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A man from Surrey who has created a new dating app for Muslims in B.C. called Salaam Swipe.
Khalil Jessa’s new app launched an app on Apple’s store and he already says t hat he got an amounts of positive feedback from Muslims eager to try it.
Khalil said “People have seen this and given me tremendous support because they know that for Muslims in particular it’s a lot more difficult to meet people within their communities, simply because we have more gender segregation,” .
He added “Each community is divided on ethnic lines as well as sectarian lines. Sectarian sounds like a dirty word but it’s really not. It just means Sunni or Shia …Those divisions, as well as gender divisions, makes it hard for people to meet each other serendipitously. We’re trying to mimic that serendipitous meeting through an app.”
The app allows people to swipe right if they like someone’s profile or swipe left if they don’t.
Users of Salaam Swipe can filter profiles based on a person’s denomination, religiousness or even willingness to convert. It also gives them the option to enhanced privacy, like an incognito mode that will hide users from friends and family.
Khalil says in some ways it’s very similar to how Muslim people have found their partners in the past, only this makes it easier. He added “In Muslim communities often times the way that people used to meet each other, and still do, is … they’d send a picture and a little bio to this one family, then the other family would send the same thing, and if two people say they like each other then they go meet each other…It’s the same model without the middleman.”
It’s not the first dating app created specifically for the Muslim community. There are Muslim dating apps such as Crescent and Minder.
