Baloch Sisters Go Viral Over Their Amazing Basketball Photoshoot

For Halima Hosseini and her sister Sarah, playing sports wasn’t the most normal thing growing up. Coming from a Baloch-Canadian family in East Gwillimbury, Ontario, the sisters grew up seeing sports as a guy thing.

“I feel like a lot of Middle Eastern and South Asian communities can relate to me in the sense that boys are promoted a lot more than the girls are,” Halima told Vogue. “Especially when it comes to playing sports and being engaged in healthy, active living.”

Despite being rich and full of diversity, Baloch culture is often not well known or understood. Baloch culture includes its own Balochi language with different dialects. It also maintains its own traditions including folk festivals and special forms of garment-making, that is quite distinct from other communities.

Most of the Baloch population resides in the Balochistan region of southwestern Asia, spanning areas of Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

However, as families have emigrated to North America from the region, groups have been established such as the Canadian Baloch Cultural and Social Community, a non-profit that aims to unite Baloch people and advocate for their rights, both here and abroad, resulting in a tight-knit community in Canada.

The transition to sports

While Halima is a student at Ontario Tech University, Sarah is a nursing student at centennial college. Now doing her Master’s in Neuro-Mechanics, Halima says she’s always been a fan of playing sports.

“I’ve played basketball since I was young,” says Halima. “I was always a point guard and played on a team in high school.” Halima also used to play rugby in high school, while Sarah dabbled in basketball and volleyball as well. “I would play whatever she played,” Sarah says.

As they noticed the lack of Baloch women on their teams, they got the idea to highlight their culture in an unexpected setting: the court.

Joined by a friend, the two sisters decided to do a photoshoot of themselves playing hoops in traditional Baloch clothing. Of course when they play usually, they do so in sports clothes since the traditional Baloch dress is quite heavily adorned.

“Most of the pieces are typically handmade.” Often, the garments they wear are made using the Balochi doch technique, a colorful embroidery style that uses triangular or diamond shapes. As Sarah wrote in her Instagram caption, “The doch takes time and effort.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CDwr5_AADlz/

“[In Baloch culture,] there’s certain clothes you wear to bed, there’s certain clothes you wear out, or to a funeral,” Halima says.

“Sports are not as popular with Baloch women, so we don’t really have clothing for sports.”

The beautiful. images were taken by Sarah’s husband, Mustafa Mureed, and inspired by court images that Halima saw on @mas.bloushi’s page.

“He’s a Baloch digital editor, and does a lot of basketball shoots,” she says. They shot the photos in her friend’s backyard—“I tried finding a basketball court for four hours,” says Halima—and she added a court background digitally. The end result captivatingly reflects the sisters’ desire to normalize and support the idea of Baloch women playing sports.

As it turns out, their message has resonated with countless other people. The trio has gotten thousands of likes with people sending messages of appreciation and kinship from all over the world.

“We’ve had people reach out from like, Hong Kong, and say, ‘Hey, I’m Baloch too!’” says Sarah. Halima adds, “Not all Baloch people look the same. There are some from northern Iran, or there’re some who are from more of an African descent from Tanzania.”

At the end of the day, Halima is simply glad to see Baloch people getting proper representation. “A lot of people don’t know who we are as Baloch people,” says Halima. “We’re people with a lack of voice on social media and in society in general. I wanted to be like, I am Baloch, I am a girl, and I do play basketball. I may come from a background that is voiceless, but I do have a voice.”