Muslim playwrights focus on universal themes

NEW YORK (RNS) Let’s start with a disclaimer: the Islamic prayers, Urdu expressions and youth-culture slang (like FOB, as in “Fresh Off Boat”) which pepper the new play, “The Domestic Crusaders,” may not be familiar to all American audiences. But if they’re paying attention, playwright Wajahat Ali says, they’ll look beyond the story of a […]

NEW YORK (RNS) Let’s start with a disclaimer: the Islamic prayers, Urdu expressions and youth-culture slang (like FOB, as in “Fresh Off Boat”) which pepper the new play, “The Domestic Crusaders,” may not be familiar to all American audiences.


But if they’re paying attention, playwright Wajahat Ali says, they’ll look beyond the story of a Muslim-American family and maybe even see traces of themselves in the characters.

“This is not a Muslim play. This is a family drama,” said Ali, whose playopened Sept. 11 for a one-month run at New York’s Nuyorican Poets Cafe. “I wanted it to be authentic but universal.”

“The Domestic Crusaders” is the latest in a string of stage plays written by Muslim Americans, and they’re receiving critical praise at a time when many Americans, still affected by the 9/11 terror attacks, view Muslims negatively.

This fledgling Muslim theater scene suggests an evolution among U.S. Muslims, whose immigrant forbears, like other newcomers, routed their children into financially secure professions like law or medicine and away from the arts and media.

Although Muslim characters are still rare in TV and film, actors like Aasif Mandvi of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” and movies like the Oscar-winning “Slumdog Millionaire,” in which the underdog hero is Muslim, hint at a subtle change in the broader entertainment industry.

The live stage, while less visible and lucrative, offers a good medium for the first generation of Muslim American artists because it relatively inexpensive and open to risk. At the same time, a few theater companies are specializing in plays written by Muslim playwrights, including Chicago’s Silk Road Theatre Project and the Rasaka Theatre Company, and San Francisco’s Golden Thread Productions.

“It takes a few generations from the first one to feel you can participate more in the creating of culture,” said Yussef El Guindi, an Egyptian-born playwright who lives in Seattle. “That’s what Muslims need to do more, tell their stories.”

Playwrights say the negative images surrounding 9/11 helped accelerate the rise of Muslim theater. “Muslims see themselves working hard, raising a family, paying taxes, and being good citizens, and then they turn on the TV and all they see is `dirty rag-head,”‘ said Ali, who started working on the play shortly after 9/11.


“When you belong to a minority that is so demonized, you have a responsibility to use your voice and speak.”

The playwrights take on a number of sensitive themes, from discrimination and civil rights abuses, to problems specific to Muslim communities, such as materialism, misogyny and racism. Salman and Fatima, the immigrant parents in Ali’s play, disapprove of their daughter Fatima having a black boyfriend even though he is Muslim. “Everybody’s equal in Islam,” Fatima shouts at her mother. Meanwhile, Fatima’s older brother Salahuddin, to the chagrin of his parents, drinks and has a preference for white women.

“I have to write stuff that I didn’t agree with, but forced myself to write it because I know the characters would say it,” said Ali.

Ali, who was born and raised in Silicon Valley to successful Pakistani immigrant parents, is well-versed in the expectations, pressures, and judgments in any tight-knit immigrant community, which is a common theme across many of the plays.

“It’s the struggle to find your place, and the emotional and practical challenges,” said El Guindi, adding that he was inspired by becoming a U.S. citizen in 1996. “I wanted to vote, I wanted to participate. I was startled by how transformative it was. It was almost like a baptism.”

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While many Muslim Americans welcome the plays, others have been critical. When Chicago’s Silk Road Theatre Project put on “10 Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith,” a family drama by El Guindi that explored arranged marriage, homosexuality and loss of faith, an official with the Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations complained it wasn’t the family drama that producers were advertising.


“Of course, as artists, they are free to tackle what they want, but I think it becomes unfair when a play with a subject matter that is distant from the classic struggles of the American-Muslim community, and is moreover not endorsed by it, uses the `Muslim bridge-building’ card to market itself,” CAIR spokesman Ahmed Rehab told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2005.

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While the number of Muslim American playwrights is growing, so too are theaters willing to host their works. “The Domestic Crusaders” was the first in Nuyorican’s 36-year history to sell out all three performances on opening weekend.

Rome Neal, Nuyorican’s theater director, said he missed the relevance of the play at first, but warmed up to it after seeing it as a universal family drama. “A Pakistani-Muslim play just didn’t click for me,” Neal said. “But after reading it, and finding that universal thread, that’s when I thought it could work.”

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More plays are on the way. “Tennis in Nablus,” by Ismail Khalidi and set in 1939 Palestine, will be produced in January by Atlanta’s Tony Award-winning Alliance Theater. “Language Rooms,” a dark comedy about two Arab-American investigators by El Guindi, opens next March in Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater. “Unveiled,” a play by Rohina Malik which follows five Muslim women in a post-9/11 world, also opens in March in Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater.

Suehyla El Attar, who is cast in “Tennis in Nablus,” says she hopes for the day when being “Muslim” on stage will be rather unremarkable.

“I’m waiting for a Muslim Neil Simon, someone who can write story after story,” she said, “and if characters occasionally happen to be Muslim, fine.”


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