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In classic Orientalist fashion, he saves the rich sheik’s daughter from the sheik’s evil, power-hungry nephew. The 2004 film “ Hidalgo,” for example, tells the story of an American cowboy who travels to the Arabian desert in 1891 to participate in a horse race. Maybe writers and producers assumed that depicting the Middle East as exotic would be an improvement over associating it with terrorism. Adding a ‘good’ Middle Eastern character doesn’t do much to upend stereotypes when the vast majority are still appearing in stories about terrorism.Īnother strategy also emerged: reverting to old Orientalist tropes of the exotic, romantic Middle East.

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In the TV drama, “ Homeland,” for example, Fara Sherazi, an Iranian American Muslim CIA analyst, is killed by a Muslim terrorist, showing that “good” Muslim Americans are willing to die for the United States.īut this didn’t change the fact that Middle Easterners and Muslims were, by and large, portrayed as threats to the West. The most common one involved including a patriotic Middle Eastern or Muslim American to counterbalance depictions as terrorists.

In 2012, I published my book “ Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11.” In it, I detail the strategies that writers and producers used after 9/11 to offset stereotyping. But surprisingly, some positive representations of Middle Eastern and Muslim characters emerged. Questionable progressĪfter 9/11, a spate of films emerged that rehashed many of the old terrorist tropes. For example, Jasmine, who is supposed to be from Agrabah – originally Baghdad but fictionalized because of the Gulf War in 1991 – has an Indian-named tiger, Rajah. The film also continued the tradition of erasing distinctions between Middle Eastern cultures. In the animated ‘Aladdin,’ the good Arabs are drawn with Caucasian features, while the bad guys speak with foreign accents. As many have noted, the bad Arabs are ugly and have foreign accents while the good Arabs – Aladdin and Jasmine – possess European features and white American accents.

Then there were the ways the characters were depicted. When the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee protested the lyrics, Disney removed the reference to cutting off ears in the home video version but left in the descriptor “barbaric.” The opening song lyrics described a land “Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face” and declared, “It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home!” Shaheen observed, hundreds of Hollywood films over the last 50 years have linked Islam with holy war and terrorism, while depicting Muslims as either “hostile alien intruders” or “lecherous, oily sheikhs intent on using nuclear weapons.” Cringeworthy moments in the original ‘Aladdin’Īgainst this backdrop, the Orientalism of Disney’s 1992 animated “Aladdin” wasn’t all that surprising. In American media, the exotic Middle East faded replacing it were depictions of violence and ominous terrorists.Īs media scholar Jack G.

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Then came a series of Middle Eastern conflicts and wars: the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, the Iran Hostage Crisis and the Gulf War. While these depictions were arguably silly and harmless, they flattened the differences among Middle Eastern cultures, while portraying the region as backwards and in need of civilizing by the West. Early Hollywood films such as “ The Sheik” and “ Arabian Nights” portrayed the Middle East as a monolithic fantasy land – a magical desert filled with genies, flying carpets and rich men living in opulent palaces with their harem girls. Orientalism in Hollywood has a long history.

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A movie poster for the 1921 film ‘The Sheik.’ Library of Congress

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