Muslim artists stand up for their own portrayals in Hollywood and beyond
Award-winning Pakistani-American playwright Bina Sharif instructs a roomful of Columbia University students to verbally attack one another.
“You are the majority, you are the ones who have power. Be ferocious!” she goads them. The students hesitate, shifting their weight from foot to foot while trying to hide embarrassed smiles.
Finally, one young woman ventures, voice wavering: “Go back to where you belong, you immigrants! Get lost!” The room erupts in laughter.
Sharif shakes her head. “You are too polite, too educated, too sophisticated. You cannot oppress,” she chides. Sharif has written and directed over 25 plays produced in the USA, Pakistan and Europe. In her theater workshops she exhorts college students to nix political correctness by broaching contentious topics regarding race, religion and ethnicity in the United States.
Sharif and other prominent Islamic artists and writers brought their voices and ideas to The Muslim Protagonist, a daylong literary symposium which aims to generate earnest dialogue around the portrayal of Islam in the mainstream.
Now in its fourth consecutive year, the symposium hosted by the university’s Muslim Student Association explores the notion of “home” for American Muslims. Organizer Fatima Kholi, a sophomore at Columbia, opened the symposium with a quote from Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz:
“Home is where all attempts to escape cease.”
It seems especially relevant, Kholi says, given a presidential election overrun with proposed warfare against Muslims, including a ban on all Muslim tourists and immigrants and the policing of Muslim neighborhoods to root out early-stage “radicalization.”
Although Muslims comprise less than one percent of the US adult population, anti-Islamic activists allege that Muslims are trying to sneak Shariah law into the American legal system. In San Francisco, another group mounted display ads on city buses in 2015 that equated Islam with Nazism.
But Kholi says she wanted to steer away from narratives of marginalization. “Instead, we decided to talk about this negotiating as artists when you’re taken as an ethnic writer. When your writing or your artwork are fit into a certain kind of label or a certain box,” she explains.
Just as pundits openly criticize the Muslim community for “failing” to take action against ISIL forces in Syria as the violence escalates, Muslims in the film industry are expected to be ethnic flag bearers, panelists say. Los Angeles-based writer and director Lena Khan, an Indian Muslim, says she feels pressure from her industry peers to “write the big Muslim movie.” “It’s very loaded to be a Muslim in Hollywood,” Khan mused during a panel discussion. “Everybody wants you to be the one person who will right everything that’s missing about Muslims in the collective memory of the United States.”
In April, Khan released The Tiger Hunter, a dramatic comedy about a young Muslim man moving to 1970s Chicago to achieve his dreams. “Sometimes I find Indian artists, including myself in the beginning, trying so hard not to be defined by our identity that we’re shying away from it,” she said. Recent comedies like the Aziz Ansari-directed Master of None have spotlighted racial microaggressions facing minorities, but Khan is more interested in “normalizing” Muslim characters in mainstream television as everyday, law-abiding civilians rather than turban-sporting, strictly non English-speaking villains.
TV drama Quantico has been applauded for breaking the mold. The show casts Lebanese actress Yasmine Al Massri in the role of two Muslim twins who work for the FBI. Praised by Muslim women as the first mainstream female Muslim characters with personality and a backstory, the twins are shown choosing whether or not to drink alcohol and swimming in bathing suits alongside non-strict Muslims to help show that Muslim women lead normal American lives.
“We want to be able to present Muslim-American characters as just part of the American firmament — and you can’t get more American than the FBI, right? They’re there to protect the integrity and security of the United States and its citizens,” says Sharbari Ahmed, a writer for Quantico.
The organizers of The Muslim Protagonist hope the takeaways continue to resonate even after the event is over, and that Muslims and non-Muslims alike will be moved to share their stories of marginalization, shifting sites of belonging, and finding home. Kholi hopes to relaunch the Protag, the official blog for the symposium, which accepts submissions from minority artists, writers, and thinkers.
“I don’t think the main focus is Islam,” Kholi says of the issues discussed at this year’s The Muslim Protagonist. “The things we talk about are things that are very relatable for minorities across America and in the West in general.”
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