Global Intifada

I watched “Art School Confidential” yesterday. It was a very entertaining film and made me think about a lot of things. How do we define art? What is the purpose of the artist?

I’ve always been a book-worm intellectual. Music and art weren’t really suitable to my tastes. I didn’t start exploring my “artistic” style until after I had graduated from college and begin experimenting with writing, drawing, and music. I wrote a bunch of decent short stories, made a few interesting drawings (nothing spectacular), and jammed out a few songs. However, after the first year of law school, it felt like all of my talents had been drained. Until recently . . .

Ever so often, I join a forum in order to debate with people in order to challenge myself. In my opinion, forums are a good way to test one’s self through the ‘gauntlet of ideas’. If you believe in something firmly, there’s no better way to see how good you are at defending those ideas by opening them to criticism by others.

Being one of the few Muslims on campus, I’m put on a lot of scrutiny. Ever so often, my classmates ask me questions and, given that their law students, sometimes I have a difficult time to come up with a response.

So I decided that in order to develop some prophylactic responses to questions that I know will inevitably be asked some day. I joined a forum for a particular state which is a fairly homogenous area and comprised predominantly of WASPs. I created a thread on Islam that explained the basic beliefs of our deen.

Almost immediately, these people began attacking the deen using the classic missionary arguments: Islam is violent, its a deviation of Christiniaty, Jesus is God, Mohammed (sallahu alayhi wa sallam) was a pedophile (naudhubillah), etc. With the help of some other people on the forum who were scattered all over the place, we began formulating responses. However, no matter how many times we would refute their arguments with articles and argumnets of our own, it seems that these people had been indoctrinated into believing particular things about Islam.

I began to realize just how powerful of a role the media plays in the way people think. I was recently thinking about the Australian imam controversy. He basically implied that women who aren’t dressed modestly are more susceptible to rape. Naturally, this caused a huge uproar in xenophobic Australia. The Imam immediately came out and pointed out that he condemned rape and reiterated that the punishment for rape under Islamic law is death. Of course, it was a bad analogy, but the powers that be used the incident to their own advantage by dividing the Muslim community into “for or against” groups and pitting them against one another.

Compare this Media frenzy with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s comments regarding the Israeli President who had actually raped 10 women:

“He turned out to be a strong man, raped 10 women,” the Russian president was quoted by Russian media as saying at a meeting in Moscow with Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. “I never would have expected it of him. He has surprised us all, we all envy him!”

President Putins’ administration claimed that it was a joke that had been lost in translation.

The media gave him the benefit of the doubt and assumed it was one of those bizarre Russian forms of humor that had indeed been lost in translation.

However, when the Imam pointed out that his analogy had also been lost in translation and that he condemned rape itself, the Western media was unforgiving.

This incident, coupled with the myriad of news reports portraying Islam and Muslims in a negative light (the Danish cartoons, the Pope, the Mozart Opera, the Niqab controversy, et al), made me realize that the problem isn’t that Muslims aren’t responding sufficiently to these claims, but that the media itself is complicit in the stereotyping of Muslims. I always knew this to be true, but I didn’t realize just how influential it is. I no longer have a TV so almost all of the news I get is off the internet. I don’t watch Cable television and I’ve lost touch with the amount of vitriol that is spewed against Islam.

So naturally, I decided that the best way to deal with Islamophobia is to target the media establishment itself. I concluded that the best way to do this was through artistic endeavors.

Hence, the Ali Jeem Show was born.

The Ali Jeem Show is more than a Muslim comedy blog. The purpose of the blog is to engage in scathing satire of the media establishment and the not-so-hidden hatred that Western governments and people have against Islam.

In additions to Muslims using political means to respond to the almost daily attacks against their faith, this blog will utilize the comedic pen to do so as well.

As I was watching “Art School Confidential”, I began to re-define myself. I’ve always seen myself as an intellectual, activist, and student of knowledge. I’ve never really seen myself as an “artist”. I realized that my personal ambition is to be more than an ‘intellectual’ in that I don’t want to be able to just accumulate vast amounts of information, but to use that information for some higher purpose, some social and spiritual need. Through Art, I can combine my different facets into one. I can use my intellectual abilities and combine it with my desire for social justice and spreading the correct image of the deen to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

So basically, I’m going to take this project very seriously. Its not about comedy, it has a purpose behind it. If there are any Muslims out there who want to contribute either through writing, art, or music, just e-mail me.

This is a long-term project that will attempt to utilize different forms of media to convey certain images: this will become artistic propaganda at its finest.

Share This