Hello everyone, I had an amazing time reading everyone’s blog posts!

For this week’s ASTU blogs, I noticed that a large number of my classmates wrote about a theme we have been exploring throughout this semester in our ASTU  100 class: the “master narrative”.  As my classmate Aleksei defines it, master narratives are “versions of a story that are particularly prevalent in a society”. Suvi simplifies master narratives as “basically what ends up on Wikipedia”.

Master narratives are often crafted by the powerful group to propagate negative ideas about the weaker group in order to justify its oppression and demonize it. We have been discussing this topic in our class lately in the context of 9/11 and in relation with two books, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a monologue of a Pakistani man, Changez, who goes to the US at the age of 18 and lives a successful life there only to have his relationship with America be strained by Islamophobia and prejudice which were the aftermath of 9/11. Persepolis, on the other hand, is a graphic memoir that tells the story from the perspective of a younger version of the author called Marji. The story follows Marji as she grows up during the Islamic Revolution under the fundamentalist regime in Iran while the war and the violence are exacerbated by America’s military actions in the Middle East after 9/11. Both these books address the “Us vs. Them” narrative which was constructed under the presidency of George Bush, “Us” being the Americans and “Them” being the enemy, which basically included all people of Muslim and Arab origins.

This had dangerous consequences in terms of heightened Islamophobia and the creation of a culture of fear and mistrust around Muslims and Arabs, which still persists. Globally, this led to the launch of the “War on Terror” by President Bush on Iraq. As my classmate Diego points out, this was intensely glorified through American media. Because of the constant showing of all Muslims as “evil”, that is what they became in the public eye. And because of the preponderant position of American movies and TV shows worldwide, this highly generalized and artificial image of all Muslims being terrorists spread across the globe.  This was used to justify America’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and brought unjust destruction and ruin to the Middle East, taking millions of innocent lives. My classmate Tracy recounts her experience of believing that the reason the US was involved in wars in the Middle East was “because of 9/11”. This ultimately led to explicit discrimination towards anyone perceived to be Muslim in America, ranging from racial slurs being hurled at them to taking them aside at airports for extra checking and interrogation without satisfactory reasons.

Master narratives are often loud and convincing because they do not let stories that challenge them to be heard. In Aleksei’s experience, when he moved to America at the age of 10, this master narrative of Islamophobia made him develop “unexplainable animosity” towards Muslims despite him never having an unpleasant experience with a Muslim. Similarly, Tracy describes how her school would make them watch documentaries on 9/11 every year, but they would only show the victims from an American, and essentially white, perspective and completely ignore the other sides of the story. She also talks about how the talk about 9/11 was limited to that one, singular day and how its aftermath and the reasons that led up to it were mostly taken off the public eye. Suvi further adds to this by raising the question of why it is that only the American victims get to be commemorated in her blog. She expresses her concerns about how the victims of the retaliatory American violence in the Middle East are often forgotten.

Remembering these silenced victims is exactly what The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Persepolis aim to do. They seek to provide a counter-narrative to the American master narrative. A counter-narrative is the story of the minority group that challenges the majority’s version of the story. Both Persepolis and The Reluctant Fundamentalist provide a counter-narrative by asking the readers to consider the impact 9/11 had on Muslims, those living within the US as well as those living in the Middle East, and to essentially illustrate to the world that terrorism should not be associated with a religion or an ethnicity. A great example of how a counter-narrative works is seen in Aleksei’s blog where he talks about how his prejudiced beliefs about Islam were shattered when his father pointed out to him that many of their family-friends were Muslims and did not carry the physical or the personality attributes that Aleksei had associated with Muslims at all.

I myself grew up with a very stereotypical and negative notion about Islam, associating it with oppression, conservatism, and terrorism. Like America, mistrust and paranoia surrounding Muslims is an issue in India too because of its rivalry with Pakistan and the historic animosity between the Hindus and the Muslims. Therefore, most of these prejudices were fed to me by the media and the adults around me. It was only when I began to form my opinions through reading a lot of counter-narratives and learning more about Islam through my best friend, who is a Muslim and who I met when I was 15 that I realized how wrong and biased my opinions were. In fact, Islam is not at all about oppression and fundamentalism.

Books like Persepolis and The Reluctant Fundamentalist force the readers to consider the alternatives to the master narrative and challenge them to question how much of their perception of a situation is based on the master narrative. A large part of what we know, believe, and consume is heavily dictated by the master narrative, especially when it comes to our notions about minority groups. This is why it is so important that we actively seek out counter-narratives, to explore the origins of our beliefs, and make our opinions as well-informed as possible.