Reel-life Islam lacks realistic touch

Divine intervention. It's what allowed Buddha to find enlightenment, Moses to part the Red Sea, Muhammad to become a lightning rod for spiritual visions and Jesus to walk on water. And, if you'll believe him, it's what allowed Mel Gibson to complete The Passion of the Christ.

Amid reports of anti-Semitism, Gibson's labor of spiritual love opened on Feb. 25 to mixed reviews – some glowing, others disgusted – and a walloping $175 million intake at the box office in its first five days of distribution.

The Passion will most likely become famous as a movie that got away with supposedly preaching intolerance. So what about another ethnic group that has been vilified by films which remain comfortably below the radar of political-correctness? What about Muslims?

Although the terrorists behind the Sept. 11 attacks were Islamic, it must be understood that Muslim terrorists represent a perversion of the Islamic faith, equitable with Ku Klux Klan members who use the Christian Bible to justify atrocities against blacks. With few exceptions, such as in the 1994 film Speed, white terrorists, like the Unabomber and Oklahoma-City-bomber Timothy McVeigh, are conspicuously absent in most films.

Unfortunately, borderline racist films steeped in Christian theology like The Passion continue to see wide distribution, whereas positive films concerning Islam, such as Osama, have to fight to find an audience outside of art-house theaters.

Idiots and terrorists

Beginning in 1994, a number of movies that portrayed negative Muslim stereotypes were released in quick succession. The action thrillers True Lies, Executive Decision and The Peacemaker presented evil Muslim terrorists battling heroes played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kurt Russell and Nicole Kidman, respectively. The violent films showcased scenes of Muslims suicide-bombing restaurants with copies of the Quran in hand and of terrorists reciting Islamic prayers before killing innocent people. The crazed religious insurgents featured in these films were depicted as savage women-beaters with a penchant for painful torture.

The torture only slightly abated in the comedy Office Space. It's hard not to cringe when a bungling Muslim working-stiff in the film is nudged into stealing corporate dollars by his white co-workers, who claim that jail isn't all that bad because of conjugal visits.

Whether they are trying to kill Russell, ruin Schwarzenegger's marriage, sully Kidman's seemingly indestructible hairdo or rip-off corporate America, Muslims are typecast in Hollywood as either ruthless terrorists or clumsy idiots.

The most grievous insult is that Hollywood insists on treating Islam like a foreign institution. The movies take neither the time nor effort to portray the depth and richness of the Islamic culture. Rather than learning about Islam or taking the care to create complex stories including positive Islamic role models, Hollywood has contented itself with ignorantly confining Muslims to roles as evil terrorists or minorities.

Neither Hollywood nor the general viewing public seem to care whether or not Muslims in the U.S. – who now outnumber Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Mormons – are happy with how they are depicted on the silver screen. True Lies, Executive Decision and The Peacemaker earned a combined box office gross of $463,242,332, according to The Numbers.com.

Conversely, Three Kings, a film about three American soldiers in the Gulf War who escort Iraqi refugees to safety in Iran and one that chose to feature layered and compassionate Muslim characters, only earned $60,652,036. Muslims in the U.S. are disturbingly more popular as villains than as heroes.

In the week following the Sept. 11 attacks alone, 500 incidents of violence were committed against Americans of Middle-Eastern descent and Muslims in this country, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Six months later, by March 2002, the number of violent incidents had risen to 1,717. In light of the overwhelming backlash against American Muslims following Sept. 11, it is irresponsible for films to perpetuate the stereotypes and misconceptions of Islam that appear to sanction hate crimes.

America under Siege

One of the few American films to treat Muslims with respect and portray the complexity of their lives, religion and culture was something of an oddity, because it was also an action/thriller. Released in 1998, The Siege finds all of the Arab-Americans in New York interned in a camp where the Army is allowed to torture and psychologically abuse terror suspects after a terrorist attack on New York City.

Though it includes Tony Shalhoub of television's Monk as a role model as an American Muslim FBI agent, The Siege fails at a fundamental level because it feels compelled to portray some Muslims as terrorists in order to find an audience.

But the filmmakers shouldn't get all the blame. Audiences allow movies with Islamic terrorists to make vast amounts of money, while films such as Osama – which showed a strong Muslim girl risking punishment to pose as a boy in order to attend school – are quickly shelved. So, when you eagerly purchase your tickets for The Passion this weekend, consider how hard it would have been for a Muslim filmmaker to make a violent and possibly anti-Semitic movie about the birth of Islam. Then think about how easy it would be for Gibson to film and market a new movie about Islamic terrorists.

Audiences guide the divine hand of the god of cinema, and neither they nor Hollywood show any signs of heaping support on projects that don't slander Muslims as terrorists. For now, Christianity, rather than Islam, will continue to reign at the cinema, regardless of the consequences.