LOS ANGELES, JULY 13 (US): Jumana Zakir knows who she will be at Halloween this year. Hint: Her new favorite superhero looks a lot like her – female, teen, Muslim, American and “absolutely cool.”
“Kamala Khan is me,” said the 13-year-old from Anaheim, California. “She’s just like me.”
Khan is the first Muslim heroine of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to headline her own TV show. “Miss. The Marvel movie, which launches at Disney+ June 8, has struck a chord with South Asian Muslims in the West because of its connection to the topic and how it portrays Muslim families.
Advocates of inclusion and representation hope the show will open the door to more accurate, on-screen depictions of Muslims and their rich diversity, the AP reports.
The show tells the story of Khan, played by Canadian-Pakistani actress Iman Velani, as she draws her strength from a magic bracelet that allows her to walk on air and conjure up glowing luminous shields. But she is also a regular Muslim teenager from South Asia who goes to mosque, performs ablutions or ablutions before prayer, sometimes wears traditional clothes called shalwar kameez, dances to Bollywood numbers at her brother’s wedding, and breaks curfew to hang out with her boyfriend Bruno. Carlyle at AvengerCon.
The final episode of the series is expected to drop on Wednesday.
Munir Zamir, a British Pakistani who grew up in East London, said he’s seen a “brown Pakistani girl from New Jersey” in comic books, and now he’s watching “Mrs. Marvel” with his teenage kids — strong. Zamir, 50, has been a Marvel fan since he was seven and has followed Kamala Khan’s development since beginning Mrs. Marvel in the comic books in 2014.
“For Muslims in particular, representation is very important because for many years, misrepresentation has been very important,” he said.
Zamir points out that there are other Muslim superheroes in the Marvel universe such as Sooraya Qadir aka Dust. She wears flowing black clothes, covering her hair and face, and can turn her body into a cloud of dust.
“Even in that description, there are some classic tropes,” Zamir said. But Kamala Khan is not a strange woman from a Muslim country. This immediately sets her apart in the Marvel universe.”
The diverse experiences of Muslim women in ‘Ms. Marvel are among the contrasts with the findings of a report published last year examining Muslim representation across 200 films from the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand released between 2017 and 2019.
The study found that women were particularly underrepresented, with only 23.6% of the Muslim characters in these films being female.
Conducted by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, with support from others, it also found that 90.5% of these films did not feature speaking Muslim characters, yet 39% of “primary and secondary” Muslim characters were violent perpetrators.
Sana Amanat, one of Kamala Khan’s creators and executive producer on the show, said making Ms. Marvel more relatable was intentional. She wanted to portray a Muslim character who “feels like someone you know”.
“It’s not on a pedestal,” she said. “She’s embarrassing. She’s entertaining. She’s a nice guy who eventually wants to do better.”
Amanat and her companions felt it was important to show Khan’s daily life as an American Muslim teenager.
The idea of a normal life resonated with Heba Bhatti, a Pakistani-American fan of the show. I especially loved how Khan’s father, Yusuf, was portrayed as a “loving father”, contrary to the frightening stereotype.
Bhatti, a Los Angeles-based architect, showed Ms. Marvel’s comics on her desk at work as a conversation starter. Now, she is preparing to give her co-workers the “Mrs. Marvel Show“. For her, it exemplifies the number of people in her community who have gone beyond just wanting to be portrayed as “ordinary Americans”, to actually tell their own stories.
“Miss. Areej Mikati, managing director of cultural change at the Pillars Fund, which supports Muslim civic leaders and artists, said Marvel is also “working to restore language that has been weaponized against Muslims.”
In one scene, Khan and her family hilariously burst into chants of “Allahu Akbar” to celebrate her brother’s wedding.
“When you hear the call to prayer, it is usually a sign that you are somewhere unsafe on TV,” Mikati said. “And all of those things are restored in this show….that’s really beautiful because those little everyday moments of our faith are really taken away from us in the media.”
Pillars Fund initiatives include a database of Muslim artists, created in collaboration with and with the support of The Walt Disney Company, to bring more Muslims into the filmmaking process.
“The superhero story is not the kind you would expect a Muslim to be in, and I love that this story changes that,” Mikati said.
The show touches on issues from monitoring mosques to what wearing the hijab means to some. Khan’s girlfriend, Jasmine Fletcher, played the veiled Naqiah Bahadir.
One of the most important conversations between Khan and Bahadir takes place in the girls’ restroom, where Bahadir talks about feeling like she is herself, with a purpose, when she wears her hijab.
Jumana, the Anaheim teen who plans to wear the hijab in a year or two, said she appreciated the show’s portrayal of what hijab means to some young girls like her.
“My non-Muslim friends already know and respect my decision,” she said. “But if more people realize that by watching this show, that’s great.”
Fletcher said she was moved by such strong responses.
“The main goal of Nakia’s character is to break down stereotypes about veiled women,” she said.
Program Leader Bisha K. Ali, who is British-Pakistani, that the series’ seven writers – four of them Pakistani – realistically represent Muslims and South Asians is crucial.
“We were hungry to be seen in a way that was celebrated and beautiful, and that comes from a place of love and compassion,” she said.
While it is impossible to portray the experience of nearly two billion Muslims, Ali said the writers have tended to tell the story of this family in a true way.
The show takes a similar approach to talking about partition in 1947 when British India was divided along religious lines into India and Pakistan, resulting in one of the largest mass migrations in history.
Violence stemming from Hindu-Muslim tensions has led to a refugee crisis, which the show weaves as part of the Khan family’s history.
Ali said the point of the show was not to point the finger in any direction, but to tell one family’s story of the intergenerational trauma this chapter in history evoked, and convey “a sense of sympathy with the amount of pain on all sides.”
Ali described the mood in the writer’s room as “incredibly emotional”, as they talked about what their mosques would look like growing up and are communicating with relatives on WhatsApp to gather more details.
Sitting in the belly of Marvel Studios in a windowless conference room, Ali said she missed the number of times writers looked at each other as if asking, “Are we really here? Are we really doing this?”