Student in hijab renamed ‘Isis’ in high school yearbook---Cruel joke or mistake?

The yearbook photo showed a young woman in hijab, the speckled headscarf framing her smiling face in front of a sunny schoolyard. Underneath, a caption read: “Isis Phillips, 11th.”

For years, Isis has been among the 700 most popular girls’ names in the United States, according to the U.S. Social Security Administration. It is inspired by the ancient Egyptian goddess of the same appellation, an important deity worshiped for her healing powers and her maternal prowess.

But the problem was, the name of the girl in the photo isn’t Isis or Phillips. Not even close.
When Bayan Zehlif, a senior at Los Osos High School in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., saw the moniker under her picture, she recoiled. Affixing that name to someone in a hijab could not have been an accident, she thought.

“I am extremely saddened, disgusted, hurt and embarrassed that the Los Osos High School yearbook was able to get away with this,” Zehlif wrote on Facebook on Saturday. “Apparently I am ‘Isis’ in the yearbook. The school reached out to me and had the audacity to say that this was a typo. I beg to differ, let’s be real.”

This was the connotation that emerged in Zehlif’s mind when she saw the page. Trevor Santellan, a student on the yearbook team, told KABC that “Isis Phillips” is the real name of an 11th-grade student who formerly attended Los Osos. She transferred earlier in the year.

In a message to the New York Daily News, Santellan said: “If anything, [Zehlif] is being racist against herself because she misinterpreted it.”

Recently, “Isis” has been more frequently associated with the Islamic State than with age-old mythology. The jihadist group that has taken responsibility for terrorist attacks around the world is frequently referred to as ISIS, an acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.