[In the first episode of this tv series, the 16-year-old
Pakistani-American superhero despairs of being allowed to go to a
comic book convention, saying, “Anyway, it is not as if the brown
girls are the ones who save the world.” Obviously, the point of this
series is to disprove this defeatist point of view.]
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CAN MS. MARVEL CHANGE THE IMAGE OF ISLAM IN AMERICA?  
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Juan Cole
June 10, 2022
Informed Comment
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_ In the first episode of this tv series, the 16-year-old
Pakistani-American superhero despairs of being allowed to go to a
comic book convention, saying, “Anyway, it is not as if the brown
girls are the ones who save the world.” Obviously, the point of this
series is to disprove this defeatist point of view. _

,

 

The Marvel Cinematic Universe streaming superhero television
show, _Ms. Marvel_
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Disney+ this week, and it is a revolution in the representation of
Muslim Americans on television.

The story revolves around a Pakistani-American 16-year-old girl from
Jersey City who resents her strict and protective parents and wants to
attend a comic book convention in *gasp* the evening and to wear a
Captain Marvel uniform as cosplay. The hero, Kamala Khan, is played
engagingly by Iman Vellani, a young Pakistani-Canadian actress.
Ultimately, she sneaks off to the convention with a
boy-who-is-a-friend (not a boyfriend) Bruno Carelli, played by Matt
Linz (who played Henry in AMC’s _The Walking Dead_). Her
grandmother had left a bracelet, and Kamala adds it to her Captain
Marvel ensemble in hopes of winning a contest for best costume at the
convention. It turns out that the bracelet is sort of like Aladdin’s
lamp, bestowing superpowers of extension on her. She uses those powers
at the convention but inadvertently causes some mayhem. She returns
home to find her mother in her room waiting for her, aware that she
had sneaked out. She is grounded.

At one point in the first episode, when she despairs of being allowed
to go to the convention, she says, “Anyway, it is not as if the
brown girls are the ones who save the world.”

Obviously, the point of the series is to disprove this defeatist point
of view.

The television series is written by Pakistani-British comedian Bisha
K. Ali, and Adil El Arbi, Bilall Fallah, Meera Menon, and Sharmeen
Obaid-Chinoy direct.

The streaming show is based on the award-winning _Ms. Marvel_ comic
books and graphic novels, which were begun by Sana Amanat and G.
Willow Wilson, both Muslims, with art by Adrian Alphona.

Sana Amanat is a Pakistani-American raised in Jersey City, so there is
a lot of her in Kamala. She had a career in magazine publishing, and
then was hired in 2009 by Marvel Comics in a quest to make the company
more diverse. She is now Director of Content and Character Development
at Marvel, and has worked on other characters, such as Hawkeye, as
well.

G. Willow Wilson [[link removed]] is a novelist who
deploys techniques of magical realism, and was the author of the first
few years’ worth of Ms. Marvel comics.

Kamala Khan as played by Vellani is a sympathetic character, and she
could end up helping do for Muslim Americans what the sitcom _Will
and Grace_ did for gays.

Some Muslim American commenters have worried that the depiction of
Kamala’s very pious older brother and her strict parents will
solidify rather than dispel some stereotypes. Me, I remember immigrant
sitcoms like the Danny Thomas show in the 1950s that had some similar
tropes. When Uncle Tannous visited from Lebanon, he thought Thomas’s
American wife was way too skinny and wouldn’t be up to pulling a
plow. Or there was Jimmy Durante, the Italian-American comedian who
made fun of his own people’s syntax with phrases like “Yes, we
have no bananas.” From that point of view, Ms. Marvel’s cliches
stand in a long line of New World/ Old World tropes.

Some conservative Muslims have objected that Kamala Khan does not
cover her hair. But I lived in Pakistan, and was interested to note
that veiling is much less common in South Asia than in the Arab world.
(It wasn’t so common in Egypt up to about 1990, either). So this
criticism may come from differences between Muslim American
traditions.

The generally positive and human depiction of Muslims is in any case a
big change. We have had entire series, like Fox’s “24,” premised
on Islamophobia. Muslims became stock villains. Rami Malik (a Coptic
Christian of Egyptian extraction) even got a lot of cred for refusing
to have his Bond villain be a Muslim in _No Time to Die_. This
refusal is only newsworthy because the Muslim villain had become the
default.

It wasn’t just dramas. I can remember being outraged some years ago
when I saw a CNN report on violence by a small group of Muslim
extremists somewhere, and they ran stock footage of ordinary Muslims
praying in a mosque to illustrate it.

The American public has not always had a poor image of Muslims. In the
Cold War era, they were often considered allies against Godless
Communism. The Eisenhower administration even gave aid to Saudi Arabia
to expand rail lines to Mecca to encourage Muslims to go on
pilgrimage.

The September 11 attacks were carried out by a terrorist group that
included secular-minded individuals such as the Lebanese hijacker Ziad
Jarrah, who had a live-in Turkish girlfriend and some of whose family
members were secular Baathists. Other members were a weird sort of
Muslim nationalist. Al-Qaeda has never been more than a fringe
extremist group in the Muslim world, akin to the KKK in the United
States, and certainly does not represent Islam. Nevertheless, many
Americans went on to tag Muslims in general with extremism and
violence in subsequent years, very unfairly.

As I discussed for Tomdispatch
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winter, even US law enforcement has been so obsessed by the small and
for the most part remarkably well-behaved Muslim American community
that they didn’t bother to keep sufficient watch on white
supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys, enabling the Capitol
insurrection.

There are something like 3.8 million Muslim Americans now, about 1.15%
of the population, and their numbers are roughly half that of Jewish
Americans. Muslim Americans are roughly divided into four major
groups, white converts — mostly Sufis– Arab Americans, South Asian
Americans, and African Americans.

By South Asia I mean Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
There are now roughly half a million Pakistani Americans in
particular, which would make them about 13% of the Muslim American
population. The majority are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi rite, but
Shiites form a significant minority (20% ?) among them. Their national
language is Urdu, which is related to Hindi but with more Persian and
Arabic vocabulary. Pakistan itself however, is ethnically diverse,
having Punjabis, Pukhtuns, Baloch, Sindhis and Urdu-speaking
immigrants from India known as Muhajirs.

Despite the four broad rubrics given above, Muslim Americans are
extremely diverse, hailing from Senegal and Bangladesh, Egypt and
India, Algeria and Malaysia. Many have been bewildered to be put by
other Americans under the sign of al-Qaeda, since it comes from a
narrow religious tradition and the hothouse atmosphere of
Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, and is completely different from their
own traditions. It is sort of as though the KKK carried out a
terrorist action in China and then Chinese started being suspicious of
Methodists and Roman Catholics.

Ironically, the virulent Islamophobia of the Trump administration
appears to have caused Americans to rethink their views of the
minority. A 2019 Pew Research Center
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found that 89% of Americans say they would welcome a Muslim as a
neighbor. 79% say they would welcome a Muslim as a family member. I
suppose that means they would be all right with their son or daughter
marrying one. While you have to regret the bigotted 19%, these
attitudes are a huge improvement on those held even a decade ago.

On the other hand, half of Americans have doubts about whether Islam
is compatible with democracy.

Myself, I have doubts about whether the contemporary Republican Party
is compatible with democracy.

_Juan Cole [[link removed]] is the founder and chief editor
of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History
at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other
books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires
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Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
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Follow him on Twitter at @jricole
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the Informed Comment Facebook Page
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* Comic Books
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* Superheros
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* Superhero TV
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* Muslim Americans
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