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Everyday Lives, Filled With Teachable Moments
The news that a reality show about Muslim families in America would be carried by TLC, the cable channel that has built its current reputation on Jon and Kate Gosselin, polygamy and “Toddlers & Tiaras,” couldn’t help giving you a little shudder. Had anyone thought this through?
As it turns out, however, the only thing extreme about “All-American Muslim,” an eight-part series that begins on Sunday, is the lengths to which it goes to portray its subjects — members of the Arab-American community in Dearborn, Mich. — as everyday people. While head scarves and abstemiousness may set some of them apart, in general the medical assistants, secretaries, deputy sheriffs and football coaches the show follows come across as almost freakishly normal.
That’s probably something to be thankful for in our continuing post-9/11 climate of suspicion and fear. Any reasonably sentient person who watches “All-American Muslim” will get the point: It’s silly to think that these hard-working, family-oriented Michiganders — whatever their political views or feelings about Israel might be — represent some sort of danger to the republic. (Which is not to say that they, along with people from many other parts of the world, aren’t doing their part to change American culture.)
Good feelings and good intentions don’t equate with good TV, however, and as it introduces us to five families in Dearborn, the country’s largest Arab-American enclave, “All-American Muslim” only fitfully displays the kind of melodrama or incidental humor that can get you addicted to a documentary reality show.
All those profiled are on their best behavior, and the show is so focused on teaching that it goes for long stretches without entertaining. That impulse is embodied by frequent segments in which four or five central figures sit on couches facing the camera and discuss the finer points of intermarriage or the hijab — moments that play like lectures or bland consciousness-raising.
It’s also noticeable that through the first two episodes, while there’s abundant discussion of differences and discrimination, there’s none at all of war and politics and terrorism, leaving you to wonder whether that’s a reflection of reality or another part of the producers’ bid to tamp down possible controversy.
That’s not to say that there’s nothing here to upset or challenge anyone. In addition to story lines involving the marriage of a Muslim woman and an Irish Catholic man (who converts to Islam) and the effects of Ramadan fasting on the local high school football team, a major focus of the early episodes is the wearing of the hijab, the head scarf that is the visible locus of many people’s negative feelings about Islam.
A welter of mixed reactions are inspired by the scenes in which Samira Amen-Fawaz, who has not worn the hijab for many years, decides to return to it because of problems she and her husband have had conceiving a child. God has been sending her signs, she says, asking her, “When are you going to wake up and listen to me?”
Particularly uncomfortable for many viewers will be the scene in which Samira and her father seek advice from an imam regarding her fertility options. He discourages any procedure employing sperm other than her husband’s and tells her, in an unctuous bit of emotional blackmail: “When you have hijab, you will have more blessing from God. When you have more blessing from God, it means God will cooperate more with you and give you a lot of good things in your life.”
On the other side of the ledger — and who knows whether this is coincidental or not — the two most compelling figures in the show, Suehaila Amen and Nawal Aoude, are outspoken, intelligent, attractive, fiercely capable young women who choose to wear the hijab. The non-Muslim viewer can’t begin to understand from the glimpses we get in the show how these women reconcile their obvious independence of mind with the complacent patriarchal attitudes demonstrated by fathers, brothers and husbands; we can only marvel at it.
“All-American Muslim” gets at some of these conflicts when Samira surprises her parents with her decision to return to the hijab. Her father, beaming, announces, “Now when I look at my daughter, I see a complete Muslim woman,” and her sister Suehaila says in her overbearing way that Samira’s choice “has been a beautiful thing for us.”
Meanwhile their sister Shadia — the maverick who married outside the faith and has magenta streaks in her uncovered hair — looks mournful as Samira basks in the family’s joy. “You know, it’s not a competition,” Shadia says.
To be fair, it’s not all hijabs and babies in “All-American Muslim.” There’s Nina Bazzy, the wedding planner who wants to open a nightclub — good luck with that — and who looks like a future star of “The Real Housewives of Dearborn.” And there are humorous moments, though the jokes might not cross cultural lines. When Jeff, Shadia’s fiancé, gamely converting, is told to get down on one knee, he stays there even when his future in-laws shout: “Where’s the sword?” “Get the sword!” Now that’s love.
Mike Hale
The New York Times