Stereotyping Muslim Women in TV and Film

Stereotyping Moslem Wo workforce in TV and Film unfathomable stereotypes and misrepresentation more or less Arab Moslem wo custody have been dominating the air jacketern media. It every started with the guess of Clash of Civilization that was written by Samuel P. Huntington in 1997. In his theory, Huntington stressed that Islam has visible conflicting vision and action to the occidental ideas of indecorum and democracy, and that Islam is the main enemy to the West. In other voice communication, Islam and Arabs has contrasting ideologies than the wolfram has. And that the ideologies the wolfram have closely democracy and liberty conflict about the Islam consciousness of the democracy and liberation. This was the start of the stereotyping of Arabs in general.The occupation of stereotyping of Arabs in general has been on the gain since the disaster of 9/11. Arabs have been subjected to discrimination and violence since 9/11, a Muslim girl for example that works in a renta l car comp both was simply fired because she was told that she cannot wear her veil, as considerably as a hotel employee give tongue to that he was cursed many times and that batch called him Taliban and Osama.After kinsfolk 9/11 attack on the USA, the stereotyping began at its fullest load, that the Islam and Arabs be terrorists, cruel, robbers, heartless, religious fanatics, brutal murderers, and abusers of women. It resulted in the start of o the word-painting of Arab women that they ar ab utilise by men, and that they argon sex object, belly dancers and notes diggers, and that they have no self esteem, and they ar beaten by men and they be only do what men wishes and require without having any idea about it.Following 9/11, the world started attack Islam and they acc utilise Islam of universe a religion of terrorism, however, among those attackers there were many who wanted to have it off the equity about that religion in order to know whether it is really a reli gion of terrorism or not. The media exaggerated in reporting the incident of 9/11 which resulted in making a lot of concourse believe that Arabs and Muslims atomic number 18 terrorists. Also Hollywood is a big breach of exaggerating this stretch out.Cinema Producers and Film Makers keep on making movies that stereotype Arabs as terrorists and killers. They besides stereotype them with the five Bs, which ar Billionaires, Bombers, Belly dancers, Bedouins, and Barbarians. jacks shaheen in his movie Reel Bad Arabs showed that the western movies are obsessed with word-painting of Arab women in their movies, but they draw them from their train of views. They didnt change any design during years of portrayals.Jack Shaheen utter that the portray of Arab women nearly as slave girls, a fair sex wearing a transparent veil that shows her body, and that they are belly dancers and peasant gold diggers that they are able to do anything in the sake of their well being, Shaheen in his this part about the portray of Arab women as gypsies and gold diggers is duty and I agree with him that is generally the case in western movies that portray Arab women.Moreover, in the Disney movie remake of around the world in 80 days, they represent that Arnold Sch contendzenegger an Arab Sheikh, that have more than 100 wives slaves just for sex, which shows that the Arab men are not satisfied by one woman only and they want lot of everything correct the wives, and this part also talk about El shariaa that the man has the right to marry 4 wives. Which the West refuses its concept from the front place, but they dont even understand the Law of Islam to talk about this issue or to misrepresent it in this way. But although they pictured Arab women in several(predicate) go dones the gold digger, the sex slave, mischievous, but after the attacks of September 11 the image of terrorists is the dominate image in the mind and the movies of the West.The TV influences the heap in a tremendous way it affects their attitudes and behavior, and affects their minds and believes. The media personnel record advantage of this fleck that the western the great unwashed are ignorant about anything that relates to Arabs and they just know them from movies and TV shows, and they mostly are in the image of terrorist so they take of this point and represent Arabs and Arab women without packing them or understanding them and they stereotype them as the way they want the people to think of them. They succeed in this point that most of the westerlys when they come to think about Arabs or Arab women, the first thing that comes to their minds is Arabs being terrorists ,barbarians, cruel, robbers, monsters, beater of women, take women as slaves, women are just for their own pleasure.Everyone knows from western media and western image what image Arab women have in general, images that started by the orientalists about Arab Harim, Arab dancing, Arab women set as objects in the Arab world locked in doors, having no function in human race affairs, Muslim women being inferior to men. These are the concepts in western media, in western films and in western cartoons, unfortunately.Most Arabs are submissive to being stereotyped by western media, but for Arab women the problem is particularly sensitive. It seems that the westbound media is obsessed by the way a Muslim woman garmentes the veil in particular. Most of the Arab Muslim women are portray as fat, shapeless women in their loose dress and ugly veil shape they even do them as a caricature in nearly magazines and programs. In fact, the concept of veil woman is constantly perceive in the west as shes having a life, shes al slipway seen as a victim, poor, isolated creature politically, culturally and she is so isolated. According to Gwinn (1997), he said that the veil woman is always reflected by the western to be the most popular way of representing the problem of Islam. In fact, Longtime ago pre I slam veils were usance among Greeks, Romans and Jews, but when Islam started and the Muslim women took the veils as a way to cover their vibrissa as God said, the West started to identify the conceal women as the Muslim terrorist one.The veil that the Muslim women wear is seen as a symbolic representation of glum and alien status as mentioned by Posetty (2008) in his article. Images of Islamic dress are increasingly used in the western media as a symbol of extremism. As a result, Muslims all over Europe and the West in general, are suffering from the consequences of such(prenominal) associations.The main problem as Ahmed (1992) pointed out in his article, has been that the act of veiling among Muslim women is associated with the lack of traditionalism and backwardness that does not fit into the modern society and among Western women. This reflects the theory of Orientalism that was verbalize by Said 1978, which asserts that the East and its inhabitants are considered backward, barbaric and outsiders to Western society.As mentioned by Edward Said in this Orientalist framework, the Muslim Arab women have always been approximation as others they are always considered as different from the Western women and the Western culture. The Western conceptional, Othered portrayed women as sexual objects, weak, and that they are marginalized in their own society. The Orientalism decocted on Arabic, history, and philosophy, but failed to truly convey the lives and feelings of Muslims, their voices remained mute.Muslims, as portrayed in western media, illustrate two Orientalist assumptions that arouse patronage and fear in Western societies. The fisrt as mentiond by Posetty (2008), Muslim women are suppress and in need of liberation and the second is that Muslim men are a violent force that creates a threat to Western society.In an agreement with Mishra (2007), who has been studying the misrepresentation constructed by the Western media about the Muslim Arab women since the 9/11 incident. She has examined the articles published by The r evolutionary York clock and other newspapers and magazines after the 9/11 incident, particularly, between September 11, 2001 and September 11, 2003. Through her study she found that issues such as rape, torture, and patriarchal heaviness were all topics that related to Muslim women in non-Western countries. Additionally, the discussion of women in Islam tends to be centered around the burqu, hijab, or as it is called in the Western societies as the veil.Muslims women living abroad are facing a bigger problem than just a misunderstanding or negative image, unfortunately they are facing a huge discrimination between them and the westernized women. The Arab Muslim immigrant women are facing gender-based media representations as well. As stated by Morin (2009), the immigrant Muslim Arab women are subjected to cultural misconceptions and the recent political conflicts that have spoiled Arab-Western relations. Th ese misconceptions that are created by the Western media make it hard for those women to live abroad without being discriminated and thought as others. In the West, clearly, negative Arab images rooted in history are providing a base for the stereotyping of Arab women in the media.In addition to the misconception about the veil, words such as the circumcision, polygamy, the sharia (Islamic) law, the harem, forced marriages, etc, are just a few issues that are associated with the Arab Muslim women, which resulted in fitting women into the absolute, homogenous oppressed Muslim woman category.News on Muslim women is dominated by the culturalist presentation and interpretation of Islam. In fact, the discrimination of these women, which attracts media attention, tends to be explained almost solo according to theories on Islamic culture. For example, when referring to the rights of Muslim women, the news discourse tends to direction on symbolic and religious issues such as the veil or Is lam, and they tend to avoid more important issues that are related to the equality of these women, such as rights to education or public freedoms. These visions are removed from reality because they fail to take into account bond of millions of women to their Islamic identity.The Western newspaper articles mainly present Muslims women in three ways as passive women, as victims and as veiled women. They are portrayed as observers rather than as active participants in their community. Their role as victims is reflected through the publishing of news stories describing conflicts such as the Afghan or Algerian conflicts in which women are clearly victims.Muslim-Arab women have increasingly been on the position covers of magazines and front pages of newspapers since 9/11 and all the events that followed among the major topics covered were the war in Afghanistan, the U.S.-led Iraqi invasion, as well as the elections in both countries. For example, on the covers of National Geographic a nd various other magazines, veiled women award the western urge to discover what lies underneath the veil.Since the invasion of Afghanistan, the Western media began to focus on the unveiling of women as a sign of their liberation, which we totally resist with. Images of women removing the veil serve as justification to many individuals for the war. Time cartridge published an article in December 2001 that told the story of 200 women who collected together to remove their veils together in a post-Taliban Afghanistan. (Macdonald, 2003).As stated by Ayish (2010), news media has made it a point to document the lives of millions of women that are in need of saving from an oppressive religion. The news media, specifically The New York Times and Time Magazine, have employed divisive methods founded in Orientalist assumptions that picture justification for Western intervention in the Middle East. And as stated by Mishra (2007), the media portrayals of Muslim men and women in The New Yo rk Times reenforce the need for Western intervention in Muslim societies and communities, to whether help exculpate Muslim women or to keep Muslim men under inspection as they are considered as a threat and violence.In advertising, they are being misrepresented as well. The Western advertisement also used the Arab Muslim women in their advertisement and they didnt want to endangerment by changing the image that the west al take ony have for the Arab Muslim women, so they used the stereotyped and typical image of the veiled woman harem, the mysterious veiled woman that is under the control of an oppressive man, to appeal to their customers of the west. They didnt want to risk changing the image in an advertisement and that this image is strong in the mind of the Western people, and they might lose money or even customers and they might accuse them with treason because they put the Arabs in a good enough image.They use the veil of the Muslim Arab women as a sex symbol to sell fo r sex. They think when they put a woman in a veil they depart get the consumers to buy the product. And when they do, they willing buy the whodunit behind the veil. The Westerns are usually buying a false and imaginary image of the Others which are the Arab or Arab women.The continuous and repetitive of these images in the different types of media will make these images real in the mind of the Western people, and this will enlarge the pause between the East and the West The oppressed veiled Muslim woman in the ads may also be machine-accessible to the escalating intolerance and disputes surrounding Muslim women and the veil in the Western world.Media people should be careful with what they put in the different types of media so as not to spread false and imaginary images or believes about other culture or other people traditions, and make them in the rack up image that could be, and make them by these images increase the hatred between countries and increase hate crimes and w ars. Media people should see the sensitivity in the materials they publish, and consider these images will hurt or damage someone or not, they should study the Arab and study their traditions and their believes Shariaa before talking falsely about it in different ways and different types of media.Western fascination with the veiling of Muslim women as a symbol of oppression is often contradictory to reality. The west are characterization Arab women in this way because they inherited this stereotyping, and they didnt try to do research or study of Arabs and Arab women to see if they are right about what they are showing in their movies or what they are writing. They just took what they have watched in the movies and read in papers, and they started to portray or actually kept on the comparable way of this negative portrayal and stereotyping of Arab women, without the right noesis about the Arab culture, religion, and mostly people.ConclusionIn the West, Arab women are often portr ayed through conventional representations and discourses in which they have no voice. The Western popular imagination, nurtured by a media which commonly lacks sensitivity to complex realities, is quick to associate Arab women with oppression and subordination. Arab women are limited to a debate between tradition and modernity in which they are alternatively perceived as model of a mythic cultural authenticity, of a drift towards extremism or of radical modernization. Therefore, they find themselves at the heart of the ambiguous relations between the Eastern and Western worlds, which was canvas by Edward Sad. They are, however, essential actors in the development of the Arab region, and it is indispensable that their position at the heart of all contemporary social, political, economic and cultural matters be accepted in both the East and West.Basically the media is the main reason of enlarging the gap between the West and the East, it keeps on pressing and pressing on the west and filling their minds with pictures, movies, and news against Muslims and Islam that arent true. Since September 11 until now Hollywood keeps on making movies about Arabs and Muslims portraying them as terrorists and killers who attack innocent people without any reason, while they dont make any movies about Israeli.The mass media not only exclude modern Islamist women but also, in general, the socially and culturally diverse communities of Muslim women living in either the Arab world or in Western world. These women are not only housewives, mothers and Muslims as portrayed by the media, but also students, researchers, entrepreneurs, domestic workers, artists, politicians, volunteers, activists, etc. In this respect, it is also not accidental that the media do not report on the evolution of pro human rights movements (including womens rights and freedoms movements) that exist in some Arab countries, such as Egypt and Morocco.Misconceptions by the media have resulted in misundersta nding Arab women. As Gwinn (1997) stated, ideas about the Muslim world have managed to deform much of our understandings toward Muslim women. Words such as the veil, the harem, female circumcision, etc. have managed to give an impression to some of the images associated with the oppressed Muslim woman.The problem now is how to convey knowledge to public opinion so that they know truly whats going on in the Middle East. Unfortunately theyre trying to build on peoples ignorance, or on peoples busy time as nobody has the time to read a lot. It is time to build on information or on knowledge that the Arabs are descendents of great civilization, Arab women have the right to live like any other woman in the world with their children and to have their childrens future away(predicate) from humiliation, away from occupation. The western media is the one who damaged the image of the Muslims specially the veiled women, so they must take step and start to do campaigns, movies, or documentaries to correct the image of the Arab Muslim woman and start to treat her unremarkably or even correct the negative images.