Muslims in the Western Imagination by Sophia Rose Arjana

Author:Sophia Rose Arjana [Arjana, Sophia Rose]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Art, Popular Culture, Religion, Islam, General, Social Science
ISBN: 9780199324927
Google: gHWbBQAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0199324921
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-02-02T18:30:00+00:00

6

The Monsters of September 11

Aliens and Other Muslims

“Alien” is often code for non-white Christians. Science fiction is a political genre:

Once clearly identified as aggressive, or implacable, or too “different” to coexist peacefully with an enlightened humanity, then the Other becomes a legitimate target. It is at this point that the process of stereotypical manipulation in SF, when faced with the Other, often defeats its own attempts at heroism. To create a resourceful enemy, the alien is endowed with a varied and heterogeneous degree of intelligence. However, it is rarely an intelligence that humans would find incomprehensible and, most significantly, it is hardly ever an intelligence superior to humankind’s. From a postcolonial perspective, the misrepresentation of the Other is almost complete. The alien first exoticized and distant, then identifiably different, has now become a quantifiable and dangerous known, sufficiently intelligent to pose a danger but never sufficiently superior to overcome the wiles of Homo sapiens.1

In the 1950s, movies about “aliens” were cautionary tales about the Communist/atheist threat, but with the end of Soviet power, a new danger emerged—Islam.

Stephen King once remarked that we create horrors to deal with the anxieties that exist in the real world, and chief among these is our fear of mortality, which is heightened during times of conflict or fear of conflict.2 The idea that “[w] e should fight for our humanity, and ‘not go gentle into that good night’ ” has political implications.3 This is precisely why the history of movies is tied to political events, something seen in the increased production of science fiction films during the Cold War and the precipitous rise in apocalyptic films since 2001.

It is not accidental that in science fiction movies, imaginary planets often take the appearance of Arabian deserts. The Gothic formula of the desert wasteland has continued to be a popular motif in the twentieth century—expressed here in Yeats’s famous poem “The Second Coming”:

Surely some revelation is at hand:

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?4

The trauma of World War I and the Age of Anxiety influenced this poem, but there is something else—the evil that has always been associated with the desert. “The desert yields not the Son of Man but the horror, the heart of darkness; a place not of indifference, but of malign terror.”5 This vision of the desert is found in several genres of fiction outside fantasy and science fiction, most notably the Western. In Cormac McCarthy’s Blood

Meridian (1985), we find “a chilling, raw restatement of the American West” that

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