Hawzah News Agency - (New York - US) - Today she travels the world, attends a red-carpet movie premiere and sits on panels with astronauts, former presidents and feminist icons.

But in the years after 9/11, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh was just a New Jersey teenager, writing a blog from her bedroom. She used the blog to connect with other young Muslim girls and defy stereotypes. At the time, the only reflections of herself in the news seemed to be men in orange jumpsuits who looked like her father and women who seemed silent and oppressed, she said.

"Being bombarded with those headlines growing up and never feeling represented by them, I did what any millennial would do, which was to turn to social media," Al-Khatahtbeh said. "I decided to put my own place out there and create that space for us to talk back."

A decade later, her MuslimGirl.com site is an online magazine with a global audience writing about how it feels to be the only woman in a hijab at a kickboxing class, offering beauty tips and covering stories of teenagers fighting Islamophobia. Last year, the domain that she bought for $7 had more than 2 million hits.

The site "is the biggest English-language online platform for Muslim women voices," the tech entrepreneur, now 27, said at her family´s video game store in New Jersey. "Our goal is to reclaim our narrative."

She was 9 when the airliners struck the World Trade Center towers, and she remembers the warning of her Jordanian immigrant father: "They´re going to blame us."

In the aftermath, she was bullied. People threw eggs at her home and slashed her mother´s tires. Her family faced such a backlash that her father temporarily relocated them to Jordan.

While she is proud of being "born and raised a Jersey girl," it was only in Jordan that she began to take pride in her roots. She learned Arabic and appreciated Middle Eastern food and hospitality. When she returned to the U.S., she began to wear a headscarf as an act of defiance against a rising anti-Muslim tide.

"I lost a lot of friends, people started treating me differently," she said. But she also became an ambassador for her faith. Students, even teachers, stopped her in school and asked about the Quran and Islam.

"I had to learn as much as I possibly could about my own religion, the ins and outs of it, what Islamophobes were saying about it, so that I could understand how to respond," she said.