Hasan Minhaj, a self-identifying Muslim Indian-American comedian, assesses several tropes about Islamic cultures— from Islam being monolithic to it being inherently violent— in his show Patriot Act. These tropes, commonly used in Western society, generalize Islamic cultures and propagate false ideologies about them. Minhaj, however, incorporates the use of these tropes ironically in his segment by using comedy which is subtle, yet moving for an audience with a majority of ‘brown’ people.
Islam, labelled frequently as an ‘inherently violent’ religion, is framed episodically in the media and often only the stories that support the trope are presented to the viewers. This leads to poor treatment of the entirety of the Muslim population due to the acts of a small Muslim subgroup. Minhaj highlights this framing in his sequence where he displays news reporters discussing the issue of Jamal Khashoggi. One news reporter states that the story of Khashoggi dying inside the consulate in Turkey was “designed to protect one man” and another states that the Saudi Crown Prince “dispatched a hit squad to execute and dismember Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi”. This segment plays with the Western expectation since a majority of Americans perceived the Saudi Crown Prince as a reformer and a step toward modernist ideology. In reality, however, Minhaj points out that several Muslims knew the consequences of Khashoggi criticizing the policies that Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) and that this Western perspective was founded on little knowledge and false ideologies. In fact, Minhaj, like several other Muslims, predicted that any discourse that goes against the MBS regime would be censored since there is zero tolerance for that in the nation. To address this, Minhaj jokes, “This is the Patriot Act, or as it’s known in Saudi Arabia, “Error 404, Page Not Found,” which is an effective way to bring to light that censorship is an ongoing problem in repressive regimes.` By censoring Minhaj’s content, however, MBS played right into the Streisand effect wherein his attempt to hide and censor a piece of information lead to it spreading more widely.
To build on this idea, Minhaj addresses the trope of ‘Islam being monolithic’ which generalizes over a billion individuals that follow Islam, each of who, in reality, have an individual perspective on the religion and life itself. Minhaj consistently refers to ‘brown’ people as one entity and brings up ‘brown’ stereotypes in a comedic manner and he uses his own cultural context with a hint of sarcasm to point out the detrimental effects that labelling a culture as monolithic has on its individuals. Through this, Minhaj is able to demonstrate how the Saudi Arabia controversy targets all Muslims, despite Saudi Arabia consisting of only two percent of the entire Muslim population.
As a ‘brown’ person from India studying in a Western university, it is evident that my culture is heavily stereotyped and I believe that ‘brown’ people are not interchangeable no matter what these tropes suggest, which is why I found it refreshing that a well-known Muslim Indian-American is commenting on the negative effects that the propagation of these tropes has on a larger social group.