Encouragingly, he has company. A number of talented diaspora Muslims have won chances to make television in the last year or two. It was about time. Hollywood has for years got away with portraying followers of Islam as a scary monolith, the “green monster”: cast repeatedly as “oil suppliers, terrorists, and bloodthirsty mobs”, as Edward Said had once noted, and later as “billionaires, bombers, and belly dancers”, according to other observers. Films like Argo or American Sniper, which won or were nominated for Academy Awards, have been guilty of caricaturing Muslims.
That is why Ramy, the first scripted series based on Muslim-American life which premiered earlier this year, is especially important. Its writers initially set the sitcom’s opening scene in a mosque but the Islamophobia perpetuated by the mainstream has been so intense that this visual made test audiences expect a bomb to go off next. Mosques enter this gently humorous show about faith and self-discovery in later scenes instead, and their repeated appearance over the course of ten episodes lets viewers see them as venues where people seek community and clarity rather than conspiracy.
The Hulu original (streaming on Prime Video in India) created and acted by the Egyptian-American comedian Ramy Youssef has a natural, intimate honesty. The protagonist’s religious belief is sincere and his practice flexible. In his search for purpose and a partner, he must also grapple with what it means to be “a good Muslim”. Particularly effective is a flashback episode that considers the tragedy of 9/11 and the aftermath of hostility meted out to Muslim Americans like Ramy who was 12 then.
The show benefits from a talented cast including Hiam Abbass (Lemon Tree), Amr Waked (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen) and Mo Amer (of the comedy trio Allah Made Me Funny). Ramy’s writers also navigate with nuance complex problems within the faith, like the general distrust of Jews and varying degrees of freedom for men and women. Ultimately, the same essential strand that informs Youssef’s stand-up comedy — that there are no bad cultures, just different cultures — runs through his sitcom too.
In the United Kingdom, an antidote to religious stereotyping has been the BBC Three sitcom Man like Mobeen (available on Netflix) written by and starring the British-Pakistani comedian Guz Khan since 2017. The protagonist Mobeen is a reformed drug dealer trying to raise his teenaged sister right with some help from his bumbling, well-meaning buddies in suburban Birmingham. The show also deals with the tensions between cops and minorities in these sometimes violent districts. Of its breezy eight episodes spread over two seasons, one involves an encounter with an Islamophobe leading a far-right demonstration, from which Khan makes a hilarious teaching moment.
Another such celebrity of significance has been Tan France, a British-Pakistani stylist, who is the fashion expert among the “Fab Five” on the makeover show Queer Eye. Standing at the intersection of Islam and homosexuality, he brings visibility to his religious community while speaking out against homophobia too. Also notable is the work of the Iran-born Iraqi writer and actor Osamah Sami who hatched the romcom Ali’s Wedding (2017) from his own colourful experiences of living and loving as a Muslim in Australia.
Youssef’s Ramy and Khan’s Mobeen both wear beards as well as caps backwards, as if to reference their plural backgrounds. Diversity, which was introduced as a token gesture in Western programming, appears to be moving in a more meaningful direction as streaming platforms make shows available in multiple geographies. The result of young Muslim creators taking charge of their stories has been fresh and optimistic, a welcome departure from the lazy demonising or fetishising of the past.
ranjita.ganesan@bsmail.in
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