Yeah, I can understand how galling it must have been for Judaism to be the comic relief within the gritty realism that was Seinfeld.
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He was a fool to go on Fox News and try to be intelligent.
Exerytime he said “academic,” “historian,” or “PhD,” he lost more of the core audience.
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Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes less so:
http://cphpost.dk/news/denmark/danish-hateparty-advert-condemned.html
There are a few British shows that have done this, although the Muslim population is larger. One thing I’d say is that “regular” is a loaded term, since it could be understood to mean “not particularly religious” or “just like westerners”.
I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to compare them. While looking different from other people isn’t something you can hide easily, gay and religious people could choose to be invisible in society and not express who they are. The concept of choice is also problematic when it relates to culture and belief, since it’s such a strong part of your identity.
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The longest-running sitcom in the history of television is about a family that is explicitly identified as practicing Christians. The show even had a number of episodes centering on their religious beliefs, their church, their pastor and their annoyingly devout neighbors.
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What I mean is characters who are likable and relatable to audiences who aren’t necessarily Muslim themselves, just like how non-gay people can like and identify with characters on Will & Grace.
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I realise that’s what you were saying, it’s just that Will and Grace and Modern Family are both set in cultures and environments that are familiar to white people (even if many don’t have the wealth that is presented as normal in many TV shows). Presenting Muslim people in a way that people can identify with is probably more of a challenge.
I’m not holding up Seinfeld as a show that broke down a lot of barriers for Jewish people on TV, just as one example of how American television has been willing put Jewish characters on screen in a way they haven’t yet for American Muslims.
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How so? If a working-class midwestern audience can identify with a show about a gay lawyer from New York City then surely they could identify with a show about, say, a working-class Muslim family from Michigan.
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Something like this?
(I haven’t seen it, no idea what it’s like, although I know the neighbourhood it’s set in)
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Or for characters in TV shows without focusing on religion, there’s Seth Wright from the series Designated Survivor:
(It doesn’t actually say whether he’s religious or not, but he’s stopped by police for walking while brown with the insinuation that he’s a Muslim.)
TV has had characters and actors who were Jews on and off screen without representing the religious aspects of our people. Since theres no such thing as “the Muslim people” because Islam is a universalist relgion not isolated to any particular people, how is that going to work exactly without the religious aspect?
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It’s part of the way there. The comedy is so-so, but the really interesting thing is the title character. He’s actually depicted as humanly flawed. He’s vain, egotistical, always thinks he’s right and can also be a generous loving father. This is a lot better than the two-dimensional “always chaotic evil terrorist#2” or the “Token minority character who is always right ans wise about everything because the writers think they’re being prejudiced if they give them actual human flaws or characterisation” tropes.
However, the comedy and the characters are still presented in a context where being a muslim from Pakistan is 100% of their identity, and informs every part of their life.
What I’d like to see would be more shows that feature characters where their skin colour, national origin or religious choices aren’t 100% of their character. A show where characters can be portrayed as human and in character with things like this being entirely incidental to their performance and role. Where someone’s defined by their job, their interaction with other characters and their personal motivations, and if there is part of the plot around religion or background, to have the characters portrayed as having conflicting views about these themes, tackling the thorny issues and not being monolithic identikit “representatives” of a particular background.
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I haven’t actually seen Will and Grace, but it’s very common to see TV shows with people living in New York. It might not be a life that many viewers experience, but it’s part of the normal range of lifestyles for white people from a culturally Christian background. The fact that this couple is gay doesn’t make it seem foreign. The same goes for Modern Family – they are living in generic white culture and it’s easy to say that they’re not that different. In Seinfeld, there are a number of references to Jewish culture, but the New York lifestyle is the strongest. Heterosexual white people can look at most of the environments and see the characters as basically like them.
If you had shown the Seinfeld characters observing strict rules and attending religious services regularly, it would have been more difficult for people to identify with them. I meant that when you say “Americans need to see Muslims portrayed as regular people”, it’s important to realise that regular people look, act, dress, socialise, structure their time and do many other things quite differently depending on their culture. The question is how to get people to identify with Muslim characters without erasing or muting significant parts of many Muslim people’s markers of identity. I don’t think you can do it in one series in any case, since Muslim culture varies widely around the world and some Muslims in America do have lifestyles that are fairly familiar to white people.
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Seinfeld and other shows DID include religion as one aspect of their characters, just usually not as a major defining theme of the show.
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There is no other defining aspect of Muslims besides Islam.
It’s not like most American Muslims spend most of their time doing weird Muslim stuff that other people don’t do. I’ve had peers, friends and coworkers of various religions. I don’t imagine a sitcom based on my Muslim coworkers’ lives would need look that different from a sitcom based on my Jewish or Christian coworkers’ lives, except maybe fewer episodes involving the central character getting hammered.
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What do you think about the gay community equating their struggle to the classical civil rights struggle then? Are Muslims not actively being discriminated against, with one political party advocating for a registry? What about gay muslims? Are they invisibile in this conversation? And why is all of this ON Aslan entirely? Why does he have to make you feel better about what some of his co-religionist might be doing? Do you know what HIS view of the LBGQT community is, especially within the Ummah itself?
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I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Why couldn’t there be a show about characters who just happen to be Muslim without centering every episode around Islam? Transparent is about an American Jewish family but most episodes aren’t about Judaism.
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That might be the only thing they have in common (the only defining aspect of people called Mark is that they are called Mark), but individual Muslims have plenty of defining aspects.
It depends on what you mean by weird; you might not be acting particularly different from each other in the intersection of your life with theirs, and this is important. However, in most cases they are just being your friend, your colleague or your peer, not your Muslim friend. They’re speaking your language and may be adjusting to your culture without expecting you to do the same. Religion and other cultural differences probably aren’t a big element in your interactions, even if it’s a big part of their lives. As a kid, most of my fellow students or friends outside the church didn’t see the religious side of me much, even though I spent a lot of my free time in church activities.
It’s not that I think it’s impossible to identify with Muslim characters at all, it’s just a lot easier if you take out all the weird Muslim stuff. It’s an issue that is addressed quite a bit in translation studies – translating the otherness of a minority culture in a way that’s understandable to the reader, but doesn’t impose the cultural standards of the more dominant target culture.
In just the last 10 years Hollywood has given us popular TV shows with central protagonists who were LGBT people and addicts and Meth cooks and murderous biker gangs and crooked cops and polygamists and Russian spies and incestuous royalty and robots and vampires.
I’m pretty sure that some talented screenwriters would find a way to create a relatable working-class family of American Muslims.
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