The Villainous Depiction of Muslims

I watched in horror and astonishment last night as the Chechen “Mafia” raped a helpless woman, and a well-educated,well-mannered, even eloquent terrorist, in the name of Islam, calmly quoted from the Koran and performed his prayers in the midst of hijacking a plane. His Arab accomplices, toting high-caliber machinery and displaying paranoid, psychotic behavior, made my insides churn, particularly when my son exclaimed, “Are these Muslims?!” We were watching the new Warner Bros. release “Executive Decision,” about terrorists who steal bombs and hijack a plane to destroy the United States.

My son felt more emotion as he watched the main villain in the movie bowing in prostration. “Why would a terrorist be praying?” he muttered. The same question resounded in my mind as we watched the prayer prostrations we associate with the security and comfort of our Islamic faith become the symbolic embodiment of terror. This was clearly another one in a string of movies depicting Islam as the enemy. But what was particularly traumatizing about this movie was that it associated mainstream Islamic practices with terrorism.

It is exactly this juxtaposition, that of fanatic terrorist activity alongside mainstream Muslim practices such as prayer, reading from the Koran, the Holy Book of Islam, and speaking the Arabic language, that defiles Islam and Muslims. A similar analogy would be a scene featuring Yigal Amir reading from the Torah, rocking back and forth in prayer, and then proceeding to assassinate Yitzhak Rabin. The difference is that filmmakers would think twice before drawing that hideous connection and would show more responsibility in portraying Amir as an outlier rather than a representative of mainstream Judaism. That responsible treatment was not afforded to Muslims in this film.

As a convert to Islam, I find the treatment of Islam, Muslims and Arabs in this movie and others like it (“True Lies,” “Not Without My Daughter”) to be extremely offensive, irresponsible and dangerous. Portraying Muslims in this light only serves to outrage American Muslims, increase the lack of understanding of a great religion and fuel the fire of paranoia, racism and distrust against Muslims.

In scene after scene, the movie hammered homethe point that it was the deranged Muslims against “Us,” Us being the rational, non-Arab, non-Muslim “Us.” The contrast was stark. For example, all the non-Muslims in the movie were either victims or heroes, while every Muslim was either a criminal or a terrorist. By the end of the movie, the line separating Muslims and terrorists had been erased. As the crowd cheered the end of the terrorist threat, I began to feel the enormity of the ensuing threat against Muslims. Was the crowd cheering the defeat of the terrorists or of the Muslims? Did they even know the difference?

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It would be easy to argue that no religion has gone unscathed in Hollywood productions, and thus Islam is no exception. However, it is important to recognize that movies negatively characterizing Islam cannot be compared with those negatively characterizing other religions for two important reasons.

First, the United States is arguably a Judeo-Christian society where Islamic knowledge among the populous is extremely low and perceptions about Islam extremely impressionable; it is difficult for the American audience to perceive Muslim extremists as the exception rather than the rule. Thus it is easy for them to draw the conclusion that all Muslims, or even most Muslims, possess extremist tendencies or that the Islamic faith and their people are strange and fanatical.

Secondly, because knowledge of the richness and complexity of Islam within Hollywood and the media is low, there is no interest in portraying Islam in the balanced and complex way that it deserves. It is easy and marketable to portray Islam and Muslims as a simplified, stereotypical package so that it can wholly and summarily be dismissed as a fundamentalist phenomenon. “Executive Decision” is a case in point. And it is clearly wrong.

In this country, my country, where the founding principles consist of freedom of thought, religion and diversity, I find such portrayals an affront to my rights as a U.S. citizen and my dignity as a Muslim.