Everyone seems to agree on one thing about “Alice In Arabia,” a show about an Arab-American girl who goes to live with her grandparents in Saudi Arabia: A good television show with an Arab-American girl at the center would be an important thing. “How many shows are there with Arab-American girls at the center?” mused novelist Saladin Ahmed, who writes fantasy novels that draw on Islam as an inspiration. And “Alice In Arabia” creator Brooke Eikmeier, a veteran of both the U.S. Army and the television industry, wrote in a piece in the Hollywood Reporter that her goal was a show with a majority-Muslim cast, with a mixed-race main character whose character arc would be from unfamiliarity with Saudi culture to great love for her adopted country.
But the ABC Family project, which was swiftly cancelled shortly after it was announced, became something else entirely. As drafts of the show circulated, “Alice In Arabia” became a proxy for a much larger question. The fight to diversify television characters often focuses on two possible solutions: challenging white writers and male writers to look outside their own perspectives, and securing more jobs for women and people of color. The fight over “Alice In Arabia” is a fascinating look at the ways in which those goals can come into conflict, especially when white writers think they have done their due diligence, but audiences of color see something every different.
In the case of “Alice In Arabia,” Ahmed said that the trouble started with ABC’s pitch for the show, which described it as “a high-stakes drama series about a rebellious American teenage girl who, after tragedy befalls her parents, is unknowingly kidnapped by her extended family, who are Saudi Arabian….Now a virtual prisoner in her grandfather’s royal compound, Alice must count on her independent spirit and wit to find a way to return home while surviving life behind the veil.” Language like this has a long history, Ahmed says, and not a politically neutral one. “There’s real reasons these stories are told about sort of oppressive, savage, Arab men, and kidnapping, and all this horrible stuff,” he argued. “I have no particular love for the Saudi government, but why tell this story again? The story I’ve never heard in popular media is this regime was basically installed by the British empire.”
Ibrahim Hooper, the National Communications Director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that a draft of the pilot script that struck him as “going off the kind of superficial, anecdotal information about the faith and the culture.” BuzzFeed reporter Rega Jha, who also obtained a copy of the draft, noted that it appeared to confuse different kinds of coverings worn by Muslim women (and also attempted to heighten the perceived conflicts of values between American and Saudi characters).
Eikmeier did not respond to a request for a copy of the script, which makes it hard for me to get a sense for myself if the overall power of the story, and its engagement with Saudi culture, might have overridden those causes for discomfort. But at least in the matter of the summary of the show, Eikmeier contends that ABC Family badly misrepresented her premise. “I cringed at kidnapped, as it implied some violent action that was never taken,” she wrote. “Virtual prisoner was an overhyped phrase I would never have personally used, and surviving life behind the veil was the exact opposite of the cultural tone I was trying to achieve.” Those are terrific ideals. But just because an author intends something does not mean that point gets translated on the page or on the screen.
Eikmeier and her critics say they want the same thing: a media environment that offers up richer and more complex depictions of Muslim and Arab characters and countries. The question, then, is how best to get there. Eikmeier has cited her experience in the Army and her relationship with her Saudi Arabian teacher as her inspiration for “Alice In Arabia.” While Ahmed acknowledged that “it’s not that white people can’t write sensitive stuff, and it’s not that being Muslim automatically makes your stuff good,” he suggested Eikmeier’s experiences were not necessarily a substitute for Muslim perspectives.
At issue is not just how much exposure Eikmeier had, either, but what type. In my conversations with Hooper and Ahmed, both brought up her military service as a kind of experience that might produce a warped perspective on countries like Saudi Arabia. Eikmeier seems to have seen her time in the Army as a ticket that got her access to a country where she might not have spent much time otherwise, rather than as a process of indoctrination. To Hooper and Ahmed, the military’s approach to the Middle East is not neutral. Instead, it frequently relies on stories that paint the region as barbaric and backwards, a narrative that justifies sending troops there.
Imagination is absolutely a powerful tool, and Eikmeier’s experience should not be construed to discourage white writers–or any writers, really–from venturing beyond their own perspectives to try to create characters unlike themselves. But the response to “Alice In Arabia” suggests that writers who are working beyond their experience have to be careful if they want to be credible to the communities they are portraying. Not all credentials seem equally impressive. And not all research and source materials come across as unbiased. Doing the work to educate yourself is absolutely critical, no matter what kind of fictional world you want to build, or what kinds of characters you want to conjure into existence. But the kind and quality of that work matters.
That those pitfalls exist for white writers does suggest that it might help to have more writers of color–and writers with a wider array of life experience, period–working behind the scenes, so writers can learn from each other, and be challenged to clear higher bars. Hooper and Ahmed agree that one important reform would be a greater Muslim and Arab presence in Hollywood, be it in writers’ rooms and directors’ chairs, marketing departments, or executive ranks.
Racial and ethic breakdowns of people in important behind-the-scenes roles in the entertainment industry do not typically separate out people of Arab and Middle Eastern descent. Instead, they are grouped into the vanishingly tiny “other” categories along with Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and people of mixed race. Sometimes, they are even lumped in with people of color in general in reports like the 2012 Directors Guild Of America census of television directors, which found that just 17 percent of television episodes were directed by non-whites. And there are no such censuses by religion, making it hard to know what sort of representation Muslims have gained in these influential positions. Whatever the figures are, it seems obvious that they are quite small.
Even before the “Alice In Arabia” disaster, issues of Muslim and Arab representation were on the agenda for ABC Family’s parent company. Earlier this year, the Muslim Public Affairs Council had announced a collaboration with Disney and ABC to help develop young Muslim television writers, in part so they will be have a better shot of winning slots in the company’s writers’ programs. The organization says candidates submitted “dozens of scripts.” That may not be enough to offset the ocean of projects floating around Hollywood, but at least it is a start.
And even if Muslims and Arabs are not formally on the payroll, Hooper offered up a reminder that studios, writers, and directors do not have to do all the work themselves–any number of organizations and people are available as resources. CAIR had to work for two years to convince Paramount Pictures that “The Sum Of All Fears,” an adaptation of the Tom Clancy novel of the same name, should have white supremacists as its antagonists, rather than the book’s Arab nationalist villains. Dreamworks, by contrast, actively solicited input from Muslim groups on how to handle “The Prince of Egypt,” which depicted Moses, who Muslims consider a prophet — some Sunni Muslims oppose depictions of both the prophets and Muhammad, a subject of debate in both Muslim scriptural tradition and in secular politics.
“When these things are in the can, it’s really tough to change them. You’ve really got to get them in the initial stages,” Hooper said. “If you’re not at the table when these pitches are being made, when these pilots are being planned, when these things are in the initial stages, you’re not going to have much impact down the road.” Hooper said that the most important thing is a balance of depictions, not on a project-by-project basis, but in the narrative mix as a whole. And he said he has no interest in any sort of rule that might ban negative depictions of Muslims or Middle Eastern countries. “If there are issues of women’s rights in the Muslim world, we’re on your side,” Hooper said. “We believe if women are denied rights in the Muslim world, that’s un-Islamic. If you discuss these things or portray these things in a way that shows the reality, that doesn’t indict the entire faith for some cultural practice, for some individual’s wrongdoing, we don’t have a problem with that.”
Ahmed adds a final suggestion: “The American girl or the American Proxy Girl snatched up by Arabs, it ends up borrowing language from stories about Indian captivity and stuff like that,” he said. “I think there are a lot more interesting stories that could be told, even if one wants to take aspects of any particular culture one finds problematic.”
That is a critically important point. Diversity is about the color and the gender of people who are writing and shooting television, but it is also about whether or not we tell the same stories, with the same dramatic beats, and the same resolutions over and over again. Changing the composition of writers’ rooms and the occupants of directors’ chairs would be a relatively easy task, if only the entertainment industry made the decision to do it. Yet pulling away from trusty old archetypes, and stories we know viewers respond to, is an entirely different challenge.