Narratives of Islamophobia on American and British TV: The Specter of the Violent Muslim Man in Hulu’s Ramy & Netflix’s Man Like Mobeen

This paper investigates how narratives of Islamophobia, specifically the trope of the violent Muslim man, appear in two comedy-drama series created by Muslim producers: Ramy (2019) and Man Like Mobeen (2016). Previous scholarship has attended to anti-Muslim bias in entertainment media by situating them within discourses of sympathy. These analyses have attested to how show producers, both Muslim and non-Muslim, uphold multiculturalism and inclusivity as Western liberal values, and present instances of racism as exceptions rather than the norm (Shaheen 2006, Alsultany 2012, Conway 2017). I argue in this paper that performances of Islamophobia in Ramy and Man Like Mobeen, function as a critique of the limits of liberal inclusion for Muslims and lay bare racism as endemic, rather than exceptional, to American and British societies. Moreover, these series demonstrate how Muslim masculinity is necessarily formed in tandem with the image of the violent Muslim terrorist.