I'll add my own two cents to this later...
Credits: Ali C.
Gryffindor or Ravenclaw? Aragorn or Gandalf? Air-bender or fire-bender?
For those who understood these opening questions, I hope you answered correctly (Gryffindor, Aragorn, Air). For those left wondering who’s Griff and what’s he doing in the door, and please, let’s not be bending any fires, let me explain. You see, growing up in the West, I and all the Muslim kids I knew were immersed in the literary culture of the West. Simply put, we grew up reading famous English young adult novels like The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Harry Potter. Their characters were our heroes; their adventures were our daydreams. We devoured their every story within days.
This isn’t just a personal anecdote: ask any Muslim American under the age of thirty, and a significant majority will attest to the influence of Western media (in the form of books, movies, TV shows, etc.) on their lives. Even parents who have resolved to curate any content their children consume are frequently undercut. You throw out the TV, but there are still tablets and smartphones. You pull them from public school, and Islamic schools are just as exposed. Forget insulating your children inside the US, it is difficult to find places in the Muslim world left untouched by the Western entertainment industry. In short, the dominance of Western literature and media cannot be ignored.
Even so, I think the fair observer would find some benefits to this situation. Characters in some of these stories model highly admirable traits, including bravery, honor and self-sacrifice. They show the reader how to persevere, how to stand up for the oppressed against the oppressor, how to be a pro-active force in the world — values not only compatible with but also integral to an Islamic moral education. Moreover, these stories deliver morals under the guise of fun, attaining by this means a reach most dry do’s-and-don’t’s Sunday school classes never can.
But there are plenty of harms to this reality as well. First, even in cases where the story’s heroes are morally decent in a universalist sense, there is still, I think, something detrimental in growing up as a Muslim whose literary and cultural heroes are almost all non-Muslim. I have personally experienced the alienation, the feeling of disconnect, that develops when the heroes you love to read about never pray like you do, never mention God like you do, never celebrate what you celebrate or wear what you wear or think like you think, but despite all of that are just so ‘cool’ that you can’t help but be drawn to their stories. Coupled with the portrayal of Islam in Western media as inherently violent or, at best, archaic and culturally barren, these feelings can lead to an inferiority complex and can ultimately result in weakened iman.
It may seem like an exaggeration that juvenile concepts like what is ‘cool’ could have such drastic implications, but imagine growing up in a society where, throughout your childhood, the people you found most interesting, exciting, down-to-earth, and real (even if fictional), were almost never Muslim.When young people observe that there is no room for someone like them in the stories they love best, they begin to disassociate themselves from that marginalized identity.
This was problematic ten, fifteen years ago, when many of these stories held to a higher moral standard. It is an utter disaster today, when those standards are deteriorating at a rapid pace. In contemporary entertainment, the role models of young America are, for the most part, morally bankrupt, rebellious, selfish, hedonistic, misguided and misguiding. Basically, things are getting worse, and fast.
COMPETING WITH HARRY POTTER
Hopefully by now we all agree that the situation cannot continue as it is. It would not be as bad if there were viable Islamic alternatives to this cultural dominance. However, for young Muslim Americans, it is, I think, almost impossible to find alternatives to this literature that are easily accessible, captivating, and fulfilling.
YOU ARE READING
Desert Son: Tales of Le_Muslim_MAN
Non-FictionIt was a cold, winter night out in the great desert. The winds were howling, the crescent moon rested high in the sky. Out in the dark and desolate desert, a new life had been born into the world. Resting near the light of a fire, a woman sat, holdi...
