Aziz El Bakkali

ContentWestern media: Representing the East. Covering Muslims and Arabs in Western

Cinema.Arabs and Muslims in CinemaMuslims and IslamThe Perception of the ArabMorocco in Hollywood

19/04/23Arabs and Muslims Screen Images Aziz EL Bakkali 2

Western media: Still and moving pictures using technological tools.

19/04/23Arabs and Muslims Screen Images Aziz EL Bakkali 3

Western media: representing the East.

19/04/23Arabs and Muslims Screen Images Aziz EL Bakkali 4

Today, media is used to represent the cultures of Africa, Middle East, different colonies, and other parts in Asia. It is a way of viewing “these areas that have been supported, justified, and reinforced by the West colonialist and imperialist venture”

Mathew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar, Visions of the East

Modern Western media- motion pictures, newspapers, television, books, music, magazines, radio, and comic books- have influenced many different aspects of human life. It has succeeded to forge the imagination of the audience and create new identities for other cultures. “Media determine our perspective, the way in which we make decisions, the way in which we spend our leisure time, the way in which we perceive Others, and most important, the way in which we interact with one another”

Yahya R. Kamalipour, The US Media and Middle East   Through various degrees, dominant media “have always perpetuated

stereotypes and prejudice about minority groups”

Teun A.Van Dijk, Racism and the Press   Western media has provided a clear cut boundary between the East and the

West, whose history “has always been closely bound up with the forms of its representation- and misrepresentation”

Edward Buscombe, “Painting the legend”

19/04/23Arabs and Muslims Screen Images Aziz EL Bakkali 5

Media “can be seen not only as a driving force behind cultural and social change but also as an index for political mobilizations both domestically and internationally”

Yahya R. Kamalipour, The US Media and Middle East

  It has a “direct and straightforward effect on the audience”

David Gauntlett, Media, Gender and Identity

Creating new identities: “By facilitating a mediated engagement with distant places, the media partially deterritorialize the process of imagining communities. And while the media can fashion spectators into atomized consumers or self entertaining nomads, they can also construct identities and alternative affiliations. Just as the media can exoticise and otherise cultures, they can also reflect and help catalyse multicultural affiliations and transnational identifications.”

Stam,Shohat. Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Cinema

19/04/23Arabs and Muslims Screen Images Aziz EL Bakkali 6

Covering Muslims and Arabs in Western Cinema.

“They can not represent themselves, they must be represented.” Carl Marx

  The MENA : “the most difficult regions of the world for Westerners to comprehend” Western audience “are more familiar with its stereotypes than its specificity.”

Donna Debowen and Evelyn A. Early, Every Day Life in the Muslim Middle East

 Hollywood: Arab Screen Images: Jack Shaheen, a famous scholar and professor of mass communications at Southern

Illinois University. Hollywood is “the most effective teacher of young… it is the authoritative creator of

commonly shared attitudes and feelings... [It is] the leading source of propagandistic images that damage and isolate some citizens and can destroy the possibility of ever achieving genuine democratic relationships among us”

Jack G. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People  “a distorted media image of the Arab people that is becoming ingrained in American

culture” Jack G. Shaheen, “Media Coverage of the Middle East

19/04/23Arabs and Muslims Screen Images Aziz EL Bakkali 7

Arabs and Muslims in cinema “Most American minorities can expect fair cinematic representation from

Hollywood- but not Arab Americans and Muslims” Jack G. Shaheen, “Unkindest Cuts”

In Many films, “directors actively choose to include such stereotypical characters and settings in their movies when depicting the Arabs and Muslims”

Kathleen Reedy, “Terrorists, thieves and Harem Girls   “Arab men are portrayed as violent and terrorists, oil ‘sheikhs or

marauding tribesmen who kidnap blond Western women.” Marvin Wingfield and Bushra Karaman, “Arabs Stereotypes

and American Educators,”   “The Arab characters are relegated to raving, maniacal terrorists, devoid

of human decency and morality” John C. Eisele, “The Wild East:

“Hollywood studios needlessly maligned Arabs” “Arabs have made many contributions to our civilisation […] they invented

Algebra and the Concept of Zero” Jack G. Shaheen, “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a

People,”

19/04/23Arabs and Muslims Screen Images Aziz EL Bakkali 8

Muslims and Islam in cinema

Western cinema has been much concerned with the representation of Islam as a “new foe quickly took the place of Soviet Communism in the imagination of many Americans”

“red menace shifted to panic in response to the green terror” Brian T. Edwards, "Yankee pashas and buried

women   “Islam was a lasting trauma” “Not for nothing did Islam come to symbolize terror, devastation,

the demonic, hordes of hated barbarians.” Edward Said, Orientalism

  “Malicious generalisations about Islam have become the last

acceptable form of denigration of foreign culture in the West; what is said about the Muslim mind, or character, or religion, cannot now be said in mainstream discussion about Africans, Jews, Other Orientals, or Asians.”

Edward Said, Covering Islam

19/04/23Arabs and Muslims Screen Images Aziz EL Bakkali 9

The encounters: “The history of American encounters with the Muslim

states is almost as old as the American independence.” Aslam Syed

 “Muslims are uniformly represented as evil, violent and

above all, eminently killable.” Kim Deep, “Deconstructing Hollywood:

Negative Stereotyping in Film” “Assumptions easily lead to bias, misunderstanding,

stereotyping, and sometimes hostility towards Islamic culture, extending from an ethnocentric approach. Once a negative image of a culture is formed, it becomes rigid, enduring, and difficult to rectify”

Yahya R. Kamalipour, The US Media and Middle East

19/04/23Arabs and Muslims Screen Images Aziz EL Bakkali 10

The Perception of the Arab

“The Arab as alien, violent strangers, intent upon battling non-believers throughout the world.”

Jack G. Shaheen

“The creation of the “evil” Arab in the American popular film relies on their characteristic confrontations with our ideologies and myths, and so the Arabs, as such a set of Others, are imagined only to exist and act in relation to our ideologies and myths.”

Tim Jon Semmerling, “Evil” Arabs in American Popular Film: Orientalist Fear

  “The word “sheikh” means, literally, a wise elderly person, the

head of the family, but you would not know that from watching any of Hollywood’s “sheikh” features.”

Jack G. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a Peo

19/04/23Arabs and Muslims Screen Images Aziz EL Bakkali 11

Morocco in Hollywood

Morocco’s various representational forms on the screen.

The Moroccan culture is at stake given an illusive Orientalist interpretation.

Moroccans are shaped within the personal imagination of film directors, mostly from a falsified adaptation of different pieces of writings.

Hollywood film industry takes Moroccan spaces as the locus for the projection of various scenes of most movies that deal with the Other.

19/04/23Arabs and Muslims Screen Images Aziz EL Bakkali 12

The country is easily used and projected as an issue of departure in many stories of the Hollywood film.

Different issues, ranging from identity culture religion, gender, space, and social institutions, have been reported within the agenda of Orientalist representation of Morocco.

Different feature films have structured the Moroccan character as the Other and put forth to establish the process of “Othering” the Moroccan subject

19/04/23Arabs and Muslims Screen Images Aziz EL Bakkali 13

References

19/04/23Arabs and Muslims Screen Images Aziz EL Bakkali 14

Thank you

19/04/23Arabs and Muslims Screen Images Aziz EL Bakkali 15