota USA 2016 pageant, taught her a lot about standing up for herself and maintaining her boundaries as a Muslim woman in the fashion and pageant industry.
While being a hijabi in the fashion industry can be challenging, Bahja said she maintains her culture while modeling by using her clothes or having a touch of blue and white, the colors of the Somali flag.
What was your upbringing like?
A: I grew up in London. I had an aunt and uncle who were very into the fashion industry. I was like 5 years old watching “America’s Next Top Model.” I also had another aunt who when I was super young and anytime I wanted to wear something crazy and my grandma and mom would say no, she would buy it for me secretly. She always inspired me to express myself via clothing. That inspired me to make my own clothes. When I was going to Miss World I designed every single outfit that I wore, I was my own stylist. I had the option of having a stylist but because of that faith I was taught to have in myself and in expressing myself and choosing what I feel is right, I was confident. Also growing up and picking my own outfits, it grew into fashion being something I’ve always loved.
How did you become interested in beauty pageants?
A: I never thought I’d do pageants. I didn’t care about beauty pageants. I was always taught to value myself for the kind of person I am. The way I was taught beauty wasn’t in a superficial way, I was always taught to like you have to be beautiful in every aspect as in you’re a good person, have a good heart, care about others and all those things together make that including your fashion sense. The way you present yourself makes an impact. I never saw a hijabi on any of these fashion shows, the very first one I saw was Halima Aden who ended up becoming a close friend of mine. In the pageant world and in many different sectors and industries I’m involved in just so many girls would come up to me like ‘I’ve never seen someone that looks like me’ and I knew how it felt to be that girl to not have that person and if there was it was like one, maybe two at most. I had an upbringing where I’d say I wanted to see myself in these places, but I don’t, and my family said, ‘Why don’t you? You can do it.’ Sometimes you have to be a little bold and put yourself out there and you never know who you’ll inspire. That’s something I always believed in.
How did you get involved in financial and business endeavors?
A: My parents have been in business for about 30 years, so that’s actually what inspired me to start studying business. They taught me how to negotiate things, how to hire people, the importance of being a good leader and so many other things that I learned firsthand with them in business. I feel like that gave me such a leg up in business and the field. I already had so much business knowledge where I would be at community events and it started as me being a speaker at events and people would approach me like ‘Hey, you know what you’re talking about and we would love to work with you’ or ‘We would love to hire you’ and that’s how people like Cryptic Investing hit me up. I’m still currently their head of finance in business development. I was like it’s crazy how I did not know much and now here I am teaching fintech and finance to young kids and it’s just been incredible being able to pass on that knowledge that I have both from what I learned in school or experienced.
Could you talk about your charity work?
A: We’re partnered with an organization called Hello Afi, and Afi means health in Somali, so it’s basically like hello healing or hello health. They have a team of doctors and nurses who work pro bono back home. So they usually pay their doctors, but we would cover that feed and that’s where the charity aspect comes in. If you really need an appointment or there’s a mom who needs prenatal care and maybe she has something that’s going on in her body where she needs immediate help, that’s the kind of person who would benefit from our services. When we get to stage two, it would be having enough money raised for the charity to be able to provide ambulances or emergency airlifts to the nearest emergency hospital, which is near a whole different country. The final stage would include bringing the doctors in person, going out to these villages and doing health days. Scheduling it once every couple of months like vaccine days or just community check-up visits because some of these teams don’t even know that the services are available and some of them aren’t able to come into the city to at least go get care.
Trying to reduce the barriers one by one is our goal and being able to continue to provide free and reduced [cost] health care.
What’s next for you in the beauty pageant industry?
A: I will be happy to be able to pass that sash onto someone else and to guide the next woman who I hope will improve our community, give back and follow in the footsteps of not just me but the girls before us and be able to be that representation for the community. I hope to represent Somalia in other pageants. I want to compete for the next year or two and for sure Miss Minnesota next year. I would love to do Miss Universe, but we don’t have a franchise. Somalia is limited, we don’t have franchises for many pageants, so the highest we have right now is Miss World. I hope to be able to have a chance to represent Somalia at least once more internationally. I hope this happens in Miss Universe, but if not, then I do hope that by the time we get that franchise, there is an amazing Somali woman we pick to uphold that flag and represent us.
