Aladdin, Olivia Pope, and Islam
One day, I want to produce a movie with a Muslim lead as powerful as Olivia Pope is as an African-American female lead in Scandal.
That’s what I was thinking in our last session of the day as I listened to our powerful speaker Anisa Mehdi, an Emmy-award-winning journalist and a film director, tell us about Valentino’s Ghost, a documentary that:
“exposes the way America’s foreign policy agenda in the Middle East influences Hollywood and mainstream media portrayals of Arabs and Muslims.”
I’ve written before about how I dream of media that showcases Muslims as the multi-dimensional complicated community that we are. How media shapes the perception of Muslims as the Allahu-akbar-kill-everyone-veil-the-women-yada-yada crazy people.
Media is powerful:
“Popular culture indoctrinates so sweetly and subtly with cartoons and music, we don’t even realize we are developing a story that we believe is true.”-Anisa Mehdi
Mehdi showed us 5 minutes of the documentary, and imma go find it and watch it (even though Robert Fisk is in it).
The trouble is: the people who will watch a documentary like this? Pretty much preaching to the choir. The way to really change those prejudices and stereotypes is to incorporate the alternate representations of Muslims in mainstream media.
Media is the tool we have to use:
“Star trek address the intifada, sexism, ageism. But all with a different species that is being prejudiced against, which makes it easier to talk about issues that are difficult to do so in the public sphere. Music and art are a wonderful tool to address all those awkward issues, especially religion.”-Anisa Mehdi
How many American Sniper movies have we seen the evil Arabs in? How many movies where religion and culture are interchangeable? All used to demonize the crazy scary ‘other?’ Media that promotes intolerance, racism, hatred, and violence, and goes unchallenged because there aren’t enough Anisa Mehdis out there who are strong enough to fight to produce their own content, expressing their spirituality and representing their communities.
You get tired fast of doing the representing thing.
So Anisa Mehdi reminded me today of that long-ago dream: Imagine doing for the Muslim community in a 40-minute episode what Shonda Rhimes had Olivia Pope do for Ferguson. I cried in that episode. And I’m not black and far, far away from the #blacklivesmatter movement. But that’s what powerful media does: it puts a human face on the headlines you see.
Perhaps one day I’ll do the same for my community.
(Today I also learned 95% of Americans don’t care about foreign policy, and what ‘dog whistling politics’ is. I met my favorite demographer Conrad Hackett at the Pew Center, who basically told us Muslims will take over the world soon because we have too many babies and so many young people. Also, that people in the US are becoming less religious. Lots and lots of other serious political briefings, but I really want to go get some Chinese food now. Toodles).
