God and Hollywood
The Islamic concept of God has often been called the
most uncompromising monotheism, next to Judaism,
in the world. Islam has a very definite concept of God and how
to understand Him, and it has
no time for concepts that bring God down to the level of human
imagination. With the establishment of Islam
as a third major influence in the religious life of North America,
Muslims must face a new set of challenges and opportunities.
Chief among these is battling the distortions about God and
His nature that appear in the mind of the general public and
in popular culture.
In addition to promoting disbelief in God, a trend that Islam
abhors, today's movies have transformed God into a fun-loving
old man, such as in the Oh, God movies (starring George
Burns) or have typecast Him as a stern, yet fickle being as
portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in Joan of Arc, or even
as a kind of glutton for punishment as in Mel Gibson's The
Passion of the Christ. Given that Christians worship Jesus
as God, the portrayal of a confused blue-eyed flower child in
white robes running around Galilee doesn't help the image of
God either (think of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar).
In Hollywood, God seems to be whatever the director wants Him
to be. Hey, and you don't have to pay Him!
Muslims shun all movies and cartoons about prophets. Disney's
kid-oriented portrayals of such figures as Moses and Joseph
and the never-ending stream of made-for-TV movies about David
and Jesus are considered in poor taste by Muslims, who see any
attempt to represent the physical features of a prophet as wrong.
By showing the face of a prophet, these movies and cartoons
give people a false idea about what the prophet looked like
and thus they begin to judge the prophet by the actor's looks
and performance. People become less interested in the prophet's
teachings and more so in his charisma. When
was the last time you saw an unattractive man playing the part
of a prophet? How many such movies made you desire to transform
your life? These kinds of cinematic
portrayals offer a good story, not a God-inspired way of living,
which is, incidentally, what the prophets really stood for.
