Islamophobia and Popular Culture: What is the Problem?

Although mentioned in the 1980s by Christian-Palestinian scholar Edward Said, Islamophobia only became a field of study in 1997 after the Runnymede Trust, a think tank in the UK, published its report “Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All” (Runnymede, 1997). The report defines ‘Islamophobia’ as a “dread or hatred of Islam and therefore, [the] fear and dislike of all Muslims,” (Bullock 2017, 6). Stereotyping in popular culture and its complex relationship with Islamophobia is a social problem that involves the framing of pre-existing realities of Muslims and necessitates a need for the other to speak for him or herself as a means of contesting Orientalist stereotypes which define Arabs and Muslims in terms of cultural and religious understandings that narrowly categorize individuals through attributes such as religiosity and femininity. That said, if I were to venture to define gendered Islamophobia, I would describe it as fear and dislike of Muslims stemming from continuous misrepresentation that is manifesting itself through the colonial gaze directed at women, resulting in hate crimes against them and in their exclusion from public spaces in the diaspora. I say ‘gendered’ because anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod calls knowledge fed to Western audiences about Muslim women (knowledge that does not reflect realities on the ground and rhetoric about veils, forced marriages, genital mutilation and honor killings as the focus of Western feminist thought on the situation of Muslim women despite the availability of alternate views and literature) “gendered Orientalism”.

Both the first and second ages of mass media are guilty of representation editing realities by framing lived experiences of Muslim women as a narrative or as a set of images revolving around attire as symbolic of oppression. Sexist and objectifying images of women dominated the first age of media, when framing in popular culture played out in print, theatre, painting, the visual arts and literature. Sexist and objectifying images of women also dominate in this second ‘age of electronic media’ (Castillo and Egginton 2017). The ‘guided spectacle’ of Islamophobia has been exacerbated by new technologies facilitating the editing of realities and truths in media; and wide-spread stereotyping has led to even more urgent need for media and reality literacy amongst audiences. In terms of the people consuming these objectifying images, before film critic Jack Shaheen began his project, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Shaheen 2009), to document depictions of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood film, he had already informed his readers in The TV Arab that ninety-eight percent of Americans watch TV for at least six hours every day (Shaheen 1984, 7). “Framed thought assumes a pre-existing reality and hermeneutic thought is a state of being involving being on the alert of framing mechanisms that facilitate the false image of reality presented” (Castillo and Egginton 2017, 187).

How is Islamophobia being tackled in the industry?

Thanks to the technological developments of the digital era, Arabs and Muslims no longer face the inability to speak for themselves as a barrier to self-representation. This is because digital forms of popular culture, such as Internet series, stand-up comedy and music videos, now allow people to independently relay new understandings of themselves and their respective communities without hardly any restrictions. While in the past, only those with access to Television sets, comedy clubs, and concerts had access to these alternative media, the digital era now grants access from “Other” voices to more audiences. Examples include Hulu series Ramy, stand-up comedy troupe Allah Made Me Funny and Mona Haydar’s rap video Wrap My Hijab. Locational, contextual, linguistic­­ and individual representation of women is regularly omitted in representation of Muslim women in the diasporas. Therefore, that Arab and Muslim identities are made ordinary through the cultural objects suggests the capacity to contest negative portrayal, fake news and ‘alternative facts’ by reality through other, newer lived experiences via electronic media accessible to all (Castillo and Egginton 2017).

Study of English-language work created in the US and that is accessible on-line reveals that subversion of age-old stereotypes and rhetoric is taking place simultaneously in different countries. Diasporic Muslim creators of film, stand-up comedians and music video artists in the Anglo-American sphere have thus been collaborating, in effect, in cyberspace to inform social perceptions world-wide. In sum, digital technologies enable audiences to consume contemporary popular culture in which creators re-cast images of marginalized diasporic communities that belie negative stereotypes. These audiences learn from the self-reflection of the artists, with some continuing to share and disseminate the material (another significant capacity of the Internet) or to produce content themselves.

Contesting predominant stereotypes of Muslim women facilitates transition from colonial images of them to those reflecting their diverse realities from within contexts that depict different ethnicities and socio-economic conditions and exposes the public mind to alternate images and rhetoric on the diversity of Muslims and Islam through representation of the everyday in a specific diasporic context. This facilitation of knowledge on Muslims then results in normalisation of their multiple identities. Indeed, considering that the consumption of digital popular culture as everydayness is a cultural revolution in cyberspace, artists, who are informed by media literacy, facilitate a public pedagogy contesting common stereotypes of Muslims by effectively offering previously withheld new knowledge humanizing a group of people. Creating a new “window” through which the problematized group is seen involves adding new images and language while keeping a link or association with the knowledge that viewers already have. Stereotypes in media propaganda are thus deconstructed through the diversification of representations.

References:

Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Harvard University Press, 2013.

Alsultany, Evelyn, and Ella Shohat. Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.

Bayat, Asef. Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.

Bullock, Katherine. “Policy Backgrounder: Defining Islamophobia for a Canadian Context.” 2017. Accessed January 25, 2023

Castillo, David R., and William Egginton. Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

Dabashi, Hamid. Being a Muslim in the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2013.

Said, Edward W. Covering Islam. Vintage, 1981.

Shaheen, Jack G. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. New York: Interlink Books, 2009.

Shaheen, Jack G. Guilty: Hollywood's Verdict on Arabs after 9/11. Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2008.

Shaheen, Jack G. The TV Arab. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1984.