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“I come from a land,/ From a faraway place,/ Where the caravan camels roam./ Where they cut off your ear/ If they don’t like your face./ It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.”
These lines are from the original version of the 1992 Disney movie Aladdin, sung by a typically menacing cartoon Arab. After an outcry from the Arab-American community, the line was replaced by “where it’s flat and immense, and the heat is intense”. The rest of the movie, innocent though it may be, plays to the stereotype quite well. All the ‘evil’ characters are hook-nosed with pointy beards and Arabic accents, while Aladdin and Jasmine, skin tone and dress aside, are non-Semitic looking and speak with American accents.
Such portrayals of Arabs in Hollywood and American TV are by no means new, and anyone interested in the topic would do well to watch Jack Shaheen’s 2002 documentary, Reel Bad Arabs which examines how Hollywood ‘vilifies’ an entire people. Only now, it’s not just Arabs, but all Muslims who are bad. Reel bad.
The portrayal of Muslims on US TV shows and cinema is misleading.
If we are to believe Homeland, the caliphate already exists. In this show, Pakistanis, Palestinians, Saudis and Yemenis (just about all Muslims everywhere) happen to share a uniform worldview without any regard for cultural, political or ethnic differences.
In this alternate universe, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda work hand in hand, plotting eternally to bring down the US. The poster for this season really says it best, showing a white-skinned Carrie turning around and showing her face (gasp!) in a crowd of burqa-clad Muslim women; an American Red Riding Hood in a forest of homogenous, anonymous Muslim women.
That Homeland is one of the most Islamophobic shows on TV is beyond doubt. Based on an Israeli TV series, it features all the tropes and clichés we have sadly become all too used to: the “these are the people who would shoot your daughter” rants, the Hezbollah leader who is a wife-beater, the utter misrepresentation of ritual.
Brody’s scene in which he is performing wudu is set to ominous music, befitting the revelation that the cornbread-fed Marine sniper is in fact a ‘secret Muslim’. He’s not the only one; there’s Roya Hammad, a successful TV reporter of Palestinian descent who is in fact working with the terrorist leader because, well, they both happen to be Muslims.
The question of how the West survives; what with 1.7 billion people actively plotting its downfall isn’t addressed. Perhaps they’re saving that revelation for another season. Perhaps it’s the magical properties of Apple Pie. We simply don’t know.
The message is that if such people can be terrorists, then anyone could be. That man running the grocery counter, the lady driving an SUV to the mall, the high school kid looking for a date to the prom … all of them could be infiltrators looking to destroy life, liberty and Little League softball in a most insidious way, by becoming part of it. This depiction of the terrorist-next-door, the terrorist-as-neighbour is a feature of the post-9/11 world.
In Keifer Sutherland’s 24, for example, we were introduced to an entire family that fitted this description. In a particularly memorable scene, the terrorist child of the sleeper cell family, Aladdin with a suicide vest if you like, menaces his erstwhile white American ‘friend’ while screaming hysterically “You can’t even pronounce my name!” Because as we all know, mispronunciations are a leading cause of terrorism.
Then there are what are touted as more ‘understanding’ depictions, as in Don Cheadle’s Traitor. Here Cheadle played a pious Muslim who secretly worked for the US government as a double agent trying to prevent a terrorist outrage. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, and the very fact that a Muslim could actually be shown as a good guy does go some way towards ignoring less savoury parts. But those parts are very unsavoury indeed.
Oh sure, the terrorist mastermind masquerades as a European style playboy — all class and chardonnay — in what is a fairly typical depiction of a man living two lives, and perhaps a nod to Mohammad Ata. But the foot soldiers in this plot are all American jihadi Joes and Janes. They are mostly white and culturally indistinguishable from ‘real’ Americans, except for the fact that they will abandon their families and sacrifice their lives when activated, as if under some irresistible post-hypnotic suggestion.
Television and film play a huge role in formulating public opinion and this is perhaps truer in America than in less screen-addicted nations, and what is being learned here is that to be Muslim is in itself dangerous. What Homeland has done to reinforce the ‘otherisation’ of Muslims, even those familiar Muslims next door, the ones you may even host a BBQ dinner with, may not be unprecedented, but it is sickening all the same. And it sells.
The writer is a member of staff.
Twitter: @ZarrarKhuhro
Published in Dawn, October 20th, 2014
