Riz Ahmed wants to end Hollywood’s misrepresentation of Muslims. Here’s how
Riz Ahmed, the British Pakistani star of Amazon’s Oscar-winning film Sound of Metal, has long been disturbed by Hollywood’s depiction of Muslims as terrorists.
So he and a group of activists are launching a series of initiatives aimed at combating stereotypes on screen and hiring more Muslim creators.
The actor and producer has teamed with Pillars Fund, a Chicago-based advocacy group, and the Ford Foundation to create $25,000 fellowships for Muslim storytellers. They have also commissioned a study that highlights the marginalization of Muslims in Hollywood.
Muslims accounted for just 1.6% of 8,965 speaking characters across 200 popular films from the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand released from 2017 through 2019, according to a USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study published Thursday. Yet Muslims accounted for 24% of the global population in 2015, according to Pew
Research.
“The cost of this lack of representation is measured in lost potential in terms of storytellers and artists in their careers and what they can contribute, lost audiences in terms of people switching off, and over a billion Muslims around the world who don’t get to connect to these stories,” Ahmed, 38, said in an interview via Zoom. “This failure of representation is experienced by Muslims as pain, physical pain, in terms of being attacked, in terms of countries being invaded, in terms of discriminatory legislation.”
Advocacy for Muslims in media comes as other marginalized groups have sought social justice and equity in Hollywood. After Black Lives Matter protests, the industry’s employers and unions have been under pressure to address their role in the lack of diversity across the film and TV business.
A coalition that includes Ahmed, Pillars and Ford also unveiled a “Blueprint for Muslim Inclusion,” calling on companies in the next 18 months to “sunset” terrorist tropes and to secure a first look deal with at least one Muslim creator.
“What we’re really advocating for is for Muslim artists and creatives to have control and be able to tell the stories that they want to tell,” said Kashif Shaikh, co-founder and president of Pillars Fund. “We’re not here trying to say that Muslims are all awesome .... We want messiness, we want nuance, we want to be able to sort of fit in that middle ground.”
As part of the initiative, organizers asked USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s
Stacy Smith, as well as a team of Muslim student research assistants, to analyze the depiction of Muslims on screen.
“There’s absolutely no reason why casting directors can’t act on this data and we would not be able to see a change next year,” Smith said.
According to the USC study, less than 10% of the movies surveyed included a Muslim character in a speaking role, and 76.4 % were male. Only 4.4% of Muslim characters filled primary roles in the cast.
Across the 200 films analyzed from 2017 to 2019, just one Muslim character identified as LGBT, and there was one Muslim character shown with a disability. More than half of primary and secondary characters were shown as immigrants, migrants or refugees. Muslim women were stereotyped and depicted as submissive.
About two-thirds of Muslim characters in the 200 films were depicted as Middle Eastern or North African, about 21% were Asian and only 5.6% were black or African-American. The study’s researchers found Muslim characters were most often rooted in times and places that promoted them as “foreign” or “other,” or were set in some fantastical past as with Walt Disney’s 2019 Aladdin.
In reality, Muslims are one of the most racially and ethnically diverse religious groups in the world, with the bulk of the Muslim population, about 62%, located in Asia. About a fifth of US Muslims identify as black, according to various Pew Research studies.
Violence is wrapped up in Hollywood’s conception of Muslims. Nearly 40% of Muslim primary and secondary characters were shown as perpetrators of violence, and more than half (53.7%) of these characters were targeted by violence, the study found.
“This is a unique moment for this research to come out,” said Noorain Khan, director in the president’s office for the Ford Foundation. “So many of the challenges that so many communities face are rooted in negative, entrenched cultural narratives.” (Los Angeles Times/TNS)