A War of Stories - Ibraheem Saleem

Bismillah Al-Rahman Al-Raheem,
Assalaamu Alaykum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakaatuh

INTRODUCTION

Stories shape our lives. They are the golden thread linking human beings together for millennia. Even before we could read or write, the image of a withered and wise old man weaving fantastical tales of heroism and bravery while the sparks of a fire sent shadows dancing across the faces of the enthralled group of children seated around him is universal. They help us to derive meaning from the experiences of others, connecting us together, and creating a shared social fabric of icons to look up to, deeds to admire and legacies to aspire towards.

But I believe we have lost our stories. Our narrative has been hijacked. Our beliefs and ideals have been subverted. We do not have a say, let alone an influence, on the forces and directions of the modern-day narratives that have entered our communal subconscious and that have shaped, and will continue to shape, our thoughts and deeds.

In this paper, I want to examine stories through the prism of subconscious cultural conditioning and present a case for a revival in how we as members of the Muslim Ummah approach stories and storytellers. I hope you find it interesting and that you leave with some ideas of your own Insha’Allah!

PART 1: THE POWER OF STORY

I guess I should probably start at the beginning: What is a story?

The Cambridge Dictionary gives a definition as “A description, either true or imagined, of a connected series of events” That’s probably true, but way too dry and technical for what we’re trying to understand about them, so we shall leave it in favour of critic Kenneth Burkes description:

“Stories are equipment for living”

Etch that phrase into your phone case. Make it your wallpaper. Hang it on the wall. No don’t, where are you goooing….😭

I

We are born as (almost) blank slates. We have and know (almost) nothing.

Allah, in His Mercy, has made us so that we can inherit from our parents and family; clothes, food and shelter can be transferred or made available to children. But there is one thing that cannot. That is experience. A child cannot “inherit” an understanding of kindness to others or patience in the face of adversary; it must learn how such a concept works. We operate within a learning cycle: we require experiences, reflection, new ideas, and testing them with new experiences in order to learn.

But how do we know guidelines around choosing new ideas to test and how we interpret them during experiences? Evidently, they must come externally, as we can’t guide our internal learning with something internal, otherwise we will constantly fall prone to our own biases. As Muslims we have the revelation of Qur’ān and Sunnah to act as a high-level Guide, but that is on a completely separate level, being wholly above anything else. So, below that, I think there are three possible methods a child, or anyone one older for that matter, could use to acquire these guides or lessons, given their lack of experience:

The first is to live that experience themselves. If they chance upon a poor man on the street and see their parents give them some money or food, the connotations a child will be likely to take away is that helping people is a good thing. They derive the meanings from their experiences, and this shapes their ethics and values.

The second is to simply be told directly: “kindness is good” or “don’t be angry if something bad happens to you”. This is purely factual information or commands with no context; the person is expected to absorb and store it for later. This is the bread and butter of most talks and lectures.

And the third method is a story that, in some way, implicitly encodes the information in an engaging narrative. Consider how the children’s book “Rainbow Fish” illustrates the power of kindness: He starts out as the most beautiful fish in the sea but has no friends. Over the course of the story, he gives away his beautiful scales one by one until he only has one left. He loses his beauty but gains new friendships through the kindness he shows to others.

Now, you probably noticed the (almost)s in the paragraph above. They are there because there’s a fourth dimension to this issue. And that is the Fitrah. The innate natural disposition that man is born with stamped into his soul: his understanding of Tawhid, the oneness of Allah.

“So direct your face toward the religion, inclining to truth. [Adhere to] the fitrah of Allah upon which He has created [all] people. No change should there be in the creation of Allah. That is the correct religion, but most of the people do not know” (30:30)

Allah has placed it inside every single human, without exception. It forms the basis of morality, for an obvious problem occurs when materialists try and explain why we do not incline towards rape or theft; If we have evolved to maximise our chances of survival and utility, then these things would be perfectly acceptable or even encouraged. But every society on earth has viewed them as abhorrent.

An issue occurs when we have to explain that despite this people follow polytheistic or even no religion; how can this be possible if everyone is born believing in Allah? The Prophet (SAWS) answers this question in the well-known hadeeth narrated by Abu Hurairah in Sahih Al-Bukhari (1292): “No child is born but that he is upon natural instinct. His parents make him a Jew, or a Christian, or Magian. As an animal delivers a child with limbs intact, do you detect any flaw?”

It is society and people around us who imprint upon us different beliefs and values that corrupt this disposition. So, someone untouched by societal imprinting will tend towards a form of knowing The One God, but it will not be Islam (In the legal sense of the word). They still require external revelation to give a form to their inclination, and whether they will be accepted into Jannah is up to Allah and how much they followed their Fitrahs moral compass.

But what does this have to do with how we learn lessons? Everything. Now that we have introduced the base inclination, the bedrock, the cotton in the threads that weave together to form the fabric of our character, we must approach everything else in relation to it.

Bringing all this together gives us a good foundational understanding of the mechanisms that drive our development.

The Fitrah is our core and is either strengthened or broken by the 3 methods of learning we have available to us. They feed into our learning cycle, and the previous guides we have learnt inform how we react to new information or experiences.

For example, a child seeing his parents give charity learns it as a value firstly because of the biological process of imprinting, but on a deeper level, it’s also fitting perfectly into the morality-shaped jigsaw puzzle in our souls. On the other hand, if they see their parents steal, then the Fitrah is overridden by the more powerful imprinting process, and the moral jigsaw puzzle is corrupted and bent. The same thing applies to if they are told something, either it aligns or it corrupts. There is an extra detail here, in that the repetition itself amplifies the force of alignment or corruption. This extremely powerful force needs to be noted however it’s not the focus of this paper.

But something special happens in a story. It’s neither real nor is it an abstract fact, instead it seems to almost be a beautiful fusion of the two. A simulated reality in which these facts are gently brightened by the writer until, like sun behind rain, it casts a rainbow of meaning that unconsciously bathes the listener or viewer in those ideas. How? Read on.

II

There is an oft-quoted statistic that stories can be 22x more memorable than just the plain facts.

Although it seems to be false, there are studies that reach a similar, if less extreme, conclusion. In their book Made To Stick Chip and Dan Heath conducted an experiment on Stanford Students. They were asked to prepare a 1-minute speech on whether non-violent crime was a serious problem, with half for and half against. On average, 2.5 statistics were used per speech, with only 1/10 using stories as a presentation device. 10 minutes later, and only 5% of the audience could remember the pure statistics, but 63% could remember the stories with statistics. This gives stories being 12x more memorable than plain facts.

Pretty incredible.

But why? What is about stories that make them the best “equipment for living”? Why do they touch us so deeply?

There are many answers to this question, so I will try (and probably fail) to keep it brief, but enough so you have a groundwork to understand the next Part properly Insha’Allah.

III

“We have […] made you as nations and tribes so that you may know one another” (49:13)

Humans are social beings.

We exist within the same universe, subject to the same laws, affected by the same feelings. We all live bound within ‘The Human Experience’. We can connect with others, can empathise with them, because we have the ability to relate. Emotions of love, happiness, and anguish can be shared, and mutually understood.

This seems to be part of the Fitrah: Allah says in the Qur’an “He taught Adam the names of all things, then He presented them to the angels and said, “Tell Me the names of these, if what you say is true?” (1:31) Abdullah Yusuf Ali said that the ‘names’ means the inner nature and qualities of things, including feelings. These feelings were outside the understanding of the angels, but Allah put them into the nature of man and so man is able to love and understand love, and this allows us to carry out our duty of viceregent upon the Earth.

This is a stories secret weapon: They can harness the emotions, the laws, the universal truths we all know and use them to spark a fire of meaning in an otherwise bland set of facts, and in doing so touch a deep part of our psyche.

The science seems to back this up. There are multiple studies showing the physical and neurological reactions of our bodies to different aspects of stories. We react in real-time to what we are seeing or hearing, including facial expressions, heart rate, and even sweating. In this study, researchers used FMRI scanners to look at how the brain and our emotions reacted when a person listened to story. They noted that changes in narrative intensity resulted in changes in heart rate variability, and it also activated a brain network known for processing conditioned emotional responses to auditory stimuli (basically the story was causing them to react emotionally). Likewise this study found brain activity in areas associated with social cognition and predictive inference when reading suspenseful passages (which build on basic aspects of human cognition such as processes of expectation, anticipation, and prediction.) So the evidence seems clear that we are neurologically and emotionally affected by stories, and that it is a universal phenomenon, literally part of who we are.

But that’s only the mechanics of how things work. There’s a layer above this that screen-writer Robert McKee summarises in his book ‘STORY’ as:

“Story isn’t a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence“

This lines up perfectly with what Allah mentions in the Quran that

“Indeed in their stories, there is a lesson for men of understanding” (12:111)

Allah encourages us to reflect on the stories He relates, to understand the deeper messaging behind them. Why? Because they allow us to make sense of the world.

We need a guide for how we choose which ideas we think of and test in our lived experiences – Essentially a guide to how we live our life.

Now when I say guide I’m not referring to Guide, a revealed wholly-external source of truth. That operates a layer above this, as I mentioned before. No, I’m talking about an informal subconscious set of rules or values that we use as heuristics in our day-to-day life. These rules could be morals, such as if we view an act of kindness positively or cynically, or perhaps they could be character traits such as being more or less risk averse. Sometimes they are already baked into the DNA of our character, maybe even into our fitrah, at an imperceptible level, which are then built on and emphasised more by exposure to guides, or even built up over time from scratch. They exist subconsciously and unique for every one of us, shaped by how Allah has created us and anything external we use to shape it consciously (i.e. revelation or, for unbelievers, political messages). And we can either absorb these rules by being told or hearing them embedded in a story.

Being told is not usually effective for a few reasons. Often it comes across as a command that we instinctively shrug off (think of a child ignoring commands to stop doing something), other times it fails to strike us in particularly memorable way and we quickly forget about it, or yet other times it clashes with our wants or values, and we reject it. Ways of getting around this problem exist, otherwise we wouldn’t listen to Allah’s commands, since they often go against our nafs! I had a longer passage here, but to keep it short, the most effective would for there to be a strong bond of love or trust between the two beings, which would make us more receptive, but takes time. Alternatively, giving an explanation of why a command was given helps; if we understand the logic/wisdom behind something, automatically we would be more willing to comply. But this can also take time or be complicated. The final solution is just simple repetition, emphasising the point over and over until it’s internalised and impossible to forget. It’s generally ineffective over short periods of time, but over longer periods it’s foundational to most of our knowledge. All in all, functional, but definitely not outstanding.

And so, we are left with stories. We respond to them neurologically and psychologically, they allow us to emotionally connect to other people’s experiences, they are personal and so easier to accept, the guides embedded within them are much more likely to be remembered and implemented in our learning cycle, and so can teach us deep lessons about the world and ourselves without becoming incomprehensible or obnoxious. They can help guide our future actions, can build connections between people, and are universal and enduring.

They really are the “software” to our human “hardware” as Director Gareth Edwards puts it.

PART 2: BRIDGE TO REALITY

I realise last section was pretty abstract, so now we’re going to jump into reality to hopefully solidify those concepts, and then to introduce you to the point of this paper.

I

Stories have existed probably since the beginning of humanity. It is logical to assume that they started out as spoken tales, passed down and spread between people. This established a relationship between the speaker and audience; often it was the people with the most experience who would entertain the youth with grand tales of heroism and bravery. Myths and Legends would be passed down generation after generation until they became woven into the fabric of society, as illustrated by the famous story of Oedipus the prince, who emigrates from his land to avoid the prophecy of killing his father, but unknowingly ends up killing him anyway. Its ancient Greek audience would have been impressed by its message of an unescapable fate decreed by the gods, resulting in an instilled societal value. Simultaneously, on a personal level, the hearer would be encouraged to accept whatever trial they were enduring as it’s probably not be as bad as this.

Pictorial and written stories came soon after as well. The earliest cave art story, seemingly depicting a pig and buffalo hunt, was dated to 44,000 years ago on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, the oldest surviving piece of written fictional literature, a mythical poem called the Epic of Gilgamesh that probably dates to around 5000 years ago in Ancient Mesopotamia, and the fact that Theatrical plays may have been performed over 4000 years ago in Ancient Egypt, show how the medium of storytelling developed.

Now when I talk about “story”, I’m considering a vast array of mediums: novels, TV, film, music, poems, YouTube, social media, maybe even news and advertising. All of these are able to present facts and messages in engaging ways, and construct narratives around them, whether that be a hobbit sacrificing everything to defeat evil (read or watched), a musician narrating how he fell in love with a girl and committed zina without a care in the world, or a thinly veiled opinion piece of how a poor family in a backward country escaped oppression in the arms of an enlightened westerner. They are all effective in their own ways.

Obviously as time went on, all these different art forms would be further refined and mastered over the centuries by people such as Shakespeare, da Vinci and Beethoven (from a western perspective).

But we do not live in that age anymore. Literature, art, and theatre have fallen out of popular culture and have been confined to smaller demographics. Instead, something far more effective has taken hold: Film

II

Film could rightly be described as the most powerful assault on the senses outside of drugs. The mechanics of the modern motion-picture, of eye-catching imagery and deep striking sound design and music, blended together with precise editing designed to maximise impact, is a story-telling medium which, refined with the very best of modern psychology, is able to reach previously unknown levels of drama and captivation.

(When I say film from now on, I’m also referencing TV/Streaming Series)

The concept of showing many slightly different images in quick succession to simulate movement originates around the 1890s with the kinetoscope, which was usually exhibited in public. By 1914, film industries in Europe, Russia and Scandinavia had become established and the style of films began to shift away from being very short almost theatre-like events towards being longer and more concerned with narrative. As more people paid to see them, so the industry grew. The technology continued to evolve, from silent black-and-white, to colour, to sound, and finally to a refined marrying of both components around the 1930s-40s, which is also known as “The Golden Age of Hollywood”. The American film industry was established and film in the cinema took over as the dominant form of entertainment, with over thirty-one million people visiting cinemas each week in Britain in 1946. However, the advent of television reduced these numbers, even though film continued to develop with different aspect ratios, new ways of colouring an eventually the replacement of film with digital methods around the 2000s. Nowadays streaming has taken over both cinema and television due to its convenience and cost-effectiveness, but there remains a strong interest in films “made for the Big Screen” with the massive IMAX format being a strong selling point of films such as “Interstellar”, “Dune” and “Top Gun: Maverick”

I could get really detailed about the mechanics of film, from structure and workings of plot to the intricacies of lighting and staging, to the art of manipulating information and emotion through editing (cos this is where I’m more experienced) but this paper is about messaging through story. So, suffice to say that although all that is integral to the final result, we’re going to narrow our focus to a purely narrative level and analyse things from there.

PART 3: INCEPTION OF VALUES

I

Take a look at the average Western uni student: They’ve never really considered the possibility of there being a God, has a vague understanding of morality but hasn’t given it much thought, and as they’ve never had a framework for deciding how to live their life, they take guides from their family, friends, the media, and their entertainment. They spend most of their free time clubbing, he makes pilgrimage to the gym daily, she wears the ihram of crop-top (or less) and tights, come hail or sun. And I don’t need to elaborate on what happens between them. They don’t know why these things are normal or when they became normal. They probably don’t really care.

But we should care. We should understand how society changed, how morals and values degraded, how the zeitgeist was reshaped. We should pay attention because, just as it happened to them, so it is happening to us. And we are woefully unprepared.

II

We need to discuss the influence stories wield over the political and philosophical thought of a society, and how they have shaped them and their values in the past, and the present.

We mentioned previously how the myth of Oedipus the prince and his inevitable succumbing to fate, and how that would have influenced the audience and society it was shown in, elevating the concept of bowing to the decree of the gods and encouraging people to follow that model in their personal lives. These potent ideas were enveloped in the sweet coating of story, which made them more engaging and memorable, and therefore had a more powerful impact on the audience compared to a sermon. This is the fundamental concept that we need to understand: We can engineer stories to influence the morality and values of the audience and society.

Allah confirms this reality by dedicating over a third of His Final Message to humanity to the stories of the people of the past:

“We narrate to you the best of stories” (12:3)

It’s pretty self-evident that a scripture designed to call humanity back to the principles of Tawhid would have to influence our values. The reality of the Fitrah means that this influence would be in tune with our natural disposition, and so, for a person of sound heart, the messages of the Qur’an should be gladly accepted.

This is what the Prophetic Stories aim to do: they teach us messages from God but capitalising off the potency of story. The account of Prophet Ibraheem (peace be upon him) exemplifies the power of placing complete trust in Allah and obeying without question, in the command to sacrifice Ismaeel and leave his wife in the desert: “Surely, Ibraheem was a nation, devout to Allah, unswervingly upright, and he was not of the associators” (16:120) Likewise, the story of Prophet Musaa (peace be upon him) illustrates to us the virtue of bravery in Deen and standing firm upon the truth even if tyrants try and force you to turn toward falsehood, as the pharaoh oppressed and killed the Muslims: “[…]He became outstanding with Allah” (33:69)

Obviously these are only small drops from the ocean of lessons that can be learnt, but I hope they serve as a demonstration of how Allah chose to convey these morals through exemplar characters who illustrated them throughout their narratives.

Our reflections upon their stories allow us to glean new insights, and the fundamental relatability of human experience allows us to have an easier time seeing how we could apply these insights to our life. We may not have the same experiences as them, but idea of helping the weak no matter what, as shown by the story of Musaa (peace be upon him) and the two shepherdesses, is universal. Perhaps we may see someone frantically consulting a map or wandering around lost, and we remember how Musaa (peace be upon him) went up to the women and asked if they needed assistance, and we may then pluck up the courage to do the same. This is the example of what a positive influence may have upon a sound heart.

But what happens when the audience does not have a sound heart? Or even, how can a sound heart be corrupted? How are values learnt there? This is what we truly need to understand about story, because it is the most applicable to our modern lives.

III

The next few points are going to be based on this paper, which is a study of if/how films have influenced the morality and culture of Nigerian Youth (written from, I think, a Christian perspective)

The issue with trying to understand how values are influenced is that one, there are so many causes and influences that people are exposed to, and two, things happen so gradually over such long periods of time that it’s very hard to discern what happened to reach a state and even harder to see what’s happening from within a particular state.

I heard a sheikh say that it is the Sunnah of Allah that things happen gradually and slowly: we see this in nature all the time, the imperceptible changing of weather between the seasons, the slight incremental growth of plants day by day, the gradual advance and receding of the tides each day. The human psyche is no different, in fact it’s probably even harder to understand as it’s invisible and we can only track its manifestations, which vary wildly from person to person.

And as always, the Fitrah must be taken into account. We’d discussed previously about a pure fitrah, but what about an impure one? Someone who does not have Islam, and so is left purely to the whims of society, how are they influenced?

It seems to roughly takes the form of 4-step process. (This process could obviously also apply to people being positively influenced by Islam, but it seems to be more distinct when not):

The first step is that people naturally need role models, people to look up to and model their life and actions on. If we see people excelling, or seeming to excel, in something, we naturally want to imitate them. Allah affirms this in the Qur’an “Indeed in the Messenger of Allah you have an excellent example […]” (33:21). If people reject the example of the Prophets, they will have to look elsewhere. And elsewhere has a high chance of being the people elevated by society, the characters pushed by the media in the stories that are widely circulated. They will absorb their values and internalise them, just like we do for what the Prophet (SAWS) taught.

The second step is that once a particular ideology takes hold, such as liberalism, then the forces of the mass media will tend to concentrate on and selectively emphasise it. This by no means starts straight away; if the new ideas are vulgar ones, then cleaner peoples fitrahs will tend to reject it, and any organised religion is usually a new vulgar ideas greatest adversary. Often it takes years of corrupted lone free radicals defying societal norms to make the new values widespread enough and exposed to a wide enough audience that the mass media picks up on it. This eventual emphasis on certain themes will continue to occur and develop until a state is reached wherein an illusion can be created that those themes are now a cultural norm of society. Whether it actually is or not is irrelevant. This is because the very prolificity of the ideas will attract impressionable members of society who are to looking to fit in in or find a framework they can believe in. As this is now seemingly a big new thing, they will jump on board and begin to model their own behaviour according to its new culture. The biological imprinting process overrides any internal doubts and the fitrah is corrupted.

The third step is that as more and more people become “converted”, these ideas and themes are “socially-learnt” by people copying each other. Rewarding consequences, such as feeling more socially integrated, create a positive feedback loop, while the big scary FOMO creates an enormous mental negative consequence for people who try and dissent. As they have no firm religious crutches on which to fall back on, the only choice is integration or ostracization. Internal doubts are crushed, and more and more people will tend to identify with the prevalent ideology.

And finally, step four, the ideas are mainstreamed and normalised, with people more likely to perceive the world through them and begin to assume that they are reality. Over generations and decades layers of new ideas are established and then built upon like the layers of rock forming a mountain. Even the hardcore dissidents left over will eventually be desensitised by repeated exposure and bombardment, and eventually they too are integrated at some level. Morality is bent into an unrecognisable state and it would basically require a jump start in the form of a shahaadah from scratch in order to allow the motivation for a healing process to begin.

You can read any ideology you want into that process, such as liberalism, radical feminism, and the Alphabet Gang. It also happens on a smaller scale, such as a new gaming or fashion fad everyone’s talking about, creating communities around these new ideas. The ideas are spread, adopted, and then solidified.

IV

I’ve made mention of “mass media” spreading and solidifying messages and ideologies above, but this paper is about stories, and film in particular. So, let’s zoom in on that

Let’s first look at an example in order to illustrate how things work on a micro level, within a film.

Take the current 2^nd highest grossing film of all time, Avengers: Endgame. This film was the culmination of a decade-long saga spanning 21 films that reached an estimated 100 million people worldwide. The core philosophical conflict of the film is whether the sacrifice of half the life in the universe is worth the future prosperity that could be gained by reduced pressure on resources. It’s the age-old question of whether the means justifies the ends. The villain, Thanos, explained his reasoning with the example of how his once-starving and destitute home-world was resurrected and rejuvenated by the sacrifice of half the population, and now no one knows hunger.

But this is a form of messaging. It is unavoidable for such a massive film to not reflect the society it is made in, and so we can see a representation of the worry for the future, from climate change and societal decay, that so many people seem to feel in it. It doesn’t really matter if the plot is dumb and can be picked apart, because most people can’t be bothered. The unconscious compliance with the ideas can be seen in the trending twitter hashtag “ThanosWasRight” and the largest mass ban in reddit history where half of the 200k members of r/ThanosDidNothingWrong were “snapped” as an homage to Thanos actions in the previous film (even if it was done as a joke)

It’s kind of hard to put this stuff into words, but I think what I’m trying to say is – think about what kind of an effect this has. Obviously, I highly doubt many people would agree with Thanos’s actions, but I do think significantly less people would disagree with his philosophy. And that’s more important for us to understand; these ideas are entering our minds and changing how we think. These ideas are being spread and debated. These ideas have been normalised and entered the public discourse.

The Islamic view is pretty clear on this issue; we should be optimistic and think good of Allah and have patience to strive and overcome trials and tests while also knowing that we will never be tested over our limits. This pretty much destroys any nihilistic, pessimistic apocalyptic view of the future (outside of what we know will happen in the run-up to the Day of Judgment), but it requires a certain amount of conviction to internalise. People who do not have this are extremely vulnerable to such a message, conjuring up doubts and questions about how could Allah let those people suffer and why wont He just send aid now (aka The Problem of Evil)

Do you see how this works? A core element of the story, here the philosophical conflict, is suggesting a message that could be hugely detrimental to a person’s faith. But its packaging within a compelling story with interesting, complex characters that we can invest in, and exciting, tense action set-pieces allow it to be absorbed along with everything else, lying just below the surface. And this allows it to attract an enormous budget and so be able to reach millions of people.

We can look at so many things like this. Put on any film and you will be able to pinpoint the themes and messages it’s trying to push across. This is because all stories need these themes and messages. They’re what allow us to connect and invest with the conflict, and they give a story consistency and focus. If they are not there, we are left feeling like what was the point, as it wasn’t about anything. You can have the biggest explosions, the fastest cars, the craziest stunts, but after a while it just becomes meaningless noise if we cannot find anything to care about. Those are the themes and messages. And they can be positive or negative:

Star Wars has bravery, doing the right thing in the face of insurmountable odds, and the bond of love between family being something to cherish and strive to protect. The Lion King shows the importance of fulfilling your responsibilities and overcoming selfishness/doing things for reasons greater than yourself. The Lord of The Rings exemplifies the epic adventure story, with themes of resisting evil, the courage found amongst good companions, and holding onto righteousness because “there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for”.

All of these are themes that Islam champions and The Prophet (SAWS) exemplified, yet they are being spread by multi-million-dollar corporations who have no vested interest in the truth. Why? Because they touch us. They align with the moral compass in our soul, within our fitrah, and so we naturally gravitate toward them. Allah just made us so that we recognise virtue when we see it, and we instinctively yearn and have a connection to it. We feel good when we see it exemplified, and we may also hope to glean some insightful lesson that we can apply in our own life. We can care and we can connect.

But it’s the same for negative themes. They don’t touch our fitrah; they touch our nafs. They inflate our base desires and instincts, and in doing so corrupt our moral compasses and our religious beliefs. Titanic, the 3^rd highest grossing film of all time, allows us to indulge in the fantasy of falling in love and expressing our passions with a beautiful woman, ignoring morals or circumstance. John Wick provides an exaggerated, gratuitous display of vengeful anger and doing anything it takes to get back at people who wrong you. The Godfather poignantly shows what the lust for power will do to a person, betraying friends and family to maintain it, and establishing yourself as a force to be reckoned with even if no one took you seriously before.

They all touch a dark part within us, the base desires, the nafs that Allah has put within all the Children of Adam (AS): The desire for sexual gratification, the desire to extract retribution, the desire for power, the desire for superiority. We are still able to be invested in these characters to some extent because of this, but the subconscious re-wiring this does to us slowly corrupts our morality over time. We may be more prone to arrogance, be bolder in seeking haram, and act worse to people around us.

Islam aims to reduce these as much as possible, but our exposure to such themes in such an alluring package acts like the sweetener around a drug, masking the bitterness and making it easily digestible, slipping past our defences that we have trained against real-life instances of these ideas but are ineffective against this different form, and so they embed themselves in our minds. This is what we need to be wary of.

V

I want to give one final example to bring everything together on a macro level, to show how elements form and build on each other over time to have a societal impact.

This example is the rise of sexual promiscuity. For me, it remains the single greatest example of human moral decay that we can easily analyse and track its evolution, and so we need to give it attention to understand it, no matter how much people like to avoid the subject. This should honestly be a whole paper by itself, and I’m having a really hard time compressing everything, so apologise in advance if its way too long lol.

The fact that thousands of years of human morality has been so completely altered in the span of a 100 years is testament to the power of these forces, both of story and the process of how we are influenced by them. Let’s start where we were and work forwards.

For most of human history, it seems that there have been clear boundaries and norms in this issue: Premarital was forbidden and rejected by most of society, and what was private stayed private. People, by and large, grew up, got married and had a family. Prostitution existed but was probably relegated to the fringes, and participants were often looked at with disgust. Peoples fitrah was preserved by the fact most people followed a religion. Also, simpler lives, and non-existent exposure to foreign lewd ideas meant norms stayed the norm. It was very rare for outrageous things to occur; when the Prophet Lut (peace be upon him) was sent to the People of Sodom, the Quran tells us that Lut said to the people “[..] How can you practise this outrage? No one in the world has outdone you in this”. It was a new phenomenon, unknown to wider communities.

(A bit of tangent: One may rightly ask about the stark examples of lewdness we see in history, such as Ancient Rome. This authors hypothesis is that sexual promiscuity is correlated with the level of advancement in a civilisation (that doesn’t have a strong religion to control it) and that it follows the cyclical pattern of the rise and fall of empires. When people are more disciplined and controlling of their desires, the collective energy of people is more able to focus on societal improvement, such as innovation, expansion, or the firmest foundation possible, the family. Unfortunately, over time generations become more and more liberal and start placing individual desires over the common good, and so less collective energy is put toward civilisational maintenance. Ultimately, this results in less cohesion and resolution, ending up in societal collapse from either internal revolution or external conquest. Anthropologist J.D Unwin said

“These societies lived in different geographical environments; they belonged to different racial stocks; but the history of their marriage customs is the same. In the beginning each society had the same ideas in regard to sexual regulations. Then the same struggles took place; the same sentiments were expressed; the same changes were made; the same results ensued. Each society reduced its sexual opportunity to a minimum and displaying great social energy, flourished greatly. Then it extended its sexual opportunity; its energy decreased, and faded away. The one outstanding feature of the whole story is its unrelieved monotony.”

Another point is that, even though the Romans and Ancient Greeks have been notoriously noted for their extreme liberalism in this issue, even normalising acts to a level modern society has not yet reached, they were the greatest civilisations of their time. And as such they have a much higher chance of preserving their relics and culture than the vast majority of humanity in smaller settlements, who would not have been affected by that culture but wouldn’t be preserved to show it. So basically, it would seem that what we’re seeing currently is just another wave in the cycle of empires… but we can still analyse how this one happened and glean insights from it for the future insha’Allah)

Anyway, fast forward a couple thousand years to the late 1800s, and we have the beginnings of this revolution. Wiki gives one of the first films to depict any sexual act in the US as “The Kiss” (1896) in which, unsurprisingly, there’s a kiss. It drew outrage from audiences, civic leaders and religious leaders alike, with one critic writing

“The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting.”

The Catholic Church called for censorship and moral reform. But in response to the outrage, many copycat films were made to mock the regulations, underlining the importance of the free radical element. Over the next half-century, the medium and what was shown developed, although extreme material was still mostly confined to the underground. The more prominent story was the classic boy-meets-girl narrative, and that became the archetypal romance story for the rest of the century and still today. Think of the classic Disney princess stories, from Snow White in 1937 to Sleeping Beauty in 1959, and beyond. Innocence was still generally a virtue, although it was changing.

Then came the so-called “sexual revolution” of the 60s and 70s, where second-wave feminism mingled with post-war urbanisation and contraceptive advancements to unleash a wave of promiscuity and liberalism that laid the foundation for the present attitude. There was a definitive feeling of throwing off the restrictions and repression of the old days, and this is manifested in the media of the time: MIC ranks the greatest film of the era as 1967s “Bonnie and Clyde”, a story of a young carefree couple falling in love and then wreaking a spree of criminal havoc across the American west. It represents the liberal attitude to relationships and life in general that was soon to be solidified. Looking down that list, its easy to see obvious patterns: Morally grey or antihero characters are everywhere from The Godfathers Michael Corleone (1972) to Taxi Drivers Travis Bickle (1976). The number 10 film “The Graduate” (1967), about an illicit affair between a graduate and a married woman, is the perfect underline for this era. It’s also easy to see the hallmarks of step 3 of the process, as more people are exposed and the ideas spread between them, when taking into account other things that were happening, such as the nosedive in religiosity, the increase in partners and reduction in starting age that people were intercoursing with said partners that the data shows. It’s all interrelated.

Finally moving toward the modern day, its clear to see these kinds of themes entering the mainstream more and more. Films such as Titanic with its now-mythical love scenes further normalised these messages for the masses and began the process of romanticising the carefree sex-life. But it was in the 2010s when things really started taking perversion into the mainstream. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), the infamous Fifty Shades trilogy (2015-18), and the global phenomenon Game of Thrones (2011-19) definitively solidified the direction things were headed by placing almost-but-not-quite pornographic content into media that was being screened alongside every other film and TV-Show and so reaching millions of general audience members (with the only restriction being age ratings for cinemas, but even that goes away for streaming). This is normalisation in progress.

Now, the outlook on this issue is quite simple: Do what you want, and anything is allowed as long as you don’t harm anyone else. There is almost no moral consideration between consenting adults, hook-up culture is the norm, and premarital concerns are non-existent. The modern media puts some sort of innuendo or explicit material in almost everything, up to the point that heavily implied sex scenes are in films rated 12A. Step 4 is accomplished, and now it can only progress into LGBT and beyond, which is already happening (e.g., the recent Lightyear movie being banned in 14+ countries for a gay kiss).

Most people’s fitrahs are being destroyed before they reach 10, and the average age for someone losing their virginity has sunk to 16 while the number of marriages reached record lows in the UK in 2018 (20.1/1000 men and 18.6/1000 women).

This is why those Uni students act the way they do. They are the bottom of a dark pit that has been dug over decades, each generation being slightly more corrupt than the last through their media and environment, breaking down more and more until we see where we are today. This is the effect, plain to see.

VI

These stories are planting and cultivating long-term ideas in our minds and the minds of our youth, and they are having tangible, devastating consequences. The examples make clear what has been happening that so many of us fail to realise. The very fact that we can align reality and media in such a precise way shows the power of these stories and the influence they have.

But this really should be old news. We cannot afford it to be new. We just can’t. To the people who think of stories and film as mere entertainment, trivial fun, not worth time and dedication to understand or create, you are wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You think its effects are small and transitory, but nothing could be further from the truth. You are approaching a viper as if it were a teddy bear, and as the poison from its fangs spreads steadily and slowly, oh so slowly, further and further into our minds and thoughts, you either ignore it, start amputating limbs, or apply a light balm to the darkened and swollen skin instead of treating the festering wound beneath.

We have lost the battle of stories.

PART 4: THE WAR

I

But we have not yet lost the war. And make no mistake, it is a war. It’s a long subconscious war being waged by multi-billion-dollar industries over decades, backed up by centuries of psychological study and refinement, and propped up by global media network designed to bombard our societies every waking moment with new narratives and products, to keep us engaged and open for more so that they can squeeze ever more money out from us and, in the process, indoctrinate us with acceptable political messages.

Probably the message us Western Muslims have grown most accustomed to is Islamophobia. This article is a great long read about the problem of negative Muslim characterization in film. Masterpieces such as “American Sniper”, which is probably one of the most overtly racist films made in recent decades, create these stereotypes, and the reach of the film industry pollinates millions with an internal hatred of those people they see as “other”; the image of the unstable radicalised immigrant or the fanatical Arab raghead has become the face of Islam in the media. Just a fact. And we can’t do anything about it because we are not in that space. We can’t defend the honour of our religion because we think the attacks are trivial and unworthy of an equal rebuttal. It’s kind of horrifying.

We are so outgunned it’s frankly laughable. More and more of our youth are becoming disillusioned and disconnected from the religious core and being attracted by the shine of liberalism and its ideas of freedom and equality that have become normalised and promoted in the mainstream. I recently heard a friend of mine say about a girl he knew “she walked into Uni with an abayah and hijab, and walked out with neither”

I can’t sum it up better than that.

II

It’s time we took control of our narrative. And that starts with acknowledging that we need to. In all my research for this paper, the number of articles or studies written by Muslims on this subject of Islamic narrative in story or film was pathetic, around 1 or 2. This lack of interest, or more likely blindness, needs to change. It’ll probably be the hardest part, but once more people, and the right people, come round to it I’m sure things will progress swiftly from there insha’Allah.

For film/streaming series in particular, we have the track pretty much set out for us. We have an entire century of film development to study and understand how things progressed. The advent of digital means all of us have cameras in our pockets. We live in the information age where anyone can learn how to operate said camera and nail down the basics of lighting, staging and acting for free and at home.

But the story needs more. It is the soul, the fire that makes everything else work, and it needs a craftsman to create. It’s not (usually) a skill that comes naturally, especially if you’re trying to use it as a vehicle of some message and you don’t want everyone to reject it. Think of the times when politics overtook the narrative and in the end the viewership spoke for itself.

And this is the lethal caveat. The line between story and sermon becomes thinner the more you focus on message over entertainment. This is becoming extremely apparent in modern media: more and more people are becoming disillusioned with popular IPs being hijacked to push political messages in extremely blunt ways that remove the veil of entertainment and make the message as apparent as a sermon (e.g. Charlies Angles (Radical Feminism), Batwoman (LGTB & Radical Feminism), Rings of Power (Radical Feminism) and She-Hulk ).

It’s a fatal mistake: as soon as the audience notices the message, their immersion is broken, and they will begin to mentally push it away. It’s now being told to them instead of being unconsciously absorbed through the story. You need to focus on and prioritise building an entertaining and engaging story/world/characters/plot before you can start thinking about messaging. It shouldn’t even be marketed as an “islamic” film, as that automatically holds connotations of preachiness. Instead, it needs to be done subtly, woven into the fabric of the story.

It’s not like we haven’t done it before. The 1980 Libyan historical epic ‘Lion of The Desert’, about the life of tribal leader and resistance fighter Omar Al-Mukhtar, is one of the greatest examples of what Muslims have managed to achieve in this field. It’s frankly uplifting to see such a perfect blend of history and entertainment, with our culture being celebrated instead of demonised, and its massive scale and set pieces showing the possibilities of what can be done.

I can’t not mention Dirilis: Ertugrul, the 2014 Turkish smash-hit historical fantasy adventure series that inspired countless wedding themes and “eyvallahs” . But it really illustrates how to captivate general audiences (and their mothers) with a good story and likeable characters, and, through them, convey Islamic values of akhaq, bravery and unity. It touches our fitrah and can begin a cleansing process in our souls, to rewire our moral compasses. Likewise, the 2012 Arab TV-Drama miniseries ‘Umar’ remains the single best example of how Islamic history and education can be presented in an engaging manner, and it shows in the fact that so many people saw it and held it up as an excellent representation of our religion and values. I’d even go so far as to say many youths who saw it learned much more than if they had just read the stories in a book.

This is the point: It made an impact by speaking to our tradition, values and ultimately our fitrah, and it did so while championing and uplifting the Islamic cause in an engaging manner. That’s what I believe we need to strive towards.

III

But how can this be done? As Muslims living in the West, it may seem that we don’t have the resources to create multi-million-pound series and films the way Arab or Turkish government-backed filmmakers can. And that’s probably true, at the moment.

But the thing is, the market is there. Modern society is producing and consuming content at never-before-seen rates, and this hunger for good stories is a prime opportunity for us. If we can inspire and teach a generation of filmmakers and storytellers to understand the fundamental concepts laid out so far, progress will occur naturally insha’Allah. There are Muslim filmmakers already working in professional environments, so we’re not starting from scratch. And the money and resources will come after that, once more people come on board insha’Allah. We recently had the so-called “first Islamic film in UK cinemas”; it would be tragedy to stop at that.

And it’s important to realise, we do not need to be so close-minded that we only produce content for Muslims. Why can’t we produce a film that entertains the masses but imparts good healthy values to society? We are instructed to show the best of Akhlaq, is this not a method of Da’wah? It doesn’t seem like anyone else is doing it. The massive success of ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ that was attributed to it being an “old-school” film with an “uplifting” story shows people are getting tired of the cynical morally grey flood of content that’s been released over the past few years, but even that is being called a “last of its kind” film.

This seems to be a perfect time to get our foot in the door and get out there and create.

NOTES

I have a few things I just need to clarify before I conclude insh’Allah

Throughout this paper I’ve used some pretty strong language to describe the effects of film. I don’t doubt these effects, but I also know that film isn’t the only mode of messaging out there. Societal change is too complicated to attribute to one cause, and it would be foolish of us to discount other things such as social media, YouTube, friend groups, and even what’s being taught in curriculum. But I do believe film has been and will continue to be a large factor, and it’s factor we are ignoring.

I’ve spoken a lot about “the messaging” of the media. I’m not a conspiracy theorist and don’t believe all media is being controlled by some massive secret satanic organisation bent on spreading its agenda through everything. However, although I don’t know a lot about the workings of media at the top, from the evidence, such as the history of the Murdoch empire (worth almost $18 billion in 2020 and owning such outlets as Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The Sun and HarperCollins) there does certainly seem to be precedent for believing a unified message could be pushed by people in power. Even if not, this does not release us from tackling the issue we see in front of us.

mentioned that stories are being better than being told. This is true up to a certain point: until the ideas gain a foothold. After this, telling, whether that be lectures, reminders or lessons absolutely has a place: they serve to emphasise points in explicit ways that makes them more likely to be remembered and learnt as knowledge instead of ideas. Everything has its place and time.

Very importantly, I do not believe that trying to completely turn films and media off will be productive. Your children live here, they will know about things probably way before you even realise, through friends and just the world at large. Trying to be isolationist will more than likely backfire and incentivise them seek out the content themselves. And them doing it themselves is far worse than if you had allowed but controlled it. So, I would say that we should all lean about these concepts, so that we understand what is going on and can sit down with the youth if they have questions and engage with them productively. Trying to ignore it and hope it goes away is wishful thinking, but allowing everything with no critical consideration of ideas and themes is very dangerous. Oh, and if some people are thinking to pack up and move to some promised neverland “back home” to escape, as Sh Yasir Qadhi puts it “you’re never going to go back”. It’s a fantasy, so do good here.

Finally, I know I’ve done a lot of speaking about why but haven’t spoken much about how. There are major questions that need to be answered, both from an Islamic and mechanical point of view. Islamic questions such as how female casting should be handled or how the issue of musical score should be approached or how/if certain topics should be covered, and mechanical issues of how funding is found, how people are taught, what stories are written, and most importantly how the blend between story and message is handled. I leave the Islamic questions to people more knowledgeable than me, and as for the mechanical ones, I’m confident solutions will be found insha’Allah.

But I think it starts with a change of mind. We need to nurture an environment where Muslim storytellers can thrive. That includes breaking down cultural stigmas against “The Arts” and that anything to do with it is a waste of time and you should go be a doctor or engineer to join the other millions of doctors and engineers in the world (no shade thrown at doctors or engineers of course).

But just consider the fact that one Muhammad Ali did more good for Islam and the world than a thousand doctors or engineers ever could. There are more Muhammad Ali’s out there, people with talent and ideas… We just need to find them.

CONCLUSION

First off, Jazakallah Khair for taking the time out to read this, I sincerely hope you found it interesting and maybe even inspiring insha’Allah, who knows!

The concept of story as a means of learning ideas to then use in our experiences seems to really go to the heart of the human condition, for what are we shaped by if not experience? It’s a timeless universal truth that Allah confirms time and again in the Quran and underpins almost everything about us, and I believe it is this fact that justifies this paper.

In a world where society seems hell-bent on deconstructing everything about us, down to core morals and principles, and as we grapple with preserving our identity for future generations, the question of how should become just as important as what. And this where I feel innovation is lacking and we would do well to look to the examples around us. We cannot be content with stagnation, producing the same after-thought masjid lecture recordings, the same hard-backed tomes destined to gather dust in some library, the same one-line Instagram reminders. Don’t get me wrong, we need some of these things and I’m not ignoring the massive innovations Institutes like Yaqeen have made with their incredible Ramadhan Series but given the lack of activity in the western world where these ideas are most potent, it really seems like we can do better.

My vision is for us to produce films that entertain and guide. That create exciting worlds and fresh stories. That widen our horizons but leave us improved. That give us role-models to look up to and create a sense of security that watching this will not only not be a detriment to my faith but will improve it. And that will help improve society over time insha’Allah.

This paper was mainly written to get my ideas out of my head and get them organised so that I could see if they hold up in detail… Now that they are out and I’ve had to think critically about the points, and even find new ones I hadn’t considered, it does seem like they do. I don’t want to be content just writing things and hoping someone else does something, so I want to try and put my ideas to the test. I have some good ideas about things I could do, so let’s see what happens insha’Allah

And Allah is the Best of Helpers.

The End
Ibraheem