When Nadia Rahman posted a video of herself zip-lining through the rainforests of Costa Rica in a hijab, the comments divided predictably. Some were delighted — “YES queen!” Others were confused. A surprising number were simply surprised, as though the combination of Muslim, woman, and adventure travel was a logical contradiction rather than, as Nadia herself would put it, a Tuesday.

Nadia is part of a generation of Muslim women who travel — not despite their faith but as an extension of it, or simply alongside it, as one facet of a complex identity that refuses reduction. They are mountaineers and backpackers, luxury travellers and budget warriors, women who travel for spiritual purposes and women who travel because they want to eat tacos in Mexico City and see the Northern Lights and understand the world at 1:1 scale.

The assumption that Muslim women don’t travel, or can’t travel, or travel only under male supervision, is statistically false and ideologically revealing. It reveals less about Muslim women than about the cultures making the assumption.

What the Research Actually Shows

The global halal travel market — which encompasses Muslim travellers of all genders — was valued at approximately $220 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $410 billion by 2030, according to the State of the Global Islamic Economy report. Muslim women represent a significant and growing portion of this market.

A 2022 report by Mastercard-CrescentRating on Muslim travel found that Muslim women travellers are among the most active researchers and planners in the market — spending more time on destination research, more likely to share travel content online, and increasingly likely to travel as solo or group-of-women rather than family-only configurations.

The stereotype of the non-travelling Muslim woman is not only statistically inaccurate. It is historically inaccurate. Islamic tradition has always included travel as a positive value — the concept of rihla, scholarly journey, is fundamental to Islamic intellectual history. Ibn Battuta’s 14th-century journeys covered 120,000 kilometres across 40 modern countries. His contemporary, Ibn Jubayr, preceded him. The tradition of travel for knowledge, for pilgrimage, for trade, is woven through Muslim history. Women were part of this. Fatima al-Fihri, who founded the world’s first university in Fez in 859 CE, came from a family of educated travellers.

Travelling With Faith

For many Muslim women travellers, faith is not a constraint on travel — it is a framework that makes travel richer.

“When I travel, I’m always looking for the mosque first,” says Amira, a 29-year-old architect from London who has solo-travelled through Japan, Colombia, and Morocco. “Not because I can’t manage without it, but because the mosque is where I find the local Muslim community, which is the fastest way to understand a place. I’ve had the most extraordinary meals, the most honest conversations, through connections I made at mosques. It’s a built-in network.”

Finding halal food, prayer times, and spaces for modest dress are practical considerations that Muslim women travellers navigate with varying degrees of importance, depending on their own practice. Apps like HalalTrip, Muslim Pro, and Halal Navi have transformed this — prayer times calculated to the minute anywhere in the world, halal restaurant directories, mosque finders, Ramadan schedule adjustments. The infrastructure of Muslim travel has never been better.

Some Muslim women find travel during Ramadan particularly meaningful. “Ramadan in Marrakech is unlike anything else,” writes Hana Tajima, the designer and travel essayist. “The entire city breathes differently. You’re fasting alongside people who’ve been fasting in that city for centuries.” Others prefer to avoid travel during Ramadan entirely, reserving the month for home community. Both choices reflect the same basic truth: Muslim practice is not monolithic, and neither is how Muslim women incorporate travel into their faith lives.

The Hijab on the Road

The experience of travelling in hijab varies so dramatically by destination that generalisation is impossible. In Istanbul, a woman in hijab is invisible — ordinary, unremarkable, one of millions. In Tokyo, she may attract polite curiosity. In parts of rural France, she may encounter the particular European hostility that has been well-documented. In New York, she is one version of New York’s endless variety.

“I’ve had the most welcoming experiences in places people warned me about and the most uncomfortable experiences in places I expected to feel fine,” says Fatima, a 34-year-old doctor from Birmingham who has travelled through 60 countries. “The assumptions cut both ways. Non-Muslim Westerners assume certain Muslim-majority countries will be hostile to a hijabi Western woman. Often the opposite is true.”

Research on this is limited but suggestive. A 2021 study from the University of Edinburgh on discrimination experiences of hijab-wearing women travellers found that experiences of overt hostility were more common in Western European countries — particularly France, Belgium, and Austria — than in Muslim-majority countries, which is almost the inverse of what media coverage implies.

This doesn’t mean that all Muslim-majority countries are equally welcoming of all Muslim women. Saudi Arabia’s guardianship reforms have been significant but incomplete. Afghanistan under Taliban rule has eliminated women’s public life entirely. Iran’s compulsory hijab laws affect women’s travel in the opposite direction — imposing rather than accommodating. The picture is complicated, and Muslim women travellers navigate it with the precision of people who know the difference between the media narrative and the lived reality.

The Countries Most Welcoming to Muslim Women Travellers

Based on reporting from Muslim women travel communities, Halal travel research organisations, and the Crescent Rating index, certain destinations consistently appear as welcoming across multiple dimensions:

Malaysia leads most quality-of-life indices for Muslim travellers. Excellent halal food infrastructure, prayer facilities in airports and malls, modest fashion options everywhere, and a Muslim-majority population that normalises every aspect of Islamic practice. Kuala Lumpur specifically has a thriving solo female travel community among Muslim women.

Morocco offers cultural depth, Islamic heritage, and extraordinary hospitality. Fez, Marrakech, Chefchaouen, and the Atlas Mountains each offer distinct experiences. A woman in hijab in Morocco is simply a woman.

Jordan has made significant investment in welcoming Muslim travellers and is consistently safe for solo female travellers across faith backgrounds. Petra at dawn is one of the great travel experiences on earth, and Wadi Rum rivals any landscape.

Japan is a counter-intuitive inclusion, but it appears consistently in Muslim women traveller accounts for specific reasons: the country’s culture of respect and non-interference means that a hijab-wearing woman is treated with the same meticulous courtesy as everyone else. Halal food is increasingly available in major cities. The experience of being treated as completely ordinary, rather than as a symbol or a curiosity, has a specific appeal.

Bosnia and Herzegovina offers a European destination with a significant Muslim history and community. Sarajevo’s mix of Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian architecture, its culture of coffee and conversation, its complex and hard-won peace, makes it one of the most compelling destinations in Europe.

Breaking the Second Stereotype

There is a second stereotype that Muslim women travellers navigate, distinct from the broader cultural assumption that they don’t travel at all. This one comes from within Muslim communities: the idea that solo travel is inappropriate, or that a woman travelling without a mahram (male guardian) is acting against Islamic principle.

The scholarly debate on this issue is genuine and contested. Traditional Hanafi and Shafi’i scholarship has historically required a mahram for distances beyond a certain threshold. But contemporary Islamic scholarship has substantially revised these requirements, noting that they were formulated in contexts of genuine physical danger for solo travellers — medieval roads were objectively dangerous — and that in the contemporary context of safe commercial travel, airlines, hotels with security, and phone communication, the underlying logic no longer applies.

Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the 20th century’s most influential Sunni scholars, held that Muslim women may travel without a mahram when safety is assured. A growing body of contemporary Islamic scholarship — including significant female Islamic scholars — supports a similarly contextual reading.

Muslim women travellers in 2026 are making their own decisions about this, as they make their own decisions about everything. Some travel with family, some with female friends, some alone. The common thread is that they are going.

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