ABSTRACT
Critical explorations of the relationship between Islam, cinema, and women contribute to academic debates around difference. This connection may be approached from different perspectives. One may think about the concept of representation in examining this topic: how are women represented in films produced in countries where Islam is the dominant religion? How do Islamic films represent women? Or, how do filmmakers who define themselves as Muslim represent issues around identity and cultural politics that inform discourses around womanhood? Furthermore, what kinds of themes and genres are chosen in films when the relationship between Islam and women is the focus of attention? How are Muslim women represented in cinemas of non-Muslim (predominantly Western) countries? One may approach these topics by examining questions around women filmmakers: what kinds of films do women from Muslim countries produce? Are there common and/or recurring themes in their films? How are these films different, if at all, from those made elsewhere? Informed by issues around representation and modes of production, it is also possible for one to approach the topic from the perspective of reception studies: how are films about women and Islam received around the world? How are women’s films from Islamic countries received within the country of their production and beyond? Do these films travel? In analyzing the relationship between cinema, Islam, and women, one may also choose to focus on Middle Eastern film. While this excludes areas outside Middle Eastern countries where Islam is the dominant religion, it enables a focus on comparable themes in the films of these socio-historical communities with shared geography and cultural and religious connections. Feminist scholarship about Islam and cinema demonstrates that there are prevailing and
longstanding discourses inherent in the ways women are represented in films (Akhavan 2015; Abu-Lughod 2002; Kahf 1999). As highlighted by recent research, Western media’s approach to Islam and the Muslim world has historically been from the perspective of difference and opposition that has promoted misrepresentative and inaccurate knowledge about Muslim nations and cultures (Alsultany 2012). In Western media, women have, in numerable ways, been represented as veiled, oppressed, and urgently in need of rescue (Abu-Lughod 2002). Western ideas about womanhood in the Middle East are informed by religious stereotypes and the representations of Islam in the media in general, and films in particular. For instance, Hollywood films are inclined to show Islam as intrinsically
oppressive towards women through the use of veiling and gender segregation to reinforce the so-called “backwardness” of Islamic societies. Indeed, Hollywood has endorsed a stereotyping of the “other” through the depiction of the “East” (Shohat and Stam 1994). The representation of Arab men, starting from the early days of Hollywood, and carrying through to the present, has varied from exotic men riding camels in the desert (for whom Arab women are only objects of desire), to terrorists and extravagantly oil-rich men (Donmez-Colin 2004). For instance, Iran has, for a very long time, mostly been (and, according to some, still is) known to theWest for the astonishingNot Without My Daughter, a 1991 MGM film by Brian Gilbert, which tells the story of a suffering American woman who is attempting to escape from her barbaric and highly religious Iranian husband who becomes “traditional” when he returns back to Iran from America. In this, as its trailer puts it, “terrifying true story of a woman whose only fault is being American,” Islam and Muslim women are depicted as backward, Iranian men as oppressive, and women in Iran as brutalized by a patriarchal culture. The oppressed woman narratives within films about Islamic countries are indeed numerous. However, it is important to question whether representations of Muslim women inWestern films are any different from those produced within, for example, the Middle East-and if yes, how. For instance, the problem with Not Without My Daughter is in its monolithic portrait of Islam and Iranian women. To suggest this is not to position oneself as “defending” a particular religion over another, but to acknowledge the problematic nature of representing women and/in Islam in an ideologically reductive way. On the other side of the coin, for example, the Sex and the City franchise has long been seen as valorizing a narrow depiction of white, Western womanhood. This was arguably crystallized in Sex and the City 2 (King, 2010). The film’s representation of “Abu Dhabi” as a culturally and socially “backward” space, just like its representation of Muslim women as veiled, enigmatic, and oppressed, have received considerable scrutiny from film critics from around the world. The condescending tone of the film towards Muslim/Middle Eastern women was the most talked about part of the film in its reviews. Indeed, the film was deemed as “borderline racist” by The Guardian (Bradshaw 2010). A controversial sequence in which the four American women (Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, Miranda) observe a woman wearing a burqa eating fries includes Samantha’s comment that “it is like they [women] don’t want to have a voice.” Stephen Farber, from The Hollywood Reporter (2010), wrote about the film’s “saucy political incorrectness.” In addition,Wajahat Ali’s Salon.com review observed that “nearly every singleMiddle Eastern female character in SATC 2’s imaginative rendition of “Abu Dhabi,” is veiled, silent or subdued by aggressive men” (2010). Contrary to this, Govindini Murty argued, in Libertas Film Magazine, that [the film] satirize[d] Islam’s treatment of women and points out that it is “the only big budget Hollywood film in recent years that dares to critique the repressive treatment of women in the Middle East.” However, as outlined by the majority of its critical reception, the film uses normative representational strategies to paint a monolithic picture of Islam and its treatment of women as brutally violent and unjust. The key issue here has to do with the repetition of such stories through the circulation of films around the world. These films are as much about constructing a fantasy of theWest as (by contrast) a place of freedom and progressive sexual politics as they are attempting to represent another culture. One question that an ideologically problematic representation of women and Islam raises
is: what alternative perspectives does this kind of popular narrative omit? Hollywood may have been the carrier of ideologies and images of the Islamic world, but with the increased number of films produced from within Middle Eastern or Muslim countries and by filmmakers of that origin, stereotypical images are progressively challenged and subverted, if less
often seen by international audiences. This is not to suggest that Middle Eastern films do not conform to stereotypes. At times, they, indeed, do reinforce negative images of Islam in highlighting issues around women’s oppression, yet these are typically used to critique the conditions that are consequences of cultural and religious values. Lina Khatib’s work, for instance, compares Hollywood’s and Arab cinema’s engagement in filming the modern Middle East (2006). She suggests that both Hollywood and Arab films depict women’s images/bodies as “authentic” symbols, while gender issues are emplotted as a tool of nationalism, although Arab cinema simultaneously attempts to subvert monolithic representations of the Middle East. While locating issues around the representations of Islam, women, and cinema, Khatib’s research suggests that, in Palestinian cinema, for instance, the liberation of the country is linked with that of women (ibid. p. 12). As Khatib’s examination of Algerian, Egyptian, and Palestinian films in relation and in contrast to Hollywood films suggests, women, femininity, and sexuality are used to symbolize the nation:
[N]ation is symbolized by wholesome femininity. While sexually aloof women are used to symbolize the foreign enemy…Algerian and Egyptian films use gender as a mark of modernity, the latter symbolizing the oppression of Islamic fundamentalism through the representation of silent, veiled women while highlighting fundamentalism’s immorality through depicting the hypocrisy of Islamic fundamentalist men in their relations with women in general.
