Missing Muslims in the movies |
'West is West' is a witty and authentic film
West is West, the sequel to the phenomenally successful film East is East is in the cinemas. Fans have had to wait a long time for this moment. The first film blew us away. It defied cultural precepts, evaded "ethnic" borders, made us laugh and cry, even changed lives.
Munir Khan, an 18-year-old Muslim, wrote to me just after East is East won the Bafta Alexander Korda Award for the best British film in 2000. The young man was so, so excited. At last, he wrote, people could see a popular movie about Muslim life. It had inspired him to go to drama school.
All this was a year before the ruthless Islamist suicide attacks on the US and the start of an endless war on terror which has split the world asunder.
The scriptwriter Ayub Khan-Din was an actor. In 1997 he turned his eventful life into an exuberant play. Co-produced by the Tamasha theatre company and the Royal Court, it was a comedy with an undertow of pain. An authoritarian yet vulnerable Pakistani Muslim man in Oldham tries and largely fails to impose his will on his white Catholic wife and large brood of dysfunctional but smart kids. From a small stage it went to the big screen. Author and culture critic Ziauddin Sardar thought the film – directed by Damien O'Donnell – reinforced the worst prejudices about Pakistani men. Maybe so for some people, though I have never thought that, having watched it over 15 times.
Until East is East, no one knew nor cared about the early Pakistani migrants in Northern towns – almost all men – and what many of them did next. They were numbers, not names. Din humanised them – just as Andrea Levy's novel Small Island humanised Caribbean incomers to Britain in the Fifties. Both became major hits. Success, however, does not always nudge the gatekeepers to open their minds and eyes. In general, the British film and TV drama industries are deeply uninterested in most stories by and about British Muslims – a term I use broadly to mean all those from that background, believers and not.
Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette came out way back in 1985. It was, I believe, the very first time mainstream audiences saw a Muslim co-hero, a young, gay man in Thatcher's alienated Britain. Many Muslims hated it because homosexuality is haram and western, but it was a breakthrough. So we thought, somewhat naively. The list of non-stereotypical Muslim-themed movies made since then is disappointingly short, but nevertheless impressive.
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Now a regular columnist on The Independent and London’s Evening Standard, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a journalist who has written for The Guardian, Observer, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Evening Standard, The Mail and other newspapers. She is also a radio and television broadcaster and author of several books. Her book, No Place Like Home, was an autobiographical account of a twice removed immigrant.
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