Movies’ Mideast Myopia : U.S. Activists and Academics Fear the Negative Stereotypes Depicted in Films Will Lead to More Hostility Toward Muslims

In the movie “Not Without My Daughter,” Sally Field’s character is brutally beaten by her Iranian husband, who refuses to let her--or their young daughter--leave Iran. Another American woman is subjected to the same violent treatment by her Iranian husband. No one among their Islamic families and friends intervenes to protect the women.

Betty Mahmoody, the Michigan woman whose harrowing escape from Iran five years ago forms the basis for the movie, says “Not Without My Daughter” accurately depicts her life there. But some activists and academics here say the film represents another example of how Hollywood perpetuates negative stereotypes about Middle Eastern cultures, including the Persians of Iran and the Arabs of neighboring countries.

“I felt very sad when I saw the trailer for it,” said Yousef Salem, public relations director for the United Muslims of America. “Why is it being brought out during the height of conflict in the Middle East? It’s going to spur more hostility toward (Muslims).”

As more and more news headlines emanate from the Middle East, so do movies, TV shows and comic routines depicting the region’s cultures. Some of those portrayals benefit from the increasingly close contact Americans are having with the Middle East, Arab activists say. For example, in “Held Hostage: The Sis and Jerry Levin Story,” an ABC-TV movie airing Sunday, Marlo Thomas--whose father, Danny Thomas, is an outspoken Lebanese--plays the wife of real-life hostage Jerry Levin who blames U.S. policy, as much as terrorism, for the traumas inflicted on her husband.

“This is a film that depicts Arabs as human beings,” said radio personality Casey Kasem, who has spent the last several months trying to raise Hollywood’s awareness on the issue. “This is the first time I’ve seen a (major) film for TV that could turn the image of Arabs and Arab-Americans around overnight. Can you imagine if we just had one movie like that on TV a month?”

At one point in the film, Thomas tells fellow churchgoers: “Our battleship has fired into the hills of Lebanon, killing innocent people. And they have retaliated by killing our own flesh and blood, our own Marines. They are taking our missionaries, clergymen, diplomatic people and newsmen, like my husband . . . . They are being held prisoners by people who loathe us so, for reasons we are not told--not by our government, not by our own free press--and we loathe them right back.”

But negative stereotypes of Middle Eastern society are also proliferating, Arab-Americans say. In last summer’s film “Navy S.E.A.L.S.,” Charlie Sheen refers to Beirut as a place where there are “rags knocking each other off like it’s a national pastime.” Last fall, Salem complained to a San Francisco radio station after its early morning talk-show host called Arabs “masters of deception.” And Jack Shaheen, a professor at Southern Illinois University who studies Arabs in the media, wrote a letter to MTV objecting to the rock channel’s “Just Say Julie” segment in which two buffoonish Arabs appear with a plot to blow up MTV. One of the Arabs is referred to as “the creep with the fez.”

“Not Without My Daughter,” which opens Friday, is obviously a more serious attempt to explore a Middle Eastern culture--in this case, the Islamic fundamentalism that Iran’s Persians have embraced since the 1979 overthrow of the Shah. Mahmoody was married to an Iranian-born doctor who had lived in the United States for 20 years. But when she reluctantly accompanied him to Iran for a vacation, he decided to embrace Islam and keep his family in the country against their will. Producers Harry J. Ufland and Mary Jane Ufland said they consulted with about 20 advisers on Iranian culture.

An early review of the film in Variety complained that it “plays upon those aspects of Islam that seem most horrific to Westerners, notably its treatment of women, to the point that virtually all the Iranians come off as vicious fiends.” One can’t help wonder, Variety critic Todd McCarthy wrote, how such a loving husband could become such a tyrant the moment he stepped onto Iranian soil.

But Mahmoody said her husband did undergo a dramatic change, and that she has since been contacted by hundreds of women in similar circumstances. While trapped in Iran, she said, her husband beat her in front of family members. At one point, she said, a female relative turned to her and said, “Don’t worry, all men here are like that.”

“I’m not going to say all Iranian men beat their wives, but I saw a lot of (abused) women,” Mahmoody said. Added Mary Jane Ufland: “Women in that culture are looked upon as property and other people do not intervene.”

Former UCLA anthropologist Fadwa El Guindi, who has not seen the movie but read Mahmoody’s book, does not deny that wife-beating takes place in Iran, but said that “Islam speaks strongly against the abuse of women.” She added that she believes the rate of wife abuse is higher here than in Middle Eastern countries. El Guindi also said that Iranian custody laws that favored Mahmoody’s husband are “not an accepted situation” and many Iranians are seeking to change them.

Guity Shahbaz-Ellis, managing editor of a leading Persian magazine called Rahavard, saw the film Wednesday night and said: “I don’t consider the man Mahmoody or his family true Iranians. I’ve never seen this kind of behavior in normal Iranians. . . . The film is going to cause resentment against Iranians. But I do want people to know that (the regime’s repressive policies) she ran away from is what most of us ran away from, too.”

The Uflands say their movie, directed by Brian Gilbert, provides a balanced portrait of 1980s Iranian society. The film, they said, points out that Islam does not condone abuse and that Mahmoody’s in-laws were from the provinces and hence more extremist that other Iranian families. They also point out that it was Iranians who came to the aid of Mahmoody and ultimately helped her escape the country--without seeking payment in return.

Moreover, critics of “Not Without My Daughter” can’t escape the fact that the treatment of women in 1980s Iran is repressive by Western standards. “This is a story of cultural differences, and what my husband did to me,” said Mahmoody. “It’s a story that relates to all battered woman.”

With the possibility of war looming in the Persian Gulf, “Not Without My Daughter” opens at a propitious time for its studio, MGM-Pathe. Barry Lorie, the studio’s executive vice president of marketing, said the timing was coincidental: MGM needed a film for late-January release, and “Not Without My Daughter” was ready at the right time. The studio, he said, did not release the film hoping to benefit from a controversy.

No one complains about the flood of TV movies and talk shows that have told the story about American battered women. And activists with Middle Eastern roots say Betty Mahmoody has the right to tell her story. What they want, they insist, are more stories telling the other side--more positive portrayals of Middle Easterners and Islamic culture.

“What we have is a situation where there’s no balance,” said radio program producer Don Bustany, currently president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “What gets publicized are the extremists.”

At least “Not Without My Daughter” raises complex questions about the portrayal of Middle Eastern cultures. For decades, academics say, Hollywood’s image of that world has been pat and simple: They were “billionaires, bombers and belly dancers,” as Shaheen puts it.

“Arabs and to a certain extent Muslims, Turks and Iranians have been presented as bad guys,” said Laurence Michalak, vice chairman of UC Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. The on-screen Arab historically “does terrible things and receives appropriately terrible punishments.”

Since the 1920s, he said, there have been comic films portraying Arabs as buffoons, exotic adventure stories equating Arabs with “lawlessness, violence and rampant sexuality,” and mummy movies filled with Arab abductors. In Boris Karloff’s 1932 “The Mummy” and its sequels, Michalak recently wrote, the Middle East represents despotism, old age, decay, death and superstition (while)the Western archeologists who dominate the mummy represent democracy, youth, vigor, life and science.

In the 1960s, films with good Israelis versus bad Arab became a trend, Michalak said, with such films as “Exodus,” “Judith,” “Cast a Giant Shadow,” and “Survival.” “The Israelis are typically European,” Michalak said, “while the Arabs are undifferentiated, bearded killers.”

Arabs have a human face in David Lean’s 1962 epic “Lawrence of Arabia,” Michalak said, but ultimately they emerge as “hopelessly violent, incompetent, and divided by tribal jealousies.”

More recently, Shaheen points to examples in which the on-screen Arab has been portrayed as a ruthless and uncultured sheik attempting to buy media conglomerates in “Network,” destroying the world economy in “Rollover,” using nuclear weapons against the United States and Israel in “Wrong Is Right” and kidnaping a Western woman in “Jewel of the Nile.”

Arab-as-terrorist has been a favorite motif of Hollywood filmmakers since the early 1970s. Drawing from the headlines, Hollywood producers cast Arab characters as terrorists in films ranging from the thriller “Black Sunday” to the comic fantasy “Back to the Future.” “Delta Force,” said Michalak, took liberties with the real-life story of the 1985 TWA hijacking in order to give American audiences “a revenge fantasy.”

Salem is particularly concerned about the portrayal of Arabs on children’s cartoon shows, where they are often shown as terrorists committing horrible acts against fair-complexioned characters.

El Guindi said the portrayals of the Middle East in film and TV “reflects an attitude that has been rooted in Western culture since the Crusades, an attitude of hostility and a need to dominate Islam, puting it down and not understanding it.” Part of that, she says, stems from a lack of interest inside American schools, including universities, in Middle Eastern culture.

But a number of Arabs interviewed for this story expressed the view that a “pro-Israeli” attitude dominates Hollywood. “If Arabs lived in peace with Israel, you would see a different image,” said Shaheen.

With tensions raised in the Middle East, Arab-American groups seem to be increasingly sensitive about their on-screen image. While numerous Arab countries in the Middle East are American allies, Bustany fears that Americans will equate Arab-Americans with their chief enemy--Iraq’s Saddam Hussein--especially if war breaks out. “Everybody is conscious about the impact body bags will have,” said Bustany.

Earlier this week, reports surfaced that the FBI has quietly begun interviewing community and business leaders of Arab descent in an attempt to foil any possible terrorist attacks here. In the course of this operation, federal agents also are telling Arab-Americans they will provide protection if they become the targets of hate crimes.

Arabs in American movies haven’t always been bad guys. During the 1920s, Rudolph Valentino as “The Sheik” became the heart-throb of millions of Western women. His character was fundamentally honorable, Michalak said, but like other good Arabs, he turned out to be of European descent. As a New York Times critic breathlessly wrote at the time: “You won’t be offended by having a white girl marry an Arab either, for the Sheik really isn’t a native of the desert at all.”