Horst Schulze, former president of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, wrote a book called Excellence Wins: A No-Nonsense Guide to Becoming the Best in a World of Compromise. During a promotional tour of the book, someone cornered the eighty-year-old executive and asked him about his idea of “excellence.”
“It’s not harder,” Mr. Schulze replied before he was pulled away by his PR people. What did Mr. Schulze mean by “It’s not harder”?
He meant that it’s not harder to be excellent than it is to be mediocre. Either way, you burn through the same number of hours per day. When you make the conscious choice to be excellent, it gives you the momentum to perform at that level on a regular basis. When you become comfortable with mediocrity, your momentum stalls and it becomes difficult to accomplish anything.
As long as you’re awake, you’re choosing to do something, even when it comes to your “leisure time.” Do you choose with excellence in mind? Or do you choose mediocrity or, worse, Dajjalic content? Do you choose to watch Western entertainment on Netflix and what is essentially softcore pornography, play video games with cringe-worthy social messaging, or waste time interacting with trolls online who probably don’t even exist in real life? All those things consume raw effort — and in return you get nothing back. Instead, why not calibrate your leisure time by choosing entertainment that is meaningful to you, where you benefit even when you’re not technically “working”?
People often misunderstand this idea of “doing better things” in our free time. You don’t need to get into the intellectual grind of studying multi-volume works on the fiqh and pretend to be a scholar when that’s not even your area of interest or specialty. You’ll find instead that the people who cultivate excellence are not working themselves to death to achieve it; they’ve just got the right orientation, motivation, and atmosphere for excellence to manifest itself on a regular basis. Even when they’re having fun, you can tell they’re getting something beneficial out of it.
You might be a movie connoisseur or manga collector. You might be a man who secretly enjoys romantic comedies. You might be among those who enjoy anime. Your tastes vary along with your preferred frequency. There comes a question many of us don’t ask: how does our Islam come into these things? Can it at all? How are Islam and Muslims portrayed in the entertainment industry in the first place, and does it match up with our idea of “excellence”?
Taliban Goat Herders in a Desert
The standard media depiction of “the Muslims” in most settings are as Taliban goat herders—but in the Saharan desert. There’s always a desert, Indian or Arabic music, and a long shot of a camel striding along in the dunes. Notice the hairy man who is slightly angry and harsh as he’s taking water out of a well. If you’re unlucky, this hairy, angry, harsh person is usually presented as a terrorist.
“But Wes,” you might say, “hasn’t Hollywood moved away from that to a more nuanced depiction?”
Well, if by “nuanced” you mean “more woke and liberal,” you would be correct. Let’s look at one modern example of so-called “nuance.”
Secrets & Sisterhood: The Sozahdahs is a new reality TV series on Hulu that follows the lives of 10 Afghani sisters living in Los Angeles. The series luridly shows these “Muslim” women living a materialistic California lifestyle while clashing with the traditional norms of their homeland. The show’s producers may say, “This is a Muslim series,” but it looks more like an Afghan version of The Kardashians. The girls’ clothing choices, discussions about illicit sex, and lack of family values demonstrates clearly that Islam plays no role in their lives. The mainstream entertainment industry is too Dajjalic to portray Islam or its followers in a modest and dignified way, let alone in a manner that portrays excelling in one’s religion to be the ultimate goal. Why do they ignore and skip over the mainstream members of the Muslim community who do not engage in illicit sex or blow things up?
We need Muslim entertainers who choose roles that maintain their values and show Muslims in an honorable light, and Muslim media advisers who hold fast to ihsan and honor instead.
We have spent decades watching Muslims depicted as crazed or conflicted terrorists or, as recently shown, secretly degenerate and “just like the rest of us.” As the entertainment industry has begun to try to reflect spiritual diversity, they’ve also created “token Muslim” roles and “Muslim extras” in background scenes. But their meager attempts to highlight Muslim characters who aren’t terrorists often end up displaying the opposite extreme: worldly and secular Muslims who have nothing to do with Islamic traditions, like in Secrets & Sisterhood. It seems that Hollywood has gone from depicting Muslims as religious extremists to depicting Muslims as secretly unreligious. It now feels like Shaytan is giving dawah on our behalf.
It’s a bit too much. Those of us who consume entertainment deserve a more realistic variety of Muslim personas. It’s time for Western Muslims to get more involved in creating, writing, and producing Islamic entertainment; to combine our resources to support new creatives in these areas; and to choose to consume truly Islamic content.
Some types of entertainment may seem consistent enough with your values and beliefs as a Muslim, yet if Muslims do not create the entertainment, it is not likely to be aligned with Islamic principles. For example, there are plenty of Japanese manga and anime series like Naruto and Vinland Saga that have storylines depicting the hero’s journey with the character growing in strength and defeating evildoers – often with a moral basis – but when critical, one finds it too shallow to leave an effect on them if not grounded in the divine.
If you’re a Muslim who cares about the Deen, it is critical for you to find excellent entertainment options that are as closely aligned with your values as possible. The days where we are satisfied with entertainment featuring westernized brown people with vaguely Muslim names are over. This isn’t to say that Muslim-produced entertainment must solely consist of religious lectures. Rather, you deserve to enjoy a new and interesting Muslim adventure that throws you off a bit. There is and will be more content for Muslims by Muslims, as long as you keep an eye out for it. “It’s not harder” to choose excellence, even in our entertainment.
Wesam Al-Daher is the founder and head writer of Tales of Khayr, an entertainment company for Muslims, by Muslims. He created the Brotherhood of the Wolf, a graphic novel series that walks the balance by providing high-quality adventure stories that 21st-century readers expect while ensuring that the dramatic arguments and themes of all the storylines are immersed in the values of traditional Islam. Check it out here: https://talesofkhayr.com