‘Master of None’ and The Rubik’s Cube of Muslim Representation on TV
Is a pork-gobbling, non-practicing Muslim on TV something to celebrate or bury?
Buckle in, folks: it’s about to get weirdly personal, political, religious, and distastefully lengthy.
For those who haven’t watched it, Master of None is a refreshing sitcom written and directed by the talented Aziz Ansari. While it’s clear from the show that he’s new at this—from the sometimes stale screenplay and occasionally awkward acting—it’s an otherwise great show that is unafraid to explore social talking points while coming off as adorably funny.
In season 2, Ansari spends an episode (“Religion”) taking on the sticky issue of his Muslim-ness; or rather, the fact he was born and raised a Muslim but doesn’t practice. He struggles as a grown adult to confess to his parents that he eats— gasp! — pork.
For Nergin Farsad, it’s a refreshing celebration of diversity in a media landscape overly inundated with terrorist-related images of Muslims. Plenty of Muslims drink, eat pork, and have premarital sex; but they are erased from existence, dissolved somewhere between angry, murderous bearded men, and perfectly pious, robed worshipers.
Did I mention that I, too, am an American Muslim? It’s hard to engage with these issues without feeling a bit scared; we’ve all spent so long feeling watched, self-conscious, and hated; like how White Christians feel (but, you know, more justified).
Which is why I also understand where Riad Alarian is coming from when he argues that Farsad joins a Muslim-Humanizing-Industry that liberalizes the Muslim image, only to pacify the liberal pressure for everyone to conform to an attitude that assimilates more willingly. In short, images of Muslims doing “normal” things is encouraged to get us to fit in, but the process violates part of our identity.
Because just as there are Muslims like Ansari who smoke, eat, and drink, there are also a great deal of Muslims who conservatively practice a faith and its rituals. These are the Muslims who build mosques, schools, and shelters, who derive a great deal of identity from their religion. But we live in a time in which conservatism and religiosity is associated with ignorance, bigotry, and fossilized cultural attitudes. Adding Islam gives it an extra xenophobic foreign twist. Conservative Muslims—the Muslims I grew up with, the ones I identify strongly with — understand this social atmosphere, and don’t feel safe. To the right, we’re immigrant thieves and murderers who need to leave; to the left, we’re backwards foreigners who need to change our ways to fit in.
It’s awkward to feature Muslim conservative types on TV, because we’re like that awkward cousin who you sincerely want to include with your friends, if only he’d stop stuttering and talking about Pokémon cards. A Muslim character who doesn’t want to shake a woman’s hand, or a housewife wearing the niqab would simply tank ratings. But is the alternative to present these characters unapologetically in the name of fair representation?
Both Fahad and Alarian seem to argue the same thing from different angles: that we shouldn’t shame a segment of the Muslim population into invisibility; they are fighting for the identities of non-mainstream individuals to be validated. But while Alarian is right that there is a constant threat and danger in Othering conservative Muslims, it is conservative Muslims who are the largest threat to the identity of the “booze-swilling, bacon-breathed Muz”, as Fahad would put it. Fahad, I imagine, does not limit her definition of “Muslim” to one who adopts specific beliefs and rituals. But conservative Muslim communities, in their need to protect their religious and cultural heritages, have used such rigid definitions of Islam to alienate less-adherent Muslims, Othering them. It is not uncommon for new converts to feel a sense of rejection when the mosque they attend fails to make them feel welcome because of something as trivial as a tattoo. In Master of None, Dev’s mom is so dismayed by Dev’s pork-eating that she doesn’t speak to him for weeks.
The first thing you’d think, of course, is that these Muslims are backwards and intolerant; but then you’d be working off our socially accepted silent assumptions: Hair-covering? Weird, if not oppressed. Goat-cologne? Unattractive, if not barbaric. Refusing to shake a woman’s hand? Straight-up misogynist. These attitudes are only there because we have a model of what is “normal”, like wearing shoes in the house, or moving out at 18, or having multiple cars in a quiet suburb. Being unable to see past our modern, American sense of normalcy prevents us from validating the experience of minorities.
Take for example, the oft-feared hijab, in nice, foreign italics. For many Muslims, the hair-covering isn’t a sex issue so much as a basic tradition, like how everyone wears blue jeans. Why blue? Why denim? In fact, why wear pants at all, instead of robes? It’s simply a way to do things that we haven’t given much thought to. In the face of increased Islamophobia and marginalization, however, the hijab has become a proud symbol of defiance, too.
Or take sexual abstinence before marriage, which many religious conservatives practice. It’s weird, right? Like, either these folks don’t have what it takes to get laid, they’re asexual, or they must have some weird masturbatory fetish at home. These assumptions are simply based on a general mainstream experience: that sex is great, so you should have it whenever you’re ready. In other words, if someone doesn’t have sex when they can, something must be wrong. It overlooks the fact that plenty of people do just fine practicing abstinence. In no way do I think abstinence-only educations are a healthy social option, but it would be imprudent not pointing out that in some cases, it does work. Refusing to believe that fact simply means not validating the experiences and lifestyles of people who can live differently than oneself.
As with either hijab or religiously-driven sexual abstinence, the many layers of what a tradition means requires adopting different perspectives and challenging our own assumptions of normalcy.
When Muslims are portrayed on TV by producers who lack these perspectives but want to include minorities and celebrate diversity, their attempts end up seeming bumbled. In Bones, intern Arastoo Vaziri is a devout five-times-a-day praying Muslim, but, as if to make him more palatable, he’s unmarried and sexually active. To sweeten the pot further, he’d also served in the armed forces, having survived an IED attack, because nothing says American like veteran (though, why an Farsi-speaker would work in Iraq as a translator suggests editorial oversight). Kash and Linda in Shameless come to mind, too. Kash is a closeted gay Pakistani man who cheats on his wife, while Linda is the white convert wife who plays the role of the unexpectedly ultra-conservative. Abed in Community is a Muslim because he says so, but there is nothing else to even remotely suggest that is the case, almost as though Harmon needed to fill a minority quota.
Yes, stereotypes are being turned on their heads, and certainly similar people do exist in real life, but I imagine that Alarian’s problem is that these characters exist simply because producers are too uncomfortable with challenging our assumptions of what is a right or normal way to live, further Othering the feared bearded brown dude. Of course, the point Fahad makes is that refusing to diversify what it means to be a Muslim in media is exactly what does the Othering to begin with.
The thing about Othering is that it requires the cutting of humanity into categories. Everything ends up becoming tribal, a giant game of Us vs Them. No one has to say it, because it seems to be self-evident. Almost all Muslim American kids can identify with the experience of being torn between two sides. We feel this constant tension between being Muslim or American, as if the two were mutually exclusive. By the time we’ve become teenagers or college students, we’ve been forced to make one of two choices: to either become insulated in our mosque community and embrace our heritage and traditions, or to integrate with the mainstream. You can fast and pray with your community, or you can drink with your friends, but not both. Both choices alienate the other half of who we feel we are.
I called this issue a Rubik’s Cube, because while puzzling, it’s far from unsolvable. We all know this is a false dichotomy, that there must be some sort of integrated middle path that is right and true, but no one seems to have really found it, otherwise there’d be a trodden path to follow.
Where there is no path, we have to build one. This means bumbling around for our sense of identity and belonging, and it means refusing to acknowledge the archaic labels that separate us. If we remove labels like “the left”, “the media”, “American”, “Western”, “conservative”, “religious”, “progressive”, “liberal”, and “foreign”, then the angst that is this article would vanish.
The thing about Ansari’s character, Dev, is that his experience is his. Articles like mine only exist because there is a cultural battle about what Dev’s experience and life should be, instead of a simple acceptance of how one individual chooses to live his life. We are all looking for some sort of way to live at peace with ourselves.
Dev argues that his religious preferences doesn’t matter, because he’s still “a good person.” The assumption, of course, being that religion is about being good, or that this issue is even about religion at all. I’d argue that it has way more to do with the identities we adopt, the communities we share with, and the legacies we pass on to the next generation; all subjects we are bound to have deep differences of opinion over. Both Dev and his mom recognize this, and reconcile. Ultimately, they love each other more as humans, as kindred souls, over their concepts of shoulds and shouldn’ts.
