Haqq and Hollywood: Illuminating 100 years of Muslim Tropes And How to Transform Them - Pop Culture Collaborative #HaqqAndHollywood

The angry, but inept, terrorist. The bumbling Sheikh. The sultry belly dancer. The ‘Good’ Muslim vs. the ‘Bad’ Muslim.

These are just a few of the tropes about Muslims that have dominated American film and television screens for more than a century. Too often, these negative and false ideas give fuel to anti-Muslim public sentiment and punitive public policies.

Yet, there is hope. In the last few years, more authentic and nuanced stories reflecting the diversity and complexity of Muslim communities have started to emerge from Hollywood.

Read about all of this, and more, in Haqq and Hollywood: Illuminating 100 years of Muslim Tropes And How to Transform Them, a groundbreaking new report by Pop Culture Collaborative Senior Fellow Dr. Maytha Alhassen.

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Dr. Alhassen, the Pop Culture Collaborative and its special partner, the Pillars Fund, gathered input from organizers and artists in the field including screenwriter and producer Sameer Gardezi, Harness executive director Marya Bangee, and Zaheer Ali, director of the public history project Muslims in Brooklyn. Collectively, these recommendations are for stakeholders in entertainment, philanthropy, and the Muslim social justice community.

1. Understand the diversity of Muslim communities, and frontline their participation in, and ownership of, the creative process.

There is no one way that people identify as Muslim. There is no one way to be a Muslim.” -Kashif Shaikh, Pillars Fund

Muslims are not a homogenous group. Women, men, gender non-conforming, queer, secular, faith-based, African, Arab, Black, South Asian and much, much more, the American Muslim community is incredibly diverse. To understand this complexity, and for Muslims to have agency over this storytelling:

Don’t wait until the end. Writers, showrunners, and producers working in Hollywood and Muslim-community organizations—such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Pillars Fund, Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative (MuslimARC), MPOWER Change, MOST, I nner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN), and more—should be included as partners in story creation on an ongoing basis instead of being brought in as consultants after the concept, script, casting, set design, etc. have already mostly been developed and determined.
Gain “intimate knowledge.” Both Muslim and non-Muslim artists should engage with source material such as oral histories and first-person narratives to inform plotlines and portrayals. Advisors are abundant: Zaheer Ali at the Brooklyn Historical Society; director of research Dalia Mogahed from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding; Sapelo Square founder Su’ad Abdul-Khabeer; MuslimARC managing director Margari Hill at ReThink Media; Sahar Ullah of Hijabi Monologues; Hussein Rashid; The Secret Life of Muslims; and more.

You aren’t doing us a favor. It’s to your benefit to get the story right and to tell the authentic story that the audience wants. –Kalia Abiade, Pillars Fund

2. Build and expand creative and career pipelines for Muslim artists within the entertainment industry.

Hollywood is doing a decent job with the entry level, but we need a middle tier of Muslim writers who can be decision makers and have power. There’s currently nowhere for them to go. In this bottom-heavy industry with a pyramid structure, lots of entry level people will be pushed out. How do we make sure that the artists who are breaking in now have 20+-year careers in the industry? -Sameer Gardezi, television writer

Philanthropists and the entertainment industry can make substantial, ongoing investments in all stages of the pipeline for Muslim creatives, starting at points of entry and continuing through a long-term career trajectory. This includes:

Map the access points. Develop, update, and share tools that map available resources, fellowships, and diversity programs to help more emerging Muslim creatives know about and have access to entry-level creative and executive opportunities—and make these tools available to Muslim-serving organizations and Muslim artist collectives involved in theater, fine arts, authors and more.
Redesign pipelines, support long-term career trajectories. Traditional diversity fellowships offer an important foot in the door to writers’ rooms for some aspiring writers and executives. However, these fellowships can fall short of influencing the overall power dynamic within the industry in terms of who is creating and greenlighting content. Also, fellowships aren’t setting up enough individuals to have long-term, sustainable careers in the entertainment industry.To address this problem, many entertainment artists are developing their own pipeline models to focus on artists of color, women, Muslims and more such as Color Creative and ARRAY Alliance. BoomGen Studios—is exploring the design of a content incubator that supports emerging artists to develop work and pitch it for television or film while gaining the tools and relationships to navigate and negotiate the business aspects of the entertainment industry.Look to these companies and projects as potential partners and/or inspirational models.

3. Invest in Muslim communities’ ability to advance long-term narrative change and participate in the pop culture for social change field.

We need to build our capacity for coordinated responses around important political moments and pop culture moments, and we need to build the infrastructure for a long-term, multifaceted narrative inclusive of the diversity of Muslim communities. This includes pipelines for talent to break into the entertainment industry, support with how to navigate it and go-to relationships between Muslim community leaders, Muslim artists and entertainment industry leaders such that the right people are tapped and hired when opportunities arise. -Marya Bangee, executive director, Harness

Design a transformative narrative; engage in long-term pop culture change strategies. Muslim-community social justice organizations, artists, strategists and philanthropy can come together to design and invest in a long-term narrative vision. Currently, the Pop Culture Collaborative and the Pillars Fund are partnering to create the American Muslim Pop Culture Cohort—a group of individuals and organizations from social movements, entertainment, the arts, advertising, and academia, as well as other Muslim stakeholders—to design a long-term narrative vision and culture change strategy for and by the Muslim community.

Culture change strategies are multi-faceted, and include the ability to:

Build pop campaign power. Muslim-community social justice organizations can build power by mounting campaigns at important pop-cultural moments, whether to advance a narrative strategy and vision (e.g. National Domestic Workers Alliance’s The Help campaign) or to hold pop culture content accountable for advancing false stereotypes (e.g. Color of Change’s Cops campaign).
Learn how to navigate, and partner, with the entertainment industry. Support the thoughtful work and deep expertise it takes for Muslim-community stakeholders to build partnerships with artists and entertainment executives, and to become effective advisors on scripts, casting, and production. Muslim-focused organizations ready to engage in this deep partnership building need mentorship from individuals, organizations, and networks rooted in social justice communities who are already working closely with writers’ rooms and production companies. Examples of these existing narrative-strategy experts: Storyline Partners, Define American, ACLU, Color of Change, Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative (MuslimARC), Harness, MOST of Unity Film Productions, SILA Consulting, and the report’s author Dr. Maytha Alhassen.Muslim-serving community organizations and networks can learn from these existing models and/or partner with these organizations to effectively navigate and build relationships in the entertainment industry. Philanthropy can support both mentorship as well as learning and partnership development.

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Maytha Alhassen

Senior Fellow

Maytha Alhassen is a Syrian-American journalist, poet and scholar, working to bridge the worlds of social justice, academic research, popular culture and artistic expression. Alhassen has performed and wrote for “Hijabi Monologues” and worked with Blackout Arts Collective to support the development of art and poetry projects for incarcerated youth.

As a Senior Fellow, Alhassen will lead a project to unlock new pathways to create and popularize authentic narratives for Muslim, Arab and South Asian (MASA) people in pop culture. She will curate a cohort of MASA stakeholders across advocacy, social justice, philanthropic, entertainment, marketing, and other fields to engage in a yearlong culture change learning and narrative strategy design process.

(Follow Maytha @maythaphd)

Read Maytha’s groundbreaking report, “Haqq and Hollywood: 100 Years of Muslim Tropes and How to Transform Them”