Searching for the Colorful Faces of Muslim Men

Abstract

What does a Muslim man look like?As a scholar, teacher of Islam, and as a Muslim, I help my students grapple with this difficult question every day. Just as there are no two Christians or Jews alike, no two Muslims are the same. Yet we are bombarded by media with a fairly monolithic picture of Muslim men, which quite easily extends to singular ideas about Islam. We are repeatedly shown a Muslim man with a big beard, which takes on the meaning that Muslim-man-with-a-beard always equals a Shari’a-loving extremist. Laugh or cry at such generalization, this is the reality of Muslim and Islamic stereotypes. Before my students pick up a book introducing them to Islam, they have already been inundated with stereotyped images of Muslim men and women, and these images are firmly lodged in their minds. The challenge for me is to provide broader images of Muslim masculinity, and to present a variety of different ways that Islam is lived from Sunni to Shi’a to Ahmaddiya to Ismaiili to Alawi.