I
found this film very interesting when I saw the trailer (and eventually the
film) several years ago. In picking up from my previous post (from yesterday)
on the absented presence of Blackness in post-9/11 discussions on surveillance
against Muslims (link: https://678digitaltheory.blogspot.com/2019/11/core-post-3-from-sncc-to-dar-ul-islam.html),
Jay Dockendorf’s film Naz + Maalik (2016)
and some of its flaws further delineate some of my key points.
The
film presents a premise of two African-American Muslim teens coming to terms
with their sexualities. While the voices of Black queer Muslims have come to
the limelight in the wake of the Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting[1],
the contemporary Black Lives Matter Movement, and amidst various forms of new media
including Summer’s documentary Al-Nisa:
Black Muslim Women in Atlanta’s Black Gay Mecca (2013), the setup of Naz & Maalik presents an opportunity
to embark upon a complex narrative that tackles issues of surveillance at the
intersections of Blackness, queerness, and Muslim identities.
The
taboo nature of premarital sexual intimacy in Naz’s Muslim household introduces
the first scene of Naz & Maalik,
when his younger sister discovers a used condom in his trashcan. Although she
is unaware of his queerness at the beginning of the film, they engage in a
brief argument amidst Naz’s fear that she will inform their parents of her
discovery. After their short-lived sibling quarrel, Naz meets up with his best
friend and love interest Maalik as they embark on their daily journey
throughout Brooklyn where they sell cologne and Christian saint-themed cards.
They have virtually known each other for their entire lives, as their families
are close and active members of the local Muslim community. Maalik is the
careless and adventurous risk-taker, as Naz is more conservative and wears a
white kufi during the first half of the film. While the condom Naz’s sister
discovered was from their engagement in intercourse, Naz remains guilt-ridden
due to his faith as the less puritanical Maalik is more accepting of the
reality of his attraction to Maalik. Nevertheless, Islam is an important
feature of their day-to-day lives as they discuss the Quranic permissibility of
various situations, from selling cards to homosexuality as the more relaxed
Maalik casually says, “only Allah can judge me—I’m sure of that.” Additionally,
they perform one of their five daily prayers in a local mosque and attempt to
partake in the halal slaughter of a chicken for the birthday of Maalik’s
mother. Along their voyage throughout the city, Naz and Maalik are awkwardly
followed by an FBI agent who spies on them out of suspicion that they are
engaging in illegal or terroristic activities. However, upon discovering their romance
in the final quarter of the film, she abandons her voyage of surveillance. In
the conclusion of the film, Naz’s sister has discovered that her brother is in
a relationship with Maalik, as the young Muslimah becomes concerned about the
permissibility of his actions and innocently asks “Are you always going to be
gay?” Unlike Naz, the outgoing, bold Maalik makes plans to inform his parents of
their relationship.
Naz & Maalik presents an opportunity to tell a
much-needed story about the intersections of race and sexuality among a highly
surveilled American religious minority. However, this opportunity is abandoned
in exchange for lengthy sequences of halal slaughter attempts, races through
parks, and unusual behaviors by random subway occupants whose purposes are not well-established.
The principal characters’ identities as Black Muslims possess no depth, as the
large, longstanding Black Muslim presence and legacy in New York City[2],
which is essential to contextualizing the history of surveillance of American
Muslims, goes largely unexplored. While there is a brief mention of
Islamophobia in the mosque prayer sequence, it does not seem to be a priority
of the film despite several spontaneous interactions with an FBI agent. In
spite of its very promising premise that appears to address Islamophobia,
homophobia, and racism, the themes are not fully developed. In the midst of
brief features of Naz and Maalik’s mothers, the manner in which their family instills
norms and defines their racial and religious identities is underdeveloped as
observed in the absence of their fathers in the film and the incomplete
storyline of Naz’s sister observing an intimately romantic exchange between him
and Maalik on the subway. Moreover, Naz and Maalik’s relationships with their
parents could have been used to explore how they have negotiated experiences of
racism, ultimately leading up to surveillance by the FBI and NYPD from the
1960s to the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
In
an ethnographic study on Black gay men in Harlem, William Hawkeswood observed
that one of the two Muslim men sampled expressed that he strongly valued his
faith while observing Ramadan, praying regularly, giving to the poor, and
planning to make hajj.[3]
Interestingly, the born and raised Muslim attributes his faith inspiration to
his paternal uncle who was once a member of the historic Muhammad’s Temple No.
7 of the original[4]
Nation of Islam in Harlem that was once ministered by Malcolm X prior to the institution’s
transition into Sunnism after Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975, during a time in
which the subject’s uncle made his pilgrimage to Mecca. As Aminah Beverly
McCloud describes that African-American Muslim parents try to create homes that
are spaces of “cultural formation and separation”[5]
from certain forms of chaos in the outside world, the subject in Hawkeswood’s
study integrates these concepts into the organization of his apartment space
that is equipped with items such as prayer rugs in central locations while
simultaneously positioning Blackness as his primary identity in a hostile
anti-Black society. The example of how his family’s faith tradition has defined
his negotiation of Blackness, queerness, masculinity, and Islamic faith shows
the complexity of this intersection, which could have been expanded to
encompass a more layered, impactful, and culturally significant exploration
that fulfills the seemingly ambitious premise of Naz & Maalik. These various negotiation factors from Hawkeswood’s
study could have been used to establish a historical backdrop to examine how
Black Muslims navigate in a society that has historically surveilled them,
first as a result of their Blackness and then at the intersections of race and
religion.
Unlike
twenty-first century works such as Jinn
(2018), Bilal’s Stand (2010), Mooz-Lum (2011), and Orange is the New Black (2013), Naz & Maalik fails to introduce a
multifaceted sociohistorical media discourse on the intersections of Islam, Blackness,
and surveillance. Furthermore, it does not dissect the complex collective
intersections of masculinity, (homo)sexuality, faith, and racial conscience
inherent in African-American Muslim queer identities and the manner this
impacts one’s day-to-day lives and spatial surroundings. While Naz & Maalik provides an ambitious
premise with promising actors and characters, the storyline and theme fall
short of representing the depth of the intersections of Black, queer, and
Muslim cultures alongside the backdrops of racism, Islamophobia, and homophobia
in modern American society.
The
sequence in which the FBI agent deserts Naz and Maalik due to her perception of
them as inauthentic Muslims stimulates various important discussions. In an
analysis on the construction of Black sexuality in “mainstream motion
pictures,” Jacquie Jones observes that Black men are often portrayed as hypersexual
and incapable of intimacy without being provided with a “societal framework”
that is often offered to White male characters who exhibit the same behavior,
thus normalizing “models of violence…and other forms of antisocial behaviors”
in constructing Black male sexuality in media discourse.[6]
The White agent’s perception of two Black Muslim men being incapable of
functioning as authentic representatives of their racial and religious groups
because of the seeming incompatibility of queerness with Black and Muslim
identities a rather deceptive conclusion, as Dockendorf’s script and film seems
to minimize the struggles of Black bodies, which seems to erroneously argue
that Naz and Maalik’s sexualities save them from the horrors of surveillance
that have terrorized Black lives in White societies Black lives from the
beginning. Notable examples of these blatantly anti-Black attacks were
ever-present in media coverage of Bayna-Lekheim El-Amin, a Black queer Muslim
activist who was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2016 for combatting two
White gay men who previously tormented him with a racial slur. While this situation
was often framed as a violent homophobic attack executed by a hypermasculine
Black man against two vulnerable White gay men, Naz & Maalik’s FBI sequence only serves an affirmation of this framing,
avoiding the consistently accurate message across American society that nothing
will save you if you’re Black.
--Kam
[1] Mashaun
D. Simon, “Black Muslim LGBT Community Speaks Out in Wake of Orlando Shooting,”
NBC News, June 16, 2016, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-lgbt-muslims-mourn-wake-orlando-shooting-n593706.
[2]New York City was the home to
several prominent African-American mosques and Muslim movements. Most notably,
it is known for being the location of the Nation of Islam’s Muhammad’s Temple
No. 7, which was led by Malcolm X throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Additionally,
other popular Sunni movements of the era such as the Dar ul-Islam Movement and
the Islamic Mission of America were founded in New York, rendering it one of
several African-American Muslim strongholds. Patrick Bowen notes that even
prior to the arrival of Malcolm X in 1954, Black Americans in New York City had
come into contact with various Islamic groups since the very beginning of the
twentieth century. See Patrick
D. Bowen, “The Search for ‘Islam’: African-American Islamic Groups in NYC,
1904- 1954,” The Muslim World 102, no. 2 (2012): 264.
[3] William
G. Hawkeswood, One of the Children : Gay Black Men in Harlem, Men and
Masculinity ; 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 109.
[4] The term “original” is used to
describe the Nation of Islam under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad from 1930
to 1975, which eventually transitioned into Sunnism in
1975 in contrast to the various recreations of the movement in the late 1970s
and 1980s, most notably under Louis Farrakhan.
[6] Jacquie
Jones, “The Construction of Black Sexuality: Towards Normalizing the Black
Cinematic Experience,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara
(New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), 250.
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