more thoughts about All-American Muslim
I read this article by Asra Nomani on the Daily Beast about why advertisers are right to boycott the show.
Here are just a few plot twists that are stomach turners to me as a Muslim seeking some sort of challenge to conventional, traditional, old-school Islamic interpretation reminiscent of the Dark Ages. In “How to Marry a Muslim,” an American-Muslim woman with tattoos meets an Irish-Catholic love interest in a bar; they plan to get married, but then she tells him he has to convert to Islam first. It’s painful to watch the backyard conversion. Many Muslim women are challenging the notion that they can’t marry non-Muslim men, and it’s a shame we had to watch this Irish-Catholic man go through the same old gauntlet of conversion. This isn’t “How to Marry a Muslim,” and it’s a little disingenuous to present it as the how-to guide. Yawn.
Then, the newly married American-Muslim bride with a tattoo tells her newly converted Irish-Catholic husband that his dog can’t live in their house because it’s haram, or illegal—which thank you very much is just a medieval fatwa like the recent one that says women can’t eat bananas because bananas are just too sexy for a Muslim woman. It’s part of an old idea that a dog’s saliva is dirty. Uh, ever heard of rabies shots?
Even when I thought I couldn’t watch anymore, I did, for research purposes. Lo and behold, Jane Muslim runs to her imam for a faith check on whether she can do artificial insemination or not. I can tell you what he is going to say before she wraps her scarf dutifully around her hair to go meet the imam. Not only, no, but hell no—with a smile. But what if she covers her hair? Would that help? That would “please Allah,” the imam responded. Really? That’s a new strategy of fertility treatment I hadn’t yet heard about.
So basically she’s saying that the show is just bad television because it’s disingenous in its portrayal of Islam. At first glance I agreed, but when I thought about it later, I changed my mind. Maybe TLC should issue some kind of disclaimer that this isn’t a portrayal of Islam per se, but really that isn’t the goal, or at least the result, of the show. Really, the goal of the show is not to interpret the Quran and try to interpret it to modern day society. The goal of the show is to tell us about American Muslims, and the fact is, that is how many Muslims are today in the U.S. Maybe we’d like to think that our generation of Muslims in the United States is more modern and liberal in its beliefs and customs, but it’s really not. We still look down on women who wear provocative clothing or even those that simply don’t wear hijab. There are countless women even in the US who veil only because they are pressured to by husbands, fathers, mothers, brothers, or even “sheikhs” who give them misguided advice. We still blame rape victims rather than the rapists. We still believe that we should treat women differently than men in every aspect of life just because of the simple fact that they are women. Just the fact that this woman has to go to a MALE sheikh to seek Islamic advice about religious treatment is just outrageous. But it still happens. Women are still discriminated from being Islamic leaders and scholars and Imams in the American Muslim community. I myself have been told many times by Muslims in my community that if I didn’t wear the veil, “my parents would go to hell.” We’re not mad at TLC for presenting Muslims in a bad light, we’re mad at them for showing us the truth.
