When I was growing up in Monroe, Mich., one of our biggest football games each season was against the Fordson High Tractors, from the Detroit suburb of Dearborn--a perennially tough team and Monroe's rival since 1928. I knew, vaguely, that Dearborn had the largest Arab-American population in the U.S., but all I saw were beefy guys in football helmets. It's not as if they called themselves the Fordson Crescents.
What never occurred to me until I watched All-American Muslim (debuting Nov. 13 on TLC) was that the Tractors face a training challenge unlike most schools in the football-loving Midwest. Those years when the holy month of Ramadan lands in football season--and Muslims abstain from food and drink during daylight--players risk dangerous dehydration. So for a month, the Tractors practice at night, from 10 p.m. until 5 a.m. In the first episode of All-American, coach Fouad Zaban calls a meeting and tells the team his plan to sacrifice sleep for safety. Then they go out onto the practice field to knock some heads.
It is at this intersection, where Friday Night Lights meets the Friday call to prayer, that the fascinating All-American Muslim lives. Reality shows are not known for ethnic nuance; see the spicy-meatball Italian stereotypes of The Real Housewives of New Jersey and Jersey Shore. But this eight-part series takes a people that pop culture has spent a decade making sinister and exotic and recasts them as refreshingly ordinary.
TLC was developing the show at a time when Muslim bashing erupted like some kind of delayed stress reaction to 9/11. Protesters screamed against an Islamic center planned near Ground Zero. (Sarah Palin, a TLC star herself last fall, enjoined "peaceful" Muslims to "refudiate" the project.) Fox and NPR analyst Juan Williams was nervous seeing Muslims on airplanes. And Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle charged that Muslims were implementing Shari'a in Dearborn, a claim shot down by its non-Muslim mayor, Jack O'Reilly.
TV used to integrate our living rooms with sitcoms about American minorities, from The Goldbergs in 1949 to The Cosby Show and Will & Grace. (After the Ground Zero flap, a Daily Show sketch imagined a sitcom that could combat stereotypes about Muslims titled The Qu'osby Show.) But today, that's more the role of reality TV. TLC specializes in family stories that open a door on subcultures: Sister Wives, about polygamy; Little People, Big World, about dwarfism; and the fecund Duggars' 19 Kids and Counting, which is as much about conservative Christian culture as it is about raising a family the size of a church choir.
Unlike TLC's past family shows, All-American Muslim focuses on not one family but several to capture a broader swath of Dearborn. Besides Zaban, there's Nina Bazzy, an independent-minded businesswoman whose ambition of opening a nightclub runs up against the community's ideas of female propriety; Mike Jaafar, a family man and deputy sheriff; and Nader and Nawal Aoude, a young couple expecting their first baby.
Like many family stories, it opens with a wedding. Shadia Amen, 31, a divorced mom with tattoos and a thing for country music ("I'm a hillbilly at heart"), is getting remarried to Jeff McDermott, a Catholic who has agreed to convert to Islam. Jeff serves as a kind of surrogate for the non-Muslim viewer. (Watch Jeff get cranky when he has to fast for his first Ramadan! Watch Jeff's Irish Catholic family find out the reception has no alcohol!) But All-American points out the nuances of the situation instead of amping up the conflict. For instance, Shadia's conservative parents are delighted that Jeff's converting; his mother is less so. But as Shadia's family points out, her parents would not have been happy if she had converted. And Jeff's mom--who ends up attending his wedding happily--realizes she's reacting less out of religious fervor than inevitable wedding-induced stress. "Change of any type is hard," she says.
In other words, All-American Muslim recognizes that religion is important--if it weren't, it wouldn't be religion--but not all-defining. And it's not monolithic, even within families. Free spirit Shadia has face piercings, her more conservative older sister Suehaila wears the traditional hijab, and their younger sister Samira is considering wearing it for the first time since 9/11 (when she stopped for fear of discrimination).
To tease out these differences, All-American Muslim brings the different families together between segments to discuss some of the issues that arise: the place of women in Muslim culture (a recurring theme of the show), war, intermarriage, sex, adoption. There are no pronouncements or right answers--just some well-meaning Midwesterners trying to puzzle out what God thinks about, say, going to a Red Lobster that has a bar. (This should ring true to any viewer; coming from a Jewish and Catholic family, I recall a few confused debates over the rules of Passover and Lent.) Real life is not a religious tract; it's just life, and people muddle through it, applying spiritual lessons on the fly.
The larger world's religious politics do intrude on post-9/11 Dearborn. The Tractors are taunted at away games as "terrorists," and we see deputy sheriff Mike providing security at a festival that draws a crowd of anti-Muslim protesters jeering, "Muhammad is a pedophile!" But the most intriguing incident involves something no more geopolitically charged than pancakes. Nader and Nawal go out for brunch in another suburb and wait 15 minutes before a hostess seats them. Nawal is furious, certain they're being mistreated because she is wearing the hijab. Nader disagrees, noting that they've eaten there before with no problem. Nawal considers his point: "Maybe she was just having a bad day."
Maybe it was discrimination, maybe it wasn't. The point is that they have to wonder, whereas most Americans would just assume they were getting crappy service. As we get to know Nawal, we see that she's not strident or sanctimonious; asked if she believes other Muslim women should wear the hijab, she says, "Who the hell am I to tell them?"
The most revolutionary thing All-American Muslim does is introduce us to a woman like Nawal, with her plainspoken ya knows and kindas and flat upper-Midwest vowels--a devout Muslim in a hijab who sounds just a touch like Michele Bachmann. TLC might have picked a more exotic immigrant community in California or Brooklyn. Instead it set the show in a town so American that Henry Ford founded his car company there and so American it then welcomed Middle Eastern immigrants to help build the machines. These characters aren't "just like us," because nobody is just like anybody. Religion is a way of distinguishing values and understanding life. But that life itself is something we all share--the pancakes and the weddings and the football games.
Speaking of which: All-American Muslim finished shooting before football season ended. After I watched it, I checked my hometown newspaper online for the score of the Monroe-Fordson game. Monroe won. But I was happy to read, after getting to know these characters, that Dearborn managed to qualify for the playoffs too. Go Tractors!
By James Poniewozik
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