Sharifah Najma is a Somali-Yemeni American journalist, writer, researcher, and strategist of BaʿAlawi Hadrami heritage. Through interviews, travel, photography, research, and cultural criticism, Sharifah explores diaspora, community, media, technology, fashion, spirituality, and the lives of underreported and marginalized people—expanding the archive of who gets to be seen, understood, and remembered.

Her work is informed by a family history of movement across the Indian Ocean world. Through her father, Sharifah comes from the BaʿAlawi tradition of Hadramawt, part of a centuries-old Hadrami diaspora connecting the Arabian Peninsula with East Africa, the Horn of Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia through migration, scholarship, trade, and religious life. Her broader ancestry stretches across Somalia, Yemen, the Hejaz, Iraq, Iran, India, and Pakistan: places that modern borders divide, but that have been connected for centuries by oceans, ports, pilgrimage, commerce, kinship, and the circulation of knowledge.

Sharifah grew up with another kind of network close at hand. Her father, Sharif Mohamed, was a computer scientist and her first Sufi teacher. His work in information technology during the Y2K era gave her an early view into computers and the emerging digital world at the same time that he introduced her to a spiritual tradition concerned with transmission, lineage, knowledge, and connection. Those two inheritances—the diasporic and the digital—continue to shape the way Sharifah sees the world.

Long before the internet promised a borderless world, the Indian Ocean was already a network. People crossed it carrying textiles, manuscripts, religious traditions, languages, aesthetics, technologies, recipes, music, stories, and memories. Communities were connected culturally, intellectually, commercially, and spiritually. The internet accelerated that old human impulse: to find one another across distance.

Sharifah's journalism has repeatedly returned to what happens inside those networks. She has written about how the internet became a home for displaced Somalis, how surveillance shapes Somali creative life, how Muslim women negotiate privacy and visibility online, how fashion communicates identity, and how Black, Arab, and Muslim communities construct their own archives when dominant media fails to represent them fully.

Her work has appeared in publications worldwide, including T Magazine: New York Times Style Magazine - MENA, GQ Middle East, NBC, InStyle, and Cultured Magazine. She has interviewed artists, writers, actors, musicians, and cultural figures including Solange Knowles, Quinta Brunson, Ramy Youssef, Alisha Boe, Noname, Aminé, Warsan Shire, and Marsai Martin.

Beyond journalism, Sharifah is a strategist specializing in cultural storytelling, brand narrative, and editorial strategy. She has developed narratives for artists at Roc Nation and produced creative, social, and content strategy for projects involving Audible, Sephora, Fenty Beauty, Target, Instagram, CVS Pharmacy, L.L.Bean, Bioré, Clinique, Polo Ralph Lauren, Apple, eBay, Pharrell Williams x Louis Vuitton, Tower 28, and Discover at Kohl's.

She has also consulted on major cultural exhibitions, including Contemporary Muslim Fashions, presented by the de Young Museum and subsequently at institutions including Museum Angewandte Kunst and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and has presented lectures and workshops internationally.

Across these different forms, the central questions remain remarkably consistent: How does culture travel? What survives migration? Who controls the image? How do displaced people find one another? And what happens when old networks of kinship, faith, trade, and memory encounter the technologies of mass media and the internet? For Sharifah, these questions are both intellectual and inherited. Her work moves between the archive and the algorithm, the port and the platform, and the ancestral and the contemporary. Sharifah is interested in tracing the connections between people, images, objects, and ideas across borders and generations.

Sharifah runs a Substack called Bad Taste.