Tag Archives: Islam

Ms. Marvel: Deliciously Halal?

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Ms._Marvel_Vol_3_2

Would you give G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona’s Ms. Marvel to your daughter or young nephew to read?

I think the answer in most instances would be a loud and affirmative, “Yes!” It is after all quite inoffensive and mainly concerns the travails of school and family life; if complicated in this instance by the fact that the main protagonist is a Pakistani-American Girl. The comic is friendly, instructive, educational, and has a placid attitude towards the dangers of everyday existence. It would seem to be, in a word, “safe.”

And what exactly are the dangers Kamala Khan faces in her first three issues? She is tricked into taking alcohol by insensitive classmates, breaks her curfew and is grounded, is sent to detention for accidentally destroying school property, helps a pair of accident prone lovers, is involved in a friendly hold-up at a corner store, and is injured during the accidental discharge of a firearm.

In many ways Ms Marvel is a return to the more gentle pleasures of the comics of yore; dialing back the myth of a violent America propagated by TV shows like CSI, Criminal Minds, NCIS et al.—where murderous psychopaths reside on every corner and corpses are to be found on every other doorstep and school dormitory. Can a superhero comic subsists on stories culled from ordinary high school life? Well, the sales figures on future issues of the comic should tell the tale in due course.

The central issues at stake in Ms. Marvel are conformity and difference, subjects which are  balanced precariously at this historical moment in America (and Europe) where the simple act of wearing a hijab might be cause for derision.

Perhaps the comics’ greatest achievement is to make the life of a Muslim girl in America perfectly ordinary. Part of the success of Jaime Hernandez’s Locas lies in just this effect—the way it shapes our understanding of an unfamiliar culture, revealing its core of basic humanity. Something similar occurs in Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation where the setting (environmental, legal) and motivations may seem strange but the reactions completely “human.” With that moment of recognition, Iranians stop becoming headline material or screaming terrorists (a la Ben Affleck’s Argo) but individuals in all their complexity.

I don’t think Wilson’s work is quite at that level in Ms. Marvel but there is a trace of gentle subversion about it; much of it related in humorous vignettes. A visit to the neighborhood mosque for a halaqah (religious study circle) is not an occasion for harsh harangues of deeply conservative mullahs but some questions concerning Islamic theology and issues surrounding the place of women within the mosque and society. The first page of issue one has Kamala sniffing a “greasy BLT” which is described as “delicious, delicious infidel meat”. This is followed by the suggestion that she try fakon instead (“it’s not that terrible”). Buddhists face similar philosophical “problems” when encountering vegetised meat dishes; a culinary art form in itself.

Ms.-Marvel Pork

Wilson’s subversiveness doesn’t lie simply in these small challenges to authority but in more subtle mouldings of this thoroughly “white”, Christian-Jewish form of expression—the American superhero comic.

Present day Islam is not especially enamored of figurative works of art, but the image of Kamala confronting the Avengers in the form of Iron Man, Captain Marvel and Captain America is clearly an instance of borrowed iconography. Lamps are not rubbed in the course of issue one of Ms. Marvel but the Terrigen Mists and the appearance of the Avengers suddenly within its folds do suggest the appearance of Jinn bearing gifts, and we all know how badly that usually turns out. The soundtrack to their arrival is a qawwali song by Amir Khusrow (“Sakal ban phool rahi sarson”), sufi devotional music which some might find intoxicating.

Ms Marvel Trinity

That’s Captain America as an Islamic mystical being straight from the pages of the Qur’an (as angels are from the Bible). But more than that, the image is clearly a syncretisation of well known religious forms—it is a Transfiguration with Moses and Elijah on both sides of a female Jesus. Iron Man has his left hand raised in a gesture which either suggests the Trinity or the giving of a benediction. Captain Marvel herself is posed in a manner which immediately brings to mind images of the Assumption of the Virgin—right down to her flowing waist ribbon. The birds surrounding her are presumably modern day versions of the cherubs we see in Renaissance paintings. To borrow a phrase from Ms. Kamala Khan, it’s all “delicious, delicious infidel meat.” One assumes that Kamala—aged sixteen and forbidden to mix with boys at alcohol fueled parties—is a virgin herself.  One also assumes that Wilson and Alphona are not entirely convinced of the merit of the iconoclastic claims of hadith literature.

assumption-of-the-virgin-1518

 

AND LO! The angels said: “O Mary! Behold, God has elected thee and made thee pure, and raised thee above all the women of the world.  Surah 3. Al-i’Imran, Ayah 42

 

Christopher ZF writing at The Stake is eager to let readers knows that:

“In this instance Kamala’s gods are not God, but another trinity that inspires her: Captain America, Iron Man, and the central religious figure of Kamala’s imagination: Captain Marvel….The manner in which Wilson and artist Adrian Alphona handle what could be a potentially fraught subject is instead refreshing in its candor…this scene is not a ham-handed, irreligious, or silly affair….”

The caution is understandable though obviously not my cup of tea.

This appropriation of imagery is clearly tied up with Kamala’s own conflicted sense of identity and her cultural influences (both knowing and unknowing)—a desire to fit equally into “normal” white American society and the traditions of her parents, with these parts seemingly irreconcilable. She’s a dark haired Alice in Wonderland, taking the bottle labeled “Drink Me” to become small or the cake with “Eat Me” written on it to become a leggy white blonde—all of this done in the interest of assimilation. The creators obviously thought long and hard (or maybe not) when they decided to make her a “human with Inhuman” lineage. Kamala’s vision is no more than a reflection of the mishmash which constitutes her subconscious desires. As “Iron Man” says to her, “You are seeing what you need to see.” If only Captain America was more halal.

Noah writing at The Atlantic doesn’t quite see it that way though. Concerning Kamala’s shape shifting powers he writes:

“You could see this power as a kind of metaphorical curse, reflecting Kamala’s uncertainty; she doesn’t know who she is, so she’s anyone or anything. I don’t think that’s quite what it signifies, though. Changing shape doesn’t mean that Kamala erases her ethnicity…Rather, in Ms. Marvel, shape-changing seems to suggest that flexibility is a strength. Kamala is a superhero because she’s both Muslim and American at once. Her power is to be many things, and to change without losing herself.”

And that is undoubtedly the final destination of Wilson’s story. The first three issues are in all likelihood a journey to that point of realization.

Perhaps the greatest subversion of all is that Ms. Marvel might be the most religious comic book published by Marvel in decades. Not anywhere as overt as the Spire Archie Christian comics but arguably in the same tradition. Islam both informs Kamala’s action and the conflicts she faces at school and at home.The centrality of Islam in Ms. Marvel was probably considered uncontroversial by Wilson’s editors (save Sana Amanat who is Pakistani-American) because of the ethnicity of the main protagonist—in America, race and Islam seem almost indivisible and therefore “excusable.” At the risk of stating the obvious, this rigidity in terms of race and religion is part of Wilson’s challenge to her readership in a country where the word “Muslim” often conjures up images of “brown” or black individuals. The fact that a blonde, white woman is taking moral action on the basis of the Qur’an is an essential part of Ms. Marvel’s narrative.

In Culture and the Death of God, Terry Eagleton writes that:

“Societies become secular not when they dispense with religion altogether, but when they are no longer especially agitated by it….as the wit remarked, it is when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it is time to give it up….Another index of secularization is when religious faith ceases to be vitally at stake in the political sphere…this does not mean that religion becomes formally privatized, uncoupled from the political state; but even when it is not, it is effectively taken out of public ownership and dwindles to a kind of personal pastime, like breeding gerbils or collecting porcelain…”

American society is “agitated” by Islam but Muslims have almost no voice in the political sphere. Kamala Khan may be the central figure of Ms. Marvel but she is an “other”—not us, someone strange, someone else—with seemingly little to say about how Americans should lead their lives; she has no religious or moral prescriptions which could affect white America. She is someone else’s porcelain collection. This makes the comic “tolerable” in the eyes of Marvel’s paymasters even while Disney enforces a policy of not taking the Lord’s name in vain in song.

The commentators at Deseret News have an even more innocuous explanation for this new venture:

“Comics are a “survey of the pop culture medium,” Hunter said, adding that the religions brought up in modern comics reflect modern society.

He said mainstream culture is talking about Muslims. According to the Pew Research Center, the Muslim population in the United States is projected to rise from 2.6 million in 2010 to 6.2 million in 2030, which shows Muslims are a growing market and topic in the U.S….Ms. Marvel’s Muslim heritage was chosen as a reflection of what the mainstream culture is interested in…Publishers are not just appealing to certain religious markets, however. They’re also using religious comics as a way to tap into the market of unbelievers, too, Lewis said.”

How wonderfully bland it would be if this was the comic’s sole raison d’être. This gentle and most politically correct of comic book stories is sometimes more clever than it seems.

 

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Further Reading

(1) G Willow Wilson on Kamala’s powers. Lots of background information in this interview:

“Her power set was actually the toughest thing, I think, to narrow down in the character creation process,” Wilson said. “I really did not want her to have the classically girly power sets – I didn’t want her to float. I didn’t want her to sparkle. I didn’t want her to be able to read people’s minds. I think a lot of these sort of passive abilities are often given to female characters – becoming invisible, using force fields. I wanted her to have something visually exciting, something kinetic…. The idea of making her a shape-shifter nicely paralleled her personal journey.”

(2)  Mariam Asad, Zainab Akhtar, and Muaz Zekeria discuss “What the new Ms. Marvel means for Muslims in Comics.”

Palm Oil Will Save Us

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Tired of reading about the evil fat cats in their pin stripe suits cackling over heaps of stolen money while the world (well, mostly Europe) burns? Wish Bankers went about things with a bit more love, honour and respect? Try us! We’re a community bank with social responsibilities; we are an Islamic Bank.

We don’t believe in interest because it is an exploitative practice, whereby money creates money. We view money not as a commodity itself, but merely a measure of the value of a commodity; how can a measure create more of a measure? Likewise, we believe that any investment must be an investment in the real economy, into a business, with equivalent liability for both profits and losses. Finance cannot be a zero sum game of short selling and credit default swapping, but should rather be a system of investment and profit whereby growth and success brings wealth to the entire society, rather than simply the financial institutions themselves. By encouraging such socially responsible financial practices, we aim to move towards a new economic system built on Islamic principles such as brotherhood, unity and responsibility.

At this point what are you thinking? Naïve? Utopian? Maybe you’re thinking it makes a bit of sense as the world in general lurches from unexpected crisis to unexpected crisis, from subprime to financial to sovereign debt and onwards to who knows where. Either way, it’s worth pointing out that the Islamic Finance Industry, which takes this as its creed, is currently worth around $1 trillion, and represents around 90% of personal banking done in Saudi Arabia, 24% in Malaysia and 22% in the UAE, to name just the biggest markets. That value is growing too, and growing fast. The list of non-Muslim entities which have raised funds through Islamic compliant structures include German authorities, Norwegian (and many other) corporations and, recently, the state of South Africa. Whatever you think about the vastly simplified statement of purpose I jotted down above, this is a minor phenomenon only if you’re in the West (or South America).

So, given the grand ideas suggested above, does the rather impressive spread of Islamic Finance herald a new economic paradigm of social responsibility? Ummm….no, not even close. Don’t get me wrong, the original ideas of Islamic Finance, which stem from the Islamic Economics movement of the 40s, do aim for a new economic system to replace both capitalism and communism. The original Islamic Economic theorists believed that the self-interested Homo Economicus of capitalism was simply a self-fulfilling prophecy driven by capitalist institutions which encouraged and rewarded self-interest at the expense of social awareness. They believed that by creating new institutions, and new modes of transaction, which discouraged such heedless wealth accumulation and provided individuals with the ability to do business ethically and responsibly, they could encourage the emergence of a ‘Homo Islamicus’ which would transform the economic paradigm. You’re not going to be surprised how that turned out though.

The central problem for Islamic Banks was, and still is, that they remain businesses. As the number of ‘natural’ Homo Islamicus’ is understandably tiny, the survival of the Banks means competing for customers with conventional banks on business terms. In particular, while customers might take a small loss for the sake of Islam and society, it appears they won’t take a huge one, so the Banks find themselves competing on price and features with their conventional rivals. Business inevitably trends towards homogeneity, with the original and traditional Islamic transactional concepts largely replaced by ones which are less alien to conventional practices. Modern Islamic Financial products now have an end result which is increasingly similar to their conventional equivalents, despite their Islamic labels.

The fact is that competition is the by-line of capitalism, and to compete with capitalism is the paradox of competing with competition itself. It’s simply a flawed proposition. Islamic Banks may have aimed to subvert the capitalist paradigm from within, but the result is exactly the same as virtually every other time an opposition to capitalism has arisen, assimilation. Capitalism absorbs opposition and turns rebellion into a commodity to support itself.

An inevitable question then, is why on earth are Islamic Banks doing so well? Why are countries from Kazakhstan to the UK looking at Islamic funding if it so closely resembles conventional finance? Why are major multinational Banks like HSBC and Standard Chartered opening up Islamic Finance divisions?

Well, essentially because despite the similarity of the end result, Islamic Finance does go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that things are still Shariah compliant. Each Bank is overseen by a committee of Islamic scholars who show little compunction in shooting down any attempts to circumvent the religious restrictions, leading to ever increasingly complex financial engineering to simulate simple transactions (insider tip: it involves gallons and gallons of palm oil – seriously). People may not care enough about this to take a significant economic loss, but they still care. They don’t care about alternative economic systems, but they have a certain interest in being able to conduct their day to day business safe in the knowledge that nothing they’re doing contravenes their ethical values.

In many ways, the experience of Islamic Finance gives both the depressing and hopeful sides to capitalism. On the one hand there is the assimilation and neutralisation of the latest attempt to forge an economic system which doesn’t thrive on inequality and instability. On the other hand though, Islamic Finance is an example of a community and ideology taking ownership and imposing its own symbolism, rhetoric and indeed restrictions on its economic activity. The shape of finance might remain broadly the same, but its language doesn’t, and that’s not necessarily an irrelevance.

Imagine that the Islamic Economists were right, that the problem with capitalism doesn’t ultimately stem from its structure, but from the individual attitudes which encourage it. Then note that the overwhelming trend in economics is in south-south trade, trade between regions such as the Middle East and South East Asia, between countries with natural affinities for Islamic Finance. In the future it’s almost inevitable that ever increasing levels of economic activity, even for our western corporations, will take place with companies who prefer to use financial products which at least ostensibly label themselves as ethical and responsible. Perhaps it’s not impossible to imagine a future where those ideas begin to assume an importance beyond rhetoric in the minds of those business practitioners. Perhaps ideas might be as insidious as capitalism itself.

Perhaps the Islamic Economists were on to something. Perhaps.

Shorter Fiore

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I am not world weary and cynical, I am just Machiavellian. The west is not more reasonable than Islam, except that it is more reasonable than Islam. You can see this because of the reason and good fellowship that has prevailed in European countries such as Serbia. Regimes like Iraq were openly hostile to us until very recently which is why we armed them when they fought Iran. Also, Noah Berlatsky coddles terrorists, nyah nyah. I understand how Christians ought to act better than Christians do, which is why I can say with assurance that if Martin Luther King Jr. were a real believer, he would have advocated nuclear annihilation for commies. The fact that atheists and believers sometimes act alike shows that faith is only relevant to someone’s actions when I say that it is. Also, I’m a fucking materialist existential hero; please join me in weeping aloud for me in my tough-minded tragedy.

 

 

And hey, let’s hear it for this gem:

“Cultural materialism is the theory that there is a Darwinian process in the selection of social forms, and that therefore for instance no religion that is adopted by large populations for generations can be arbitrary or irrational, but rather must serve some purpose for its adherents.”

Translation:
Look, I dropped Darwin’s name, and concluded that religion must serve some purpose! Unlike lame-assed, half-baked, clichéd, swaggering cultural materialism, which is handed down from God…whoops! I mean from my own pure, indomitable brainstem! Which by coincidence I pulled yesterday out of my own indomitable ass.

 

 

If you missed it, here’s Fiore’s original post and my response to it.

Worshipping Nothing

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R. Fiore has a recent article up about the South Park censorship brouhaha in which he takes a brave, world-weary stand against cowardly corporations, crazy Muslims, and simplistic theists. As always with Fiore, it’s stylishly written…and as sometimes with Fiore, it’s pretty thoroughly vapid. He’s got that just-plain-common-sense-man-on-the-street approach, which involves repeating things everyone already knows, retailing banal prejudices as shocking insights, and patting yourself rhythmically on the back all the while.

Fiore’s argument is basically that we’d all get along better in this old world if we acted as if we didn’t believe anything. Or as Fiore says, “What the West has learned is that even if you do sincerely believe in God, if you want any peace you can’t act that way.” For Fiore, the South Park incident shows the eminent reasonableness of the Western world, and the fact that reasonableness is essentially useless in dealing with nutzo Islamist thugs:

The Danish Jyllands-Posten, lulled into a false sense of security by a period of reason and good fellowship in Europe dating all the way back to 1945, published their suite of cartoons featuring Muhammad on the assumption that no one was crazy enough to sacrifice their lives and liberty or commit horrible crimes over a drawing. The response of the fanatical end of Islam was, in effect, yes as a matter of fact we are crazy enough, and if that wasn’t sufficient please let us know and we’ll be crazier still. The position this places the would-be blasphemer in is that you can visually depict Muhammad, but only if you’re willing to see blood shed over it. Courage will allow you to express yourself, but it won’t prevent the violence. The net result is that the fanatics get their way and the only cost is to brand millions of completely innocent Muslims as murderous barbarians.

I think my favorite part of that quote is the nostalgic harking back to “a period of reason and good fellowship in Europe”, coupled with Fiore’s utter lack of historical or intellectual curiosity. Presuming that this period of reason and good fellowship did exist for a moment — why did it end, precisely? What caused the Muslims to suddenly jump the shark? Is it immigration into Europe that’s the problem — which would lead to certain policy positions that I strongly suspect the carefully enlightened Fiore wants nothing to do with.

Or…as an alternate possibility, could it be that, from the Muslim perspective, there was in fact no “period of reason and good fellowship,” but rather decade upon decade of Western-supported dictatorships, quasi-imperialism, repetitive humiliations, and (in the case of Afghanistan, at least) vicious, unending warfare? Fiore muses with an air of non-plussed good humor at what could have possibly led some Muslims to set themselves against South Park so:

The Mafia is an appropriate comparison because the threats made against South Park are in some ways more akin to extortion than conventional terrorism. A typical terrorist campaign attempts to achieve an absurdly ambitious goal with an absurdly miniscule amount of force. For example, in 40 years of terrorism after 1967, Palestinian terrorists managed to kill something like 2100 Israelis. No one is going to surrender their country to avoid this level of casualties. A modern army can kill that many non-combatants in an afternoon by mistake. The campaign against depictions of the prophet Muhammad on the other hand brings to bear an absurdly disproportionate amount of force to stop something most people in the West don’t have the inclination to do in the first place.

The Mafia analogy carefully obscures the clear conclusion — Muslims have little if any way to address their political grievances to the foreign powers that repetitively kick them in the teeth. Terrorism is largely, as Fiore quite rightly notes, useless. So when you can’t do anything about the big insults, you naturally focus on the small ones. Surely segments of the Muslim world sees depictions of the prophet by the infidels not as the first insult, or the fifth or the 200th, but rather as part of one, long, sustained insult by a bully who has kept his foot on their throat for half a century plus.

Threats against newspaper publishers or television networks are petty and stupid and despicable, obviously — but they’re neither incomprehensible nor evidence of some sort of disconnect between religious thinking and rationality. Given the relationship between the west and the Middle East, the threats are, on the contrary, entirely comprehensible. That doesn’t mean that they should be condoned. In the first place, as Fiore points out, the whole brouhaha definitely makes things worse, not better, for Muslims worldwide. Moreover, while it isn’t as bad as the Taliban’s systematic oppression of women or al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks, threatening to kill innocents for drawing pictures does seem to me to be a fair definition of evil. Still, we can take comfort in the thought that we’ll go tit for tat or better in the near future, whenever the next American drone strike takes out the next Afghani wedding party.

Fiore’s a lefty too, and I doubt he supports the Afghan war any more than I do. But he doesn’t want to talk about it in too much detail because to do so would mess up his nice little binary; rational west as powerless, peaceful victims; nutty religious dickheads as powerful, violent thugs. To give Fiore his due, though, he is willing to follow his simplistic analogy wherever it takes him, no matter how idiotic the end location is. And so in the last paragraph we get this gem:

What the West has learned is that even if you do sincerely believe in God, if you want any peace you can’t act that way. After all, if you truly believed that those who follow the wrong religion will be subjected to eternal torment then you’re doing them no favors by allowing them to do so. For instance, during the Cold War, if you believed as Jesus told you that death is an illusion, and the atheistic regimes of the Soviet bloc were depriving millions of even opportunity to save their souls from eternal damnation, then you would be honor bound to not only risk nuclear war but to engage in it. After all, eternal bliss would compensate the just for any suffering they endured.

To call this a strawman argument is to cast scurrilous aspersions on the structural integrity of straw. Which Christians exactly is it who want to start a worldwide nuclear holocaust for the sake of the souls of atheists? Would that be the many Christians who, on quite good scriptural authority, believe that Jesus enjoined them to pacifism? Would it be the Catholic Church — still the largest Christian denomination — which holds to a just war doctrine that declared the Iraq war anathema? The Niebuhrian realist tradition, which stresses a humane concern for human life and justice? Hell, even wacko Protestant Christian right-wing apocalyptic fantasies like the Left Behind series doesn’t advocate genocide-for-Jesus as far as I know.

There are nutcases everywhere, obviously, and I’m sure there’s the random Christian out there who wants everyone to die in a fiery man-made holocaust — but to suggest that this is especially a hallmark of religious thinking as opposed to the rational atheist philosophies of, say, Pol Pot or Mao or Hitler…it’s nonsense on its face. And that’s to say nothing of our own lovely, rational, harmless, hapless capitalism, which can’t stand up for South Park, but which has, nonetheless, shown itself capable on occasion of a certain ruthlessness, as Chileans, Cambodians, and, for that matter, Native Americans would no doubt be willing to attest.

“What the West has learned is that even if you do sincerely believe in God, if you want any peace you can’t act that way.” I’ve quoted that twice already, and I’m quoting it a third time because it’s central to Fiore’s argument — and, I believe, to his belief. Because it is a belief, right? It’s certainly not a fact. Where, after all, is this peace we’ve found by acting as if we don’t believe in God, precisely? The U.S. is more religious than Europe, certainly, but by world-historical standards we’re a pretty secular society — and, by world-historical standards, we have probably the biggest military of all time. China’s fond of playing with weapons too, and they aren’t noticeably religious last time I checked. And, you know, on the other side, I was under the impression that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi both drew the inspiration for their non-violent resistance movements from their faith. Or does Fiore think that MLK was somehow acting as if he didn’t believe in God?

Fiore ends with a really tiresome roulette wheel analogy which I don’t have the heart to quote. But it’s telling that such vacuous modernity can only end by seeing faith in terms of gambling, money, and yes, capitalism. Fiore believes that believing in nothing will save him…but the truth is that nothing has its own rites and rituals, its own insanities, its own cruelties, and even its own genocidal impulses. The world isn’t divided into believers and non-believers, or into the sane and the insane. The only ones here are us chickens — or, if you prefer, us poor sinners, a long way from home.
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Update: R.Fiore has an extremely long response here.

And my short reply to Fiore is here.