What Muslim creativity would look like without tired old stereotypes

Actor Riz Ahmed in New York on April 25, 2017. Reuters

In his 1946 essay Why I Write, George Orwell wrote: "The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude."

Sometimes the same logic can apply to creative endeavours. These shape our narratives and by extension, affect how society is structured and how we treat each other.

It is why I started writing in 2005, driven by the need, as Orwell said, “to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.”

After September 11 in the US and July 7 in the UK, I felt the need to push back against a world that too often stereotyped Muslims as backwards, foreign and violent.

I wanted to write a book that was a story about a British Muslim woman (me) who broke with convention to be self-determining, proud of faith and humorous.

Eventually Love in a Headscarf was a bestseller, translated in 14 languages, but finding a publisher was a bruising experience. Rejections always have a veneer of plausibility. You can sometimes believe them and be plagued with self-doubt. Some of the rejections I heard were: the story you want to tell is the wrong one. Or: write the story I want you to write to define you instead. Or, I don't know who the audience for this is. Or, perhaps the most gaslighting of all rejections: we need this story to be completely different, but repeat the stereotypes.

You might think that this is history, but I hear the same sort of rejections today as I did 15 years ago, which is so galling because today we have the vocabulary to understand the problems of underrepresentation. We understand the moral imperative to create space for authentic voices. We know the commercial opportunities for new stories and new audiences.

And I am not the only one to have such experiences. The actor Riz Ahmed says that sometimes “you’ve got a feeling anecdotally and experientially, and you’ve been gas lit”. The first step to solving that is data. This week Ahmed published research exploring the depiction of Muslims in the 200 top grossing films between 2017 and 2019 in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand. The research was carried out by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, with the Ford Foundation, Pillars Fund, Riz Ahmed and Left Handed Films.

The findings of Missing and Maligned: The Reality of Muslims in Popular Global Movies are sobering. Out of these 200 films, 181 had not one Muslim character who spoke a word. The report called it an "epidemic of invisibility".

Just 1.6 per cent of 8,965 speaking characters in these films were Muslim. Of which less than a quarter (23.6 per cent) were female. This when Muslims make up over 24 per cent of the global population.

Tired tropes dominate in these films of Muslims as: perpetrators of violence (39 per cent) or targets of it (53.7 per cent); depicted as foreign or other (87.8 per cent), spoke no English or with a "foreign" accent. Most Muslim characters present in the majority of these films only further the goals of the white male leads.

Ahmed talks about three stages: stereotypes, which most narratives adhere to, and where Muslims are co-opted, despite their dislike of playing a part in such narratives, but often these roles are the only option for an actor to get work. Next, subverting stereotypes, with the chance to challenge. But the ultimate goal is the promised land, where you can be a creative on your own terms.

Even the seemingly simple task to go from stereotype to subverting stereotypes is no mean feat, requiring the overturning of long-entrenched notions.

In 2016 I wrote Generation M, a book exploring a new emerging global Muslim identity. Instead of tired tropes, this was the real world story, rooted in data and presented research of a global segment of positive, optimistic, entrepreneurial, worldly young Muslims. It brought a religious identity together with modernity.

But the spotlight still largely centres on tired, lazy and frankly unimaginative narratives such as "escaped" from Islam or escape from extremism.

Last year I had a taste of what it might feel like to live in the promised land as a creative – nothing to do with stereotypes as a Muslim – when I published my first children's book, The Extraordinary Life of Serena Williams. In the TV interviews no one asked me about my headscarf or if Muslims are terrorists. I was simply me, a writer, talking about my art. In those interviews I felt joy and liberation. I asked myself, is this how it could feel all the time?

I also realised the opposite: how stifling and restrictive the invisible constraints are slowly killing my creativity.

So Riz (if I may), thank you for putting numbers behind what so many of us have experienced and tried to articulate in order to shift false narratives. There are many of us who are part of this movement to ensure Muslims can tell the stories that they want to tell, whatever those might be, away from lazy stereotypes.

Shelina Janmohamed is an author and a culture columnist for The National