Riz Ahmed, Pillars Fund & Ford Foundation Unveil the Blueprint for Muslim Inclusion (EXCLUSIVE)
has become just as well known for his activism as for his performances in projects like “Sound of Metal” or “The Night Of.”
“With all my privilege and profile, I often wonder if this is going to be the year they round us up, if this is the year they’re going to put Trump’s Muslim registry into action, if this is going to be the year they ship us all off,” he said. “The representation of Muslims on screen — that feeds the policies that get enacted, the people that get killed, the countries that get invaded.”
The first step in crafting the call to action, though, was defining the problem beyond Ahmed’s personal experiences in both the entertainment industry and the world at large, and the best way to do that was through research.
The four organizations worked in tandem for the better part of two years, collecting the data and come up with a plan of action to support it, and now they’re revealing the results.entitled “Missing & Maligned: The Reality of Muslims in Popular Global Movies,” The study covers the top 200 movies released between 2017 and 2019, across four countries: the U.S., the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, representing the global nature of Muslim community.
The researcher explains that the study first defined a Muslim character based on a set of explicit and implicit cues, in order to accurately judge whether a character is Muslim for the quantitative analysis. “I found that personally connecting because I am an immigrant; my family and I came to America during a national tragedy,” Al-Baab says. “But what was also important to note was, that yes, those experiences exist, but just like my family, and millions of other Muslims around the world, we evolve, we grow, we establish ourselves, we integrate ourselves, and we take advantage of any opportunities that we have, so it’s important to see that reflected on screen as well.
Riz Ahmed poses for a portrait for Blueprint for Muslim Inclusion Initiative at PMC Studios on June 4, 2021 in Los Angeles, California.Ultimately, the study confirmed much of what Ahmed said in his previous speeches, but that didn’t make the results feel any less like a sucker punch. “We’re at a time right now in India, in Kashmir, in Myanmar, in the United States, in the U.K, in China, where elected officials are saying crazy shit and passing very disgusting, discriminatory laws. We have armed extremists killing us in our homes, in our places of worship. We have state sponsored violence,” Ahmed continues. “When you dehumanize a group and you erase a group from our collective imagination, it’s a lot easier to dispose of them.
“The Muslim religion has been so racialized,” Mikati chimes in, saying that one of the benefits of the study is helping to explain that “there are the 10,000 ways that you can be Muslim.” As part of the Blueprint, the coalition is launching the Muslim Visibility Challenge, which calls on industry power players and studios to sunset terror tropes and to secure a first-look deal with at least one Muslim creator over the next eighteen months.
“What a lot of people don’t know is that the Muslim community in the United States is the most likely faith community to live in poverty. And in the UK, over 50% of Muslims also live in poverty,” she adds. “That means that a lot of Muslims actually don’t have the privilege of choosing storytelling as a vocation. So, we want to make sure that it’s not a limiting factor to hearing stories from the abundance of talent that exists within our community.
“That means artists can use the money for whatever they want. It could be for rent, it could be for a film they want to make, it can be for medical bills, it could be for taking an exciting class to learn a new skill,” Mikati explains. “It’s an abundance of riches,” Noorain says of the group of mentors, and the plan of action in general. “it’s bigger and more ambitious and more tangible than I think we could have imagined at the beginning.”
Arij Mikati and Kashif Shaikh of the Pillar Fund pose for a portrait for the Blueprint for Muslim Inclusion Initiative at PMC Studios on June 4, 2021 in Los Angeles, California.The roadmap also includes several resources, including extended reading lists and tools like the “Riz Test” to run their scripts through to check for bias and stereotypes.
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