Opinions

We Need to Ban the Word ‘Habibi’ (Until Further Notice)

BYYassine Hariss

September 8, 2026

May Allah forgive the person who taught non-Arabs the word habibi. It is quite ironic that for a language widely considered one of the richest in the world, Arabic seems to have only one word worth exporting. Slapped on T-shirts, printed on tote bags, plastered on restaurant walls, squeezed into song titles, and turned into enough neon signs to light up the entire planet (twice), habibi has somehow become the shorthand for an entire culture and region that’s, quite frankly, far too rich and diverse to be summed up in just six letters.

Don’t get us wrong, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the word itself. Habibi—which roughly translates to “my love” or “my dear”—can communicate everything from genuine affection to sarcasm depending on how it’s used. However, its regular use in everyday situations gave way to overexposure, and with that, much of the charm that made the word so special in the first place has become diluted by its constant repetition.

There is a fairly obvious reason for its popularity. For many people outside the region, the term of endearment is one of the first words they can properly grasp. It is relatively easy to pronounce, useful in more situations than one, and requires very little explanation compared to much of the language. And truth be told, there’s something rather nice about that. Languages have always evolved across borders, and seeing a word so familiar to us find a home in other people’s vocabulary isn’t something we should necessarily frown upon. If anything, its popularity speaks to just how useful and incredibly adaptable the expression is.

Things become more complicated when the handful of references outsiders recognize most become the same ones through which an entire region is expected to make itself understood. This creates the uneasy sense that we have learned to present ourselves through a lens that’s almost been imposed on us.

The question of who gets to shape how we see ourselves has occupied postcolonial thinkers for decades, perhaps most notably Frantz Fanon. In Black Skin, White Masks, the Martinican philosopher and psychiatrist examined how colonialism does more than impose an image of the colonized from the outside; over time, that image can begin to interfere with their own sense of self. Describing what he called a “historico-racial schema,” Fanon wrote that the ideas through which he was expected to understand himself had been supplied “by the other, the white man,” who had “woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories.” And continuing that logic, added many that don’t necessarily pertain, or at least not entirely, to him.

The stakes here are obviously nowhere near those Fanon was writing about, but there is an echo of that dynamic in the way our region’s culture is packaged today. Of course, a tote bag with habibi written on it isn’t an instrument of colonial oppression. But the tendency to repeatedly reach for the same handful of references outsiders already—and almost exclusively—associate with us does reflect a broader pattern of behavior: we tend to present ourselves through what we know will be immediately recognizable by others (read: by the West).

If you need any indication of just how far our habibi obsession has gone, the word has now inspired a term for a wider phenomenon: “habibification.” In a piece for Dazed MENA, writer Mai El Mokadem uses the term to examine the growing appetite for Arab aesthetics within house music, where everything from old-school vocals and oud loops to desert imagery is increasingly borrowed and repackaged for global audiences. Pointing to Peggy Gou, who once released limited-edition merchandise prominently featuring the word habibi, she draws attention to the ease with which elements of the region can be embraced while the realities of the people behind them remain at arm’s length. El Mokadem highlights Gou’s past performances in Israel, as well as her previous insistence that she would play anywhere people wanted to hear her music, regardless of the politics involved.

As she explains, and as has been the case for far too many years now, the West can appear keen on taking parts of our culture while remaining antagonistic towards the very people nurturing it. Shisha? Yes. Arabs? Muslim Ban. Hummus? Absolutely. Palestinians? It’s ‘complicated’. In fact, the dynamic at hand seems to affect other areas of the world too.Think of how popular rap music has become in the United States and how Black-Americans, the community largely responsible for creating it, continue to face discrimination and inequality in the country that now so enthusiastically consumes their culture.

“Wanting the aesthetics of a place without necessarily wanting everything that comes attached to them” is a sentence that sounds familiar. In Orientalism, Edward Said argued that the West’s understanding of the East had long been shaped by a recurring collection of images, ideas, and cultural references which, through repetition, came to feel almost inseparable from the places they supposedly were or represented. As he wrote, “the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West.”

Nearly five decades later, it is that last word, “vocabulary” that feels especially relevant. What are habibi, the oud, the desert imagery, and all the other references we repeatedly fall back on? The answer is: they’re a collection of signs through which this part of the world becomes immediately legible to Western eyes. The difference, maybe, is that we are increasingly fluent in that vocabulary ourselves. We know what the West expects the region to look and sound like, we know which references it likes and, whether consciously or otherwise, have become keen at catering to them. The result is a rather strange form of self-Orientalism in which we are no longer being reduced to by people outside as we are packaging ourselves through them too.

And it’s not just individuals taking part in it either. Countries across the region have realized that there’s something to gain from playing into this imagery, leaning pretty heavily into the whole desert, camels, and traditional dress aesthetic while selling themselves as a new travel destinations to the rest of the world. And you can see the logic. If that version of Arabness gets people on planes, brings money into the country, helps reduce an economy’s reliance on oil and, at the same time, gives its international image a bit of a makeover, why wouldn’t you run with it? For decades, Arab countries haven’t exactly been spoiled for choice when it comes to how they’re portrayed in the West. War, terrorism, extremism, and instability have shaped so much of the perceptions associated with the region that being reduced to dates, dunes, and men in thobes can almost feel like an upgrade.

From a wider angle, it seems as if Habibi is anything but an isolated case. Yallah has been milked in the same way, while fashion shoots seem perpetually drawn to l’balad, turning old shop-fronts, plastic chairs, fruit stalls, and battered taxis into backdrops whenever a little sprinkle of authenticity is needed in the name of “inclusivity.” Again, none of these references are inherently bad or wrong. They are inherently part of what makes the region we know it to be as. But there is something quite curious about how often we return to them while simultaneously congratulating ourselves on entering somewhat of a new cultural golden age.

Because for all the talk of a renaissance, so much of what we currently celebrate as fresh and distinctly ours seems to have been lifted wholesale from the generation before us. We wear what our parents wore, sample what they listened to, photograph the streets they grew up on, and revive the expressions they used long before any of us thought to print them on a T-shirt. The difference is that we have learned to package it all in a much nicer way, for better or worse.

So maybe, just maybe, we are not quite living through the new cultural moment we’d like to imagine. We may feel more liberated from the shackles of the Western gaze, but we are still, paradoxically, preoccupied by making ourselves validated, and even appeal, to it. Maybe we’re simply reliving much of what our parents already did, only more glorified, and still, in one way or another, seeking approval from the same places we insist we no longer need it from.

We Need to Ban the Word ‘Habibi’ (Until Further Notice)

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