Title is a tad bit misleading, I highly doubt I'll be posting daily in this. Nonetheless, I decided to stop filling my other books with news articles and such so I've created this one. In this book I'll be sharing articles, stories, and sometimes pi...
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As a civil rights activist with the Georgia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, most of the emails I receive involve deadly serious topics: hate speech…hate crimes…discrimination…Donald Trump’s latest tweet.
So you can perhaps imagine my surprise when I received an email last year from a casting director for the latest sequel to the classic blaxploitation film Shaft, which was filming in Atlanta.
Was this a mistake? I wondered. What in the world could the infamously profane and promiscuous black detective have to do with the Georgia Muslim community?
As it turns, the plot of the new Shaft revolves around the mysterious death of Shaft Junior's best friend, a Muslim. The studio was searching for more Atlanta Muslims to participate in scenes depicting an Islamic funeral and a prayer service.
Good for the studio, I thought. After all, American Muslims have spent decades watching themselves depicted as crazed terrorists, conflicted terrorists, secret terrorists, or token Muslim law enforcement agents tracking down terrorists.
Hollywood's more recent attempts to showcase diversity and introduced more Muslim characters has resulted in the opposite extreme: widespread depictions of "secular Muslims" who gleefully disregard the traditions of their faith.
For example, the Hulu show "Ramy" depicts the sexual dalliances of the Muslim title character with his various girlfriends. In the cable show "American Gods," a Muslim man engages in sex acts with—literally—an Arab demon. The CBS show "The Red Line" features a graphic sex scene between a Muslim man and his boyfriend. Aziz Ansari's "Master of None" dedicates an entire episode to the main character's decision to eat pork in front of his Muslim parents.
Even back in 1998, The Siege depicted a Palestinian Muslim CIA informant in a sex scene with his CIA handler (spoiler alert: the Palestinian turns out to be a terrorist). And let us not forget the climax of the 1992 Aladdin, when Jasmine saves the day by distracting/seducing Jafar while dressed like Jabba the Hutt's sex slave.
In other words, Hollywood has jumped between depicting Muslims as violent terrorists and fetishizing us as "liberated" sexual objects. In doing so, filmmakers skip over and ignore the mainstream members of our community who do not blow things up, much less engage in sexual escapades with CIA agents and demonic forces.
Hence my hope for Shaft. Perhaps a film series with a legacy of commentary on racial injustice would tackle Islamophobia and portray the American Muslim community in a more accurate light at the same time.
Fast forward one year, and Shaft has been released. What’s the verdict? Even with good intentions, Hollywood still struggles to portray Muslims accurately or fairly, much less positively.
To understand how Shaft went wrong, you must first understand its plot. Long story very short: Shaft Junior is an FBI data analyst. His best friend is Kareem, a Muslim-American war veteran who struggles with PTSD and substance abuse. When someone murders Kareem, Shaft Junior asks his estranged father to help solve the case.
