Examining the Critical Role American Popular Film Continues to Play in Maintaining the Muslim Terrorist Image, Post 9/11

The truth of Islam in the way it is portrayed and distributed through popular movies is flawed in that it offers a homogeneous and monolithic understanding, essentializing the discourse on religion. This rhetoric of normativity becomes even more problematic when trying to understand a religion in a multicultural context. Rather than resigning oneself to the fact that it may be impossible to teach what Islam is through film, or pondering whether the term exists, one might be able to use alternative and competing narratives in film to emphasize cleavages in authoritative knowledge. Religious essentialism can be also questioned in the context of immigration - new worlds within the story-world of Islam. Instead of focusing on one general or mainstream understanding about the authenticity of multicultural perspectives on Islam allow for a multiplicity of narratives about the intertextual understanding of what Islam is (or is not) and what a Muslim is (or is not). Unfortunately, popular film in America has essentialized Islam by creating a western notion of what Islam is (or isn't).Although it has been argued that Immigrant Muslims in America have become demonized as a national security threat since 9/11, this demonization and otherness has existed for quite some time. Muslim communities and families face bias crimes, sweeping arrests, popular and media hostility and official assumptions of guilt by association. For decades, the West has viewed Islam as violent, confrontational, and barbaric. This fear of traced through historical conflict between Christians and Muslims, has been transmitted through generations by literature, folklore, academic writings, and now film.American cinema has, for the past one hundred years, offered up the image of Islam and the portrayal of Muslims in different, yet for the most part negative, ways. It has used images to construct sentiment, to strengthen attachment, and to promote replication, and it has reproduced its relationship to the Orient in an ever-changing progression (Miles 1996: 10). It has espoused the cultural assumptions on which Orientalism is founded. In early films, such as The Unfaithful Odalisque (1900), The Palace of Arabian Nights (1905), The (1915), The Sheikh (1921), The Desert Song (1929) and Thief of Damascus (1952), the world of Islam was depicted as mysterious and exotic, filled with images of bejewelled, yet, veiled women in harems, bearded sheikhs and dark-skinned villains living in places in the desert landscapes surrounded by palm trees and camels. But the mysterious and exotic do not necessarily promote a positive image (Ramji 2005).In the early 1900s, American films embellished the portrayals of the caricatures written about by the Europeans. In mythic Arabia, bearded Arabs rode camels in the desert, waved swords, killed each other and coveted Western heroines. Women were kept in harems and belly danced in revealing clothing. These old stereotypes have been replaced with new ones. The sheik and lusty despot have slowly disappeared, leaving hijackers, kidnappers and terrorists. Muslim women have disappeared behind the chador and burqa (Picherit-Duthler and Yunis 2011).The Muslim male is portrayed as a backward and undeveloped heathen. American film, in its projection of Arabs, consistently associates Arab with Islam, thus all Arabs are Muslims and all Muslims are Arabs. American film does not usually offer depictions of Muslims as Indonesian, Malaysian or Pakistani, countries that have the highest Muslim populations. Even though approximately fifteen percent of all Arabs are Muslim, the two become one in American cinema. Muslims in American films speak Arabic, invoke the name of Allah and wear specifically Middle Eastern clothing: in the case of women one sees the burqa (Afghanistani) or the chador (Iranian) and the men usually wear the kafeyah (checkered scarf associated with Palestine). American cinema has created a homogeneous concept of what a Muslim is, and what a Muslim extremist is - he is an (Shaheen 2001). …

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