Smart Grrl Summer: Religion & Pop Culture & Why We Care

Transcript for the fourth & final Smart Grrl Summer episode:

PDF transcript & digital transcript!

Shownotes:

On this final Smart Grrl Summer, your favorite smart grrls talked popculture. Not just because it’s fun, but because the so-called low-brow popular and consumable media we digest influences religion, has religion in it, and helps us think about religion IRL. And as listeners learned off the bat, this happens to be one of Megan’s areas of expertise.

Some new keywords this time! Find them in our glossary. They were:

• pop culture, pulp, American minority religions

The 101:

This episode is about why we care about pop culture! We care because sometimes pop culture is a barometer for how a community feels, thinks, or acts; sometimes pop culture moves how communities think, feel, and act; and pop culture always reflects the values of the communities it comes from.  It is never apolitical nor innocuous. 

Our thesis for this episode is that if we care about religion, we care about how religion is portrayed popularly. 

To do this, we focus on one of the case studies in Megan’s brand-new out-now book, Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions: the pulp nonfiction and movie Not Without My Daughter.

Megan started us off by defining pop culture and, within that, pulp, which can be fiction or nonfiction, and is usually work that folks consider sort of tasteless, garish, poor quality, sensationalist. Not Without My Daughter fits within pulp nonfiction which, in turn, is a part of pop culture. But don’t assume, nerds, that popular means unimportant or that pulp means fringe. Like Megan told us, Not Without My Daughter isn’t just a book from the 80s that “your mom’s bookclub read,” it launched the political career of its author, Betty Mahmoody; it continues to be a best seller and a widely viewed movie; and its content continues to shape not only popular opinion about Muslim men and Muslim-majority countries but also the global laws around women and children.

Here’s why Megan has spent so much time on this pulp nonfiction and, frankly, every time she writes about it, it blows Ilyse’s mind that this refuted, troubling book has such an enduring presence, well, anywhere.

1. Because on the surface, Not Without My Daughter is a really great story about one woman’s experience of surviving domestic violence against all odds. So it draws us in--as feminists, as freedom-loving Americans. Lurking beneath both book and movie surfaces, however, are some violent, scary, long-lasting American biases against Muslims and Islam!

   • Betty Mahmoody portrayed her husband, his family, Iranians, and all Muslims as dirty, dangerous, violent, and especially abusive of “their” women. But only after portraying her husband as a good, patriotic American. Mahmoody literally says her husband is abusive and violent because he’s a Muslim Iranian. She implies, too, that he tricked her: even this good Muslim is, at his core, bad.

   • Mahmoody, therefore, argues in this pulp nonfiction* that ALL Muslims and Iranians are fundamentally un-American and violent, especially toward women. This grotesque set of lies matter in how we think about Muslims and Iranians, to this day…
     

2. …because this pulp nonfiction* is still in print. It’s cheap. It’s cover has been updated to highlight our current image of “scary Muslims” -- it is a popular, omnipresent way to think about Iran, Muslims, Muslim men.

   *Megan cited both Dohra Ahmad’s work that defines this usage of “pulp nonfiction,” as well as Farzaneh Milani’s Words, Not Swords, but the audio is a little wacky and it isn’t entirely clear in the episode. The transcript has the citation. You should too.

And, historically, this popular, omnipresent way of thinking has had tangible, real-world consequences beyond making boatloads of money. Mahmoody’s story helped shaped U.S. federal law and policy.

• In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed the International Parental Kidnapping Crime Act, which makes the international abduction of a child by a parent a federal felony offense. Not Without My Daughter made this law happen.

• Mahmoody was the only person to be named in the Senate hearings for House Resolution 3378, the bill which eventually became the International Parental Kidnapping Crime Act. Senators mentioned the book in deliberations.

• And if that’s not enough, later, the U.S. State Department (yes, that one) appointed Mahmoody as an advisor “on the plight of American women and children held against their will in foreign countries.”

Primary Sources:

Ilyse talked about the way Megan’s research on Not Without My Daughter continues to shock and awe her in the worst ways.

Megan talked about how a major donor to UNC-Chapel Hill’s graduate program in religion could not comprehend why Megan’s research was smart: “aren’t Muslims like that, though?” said this Karen.

Story Time:

Ilyse had the pleasure of pulling a quote from Megan’s book. She feigned embarrassment. Here’s what we reflected on:

“Abusing Religion demonstrates that the stories we tell ourselves about American religious outsiders matter—these stories do real work in the world, creating and limiting conditions of possibility for religious and sexual difference in the contemporary United States and shaping presumably secular institutions.” (137)

Your homework:

Megan reminded us of all the things she’s written about pop culture, Not Without My Daughter, and the race/religion/gender/sex/abuse matrix that is Abusing Religion. Here’s some highlights:

• A three-part series from The Revealer following the case studies of Megan’s book:

  • “Abusing Religion: Race, Islam, and Not Without My Daughter”

  • “Abusing Religion: Polygyny, Mormonisms, and Under the Banner of Heaven”

  • “Abusing Religion: Michelle Remembers and the Satanic Panic”

• First, watch A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a 2014 Iranian western vampire film. Then, read Megan’s analysis on it.

Ilyse, shocking no one, had too many resources on Islam, race, and Iran, some of which are fun reads or watches and some are not. They included:

1. As a refute of sorts Mahmoody: Lila Abu Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Read the book. But if it’s easier, here’s a clickable summation piece.)

2. Because everyone should read it: Juliane Hammer, (Muslim) Women’s Bodies, Islamophobia, and American Politics

   1. Hammer’s work on domestic violence and Muslim women is also not to be missed: Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence.

1. Friend of the pod Michael Muhammad Knight will eyeroll at us, but his book and the film adaptation Taqwacore is another popculture moment--the book inspired a literal movement of punk Islam. A little bit pulp, too.

   1. But please, y’all, he’s our friend and he is so much more than this moment in his life. Go read his other several many books. He has so many Ilyse will just list her personal highlights:

      1. Blue Eyed Devil (2009)

      2. The Five Percenters (2008) and Why I Am a Five Percenter (2011)

      3. Muhammad: Forty Introductions (2019)

      4. Muhammad’s Body (2020)

2. Ramy on Hulu. This is not a perfect show, duh, but I do think it’s doing real work to be honest about his own experience. I’ll post up some critique of it, too, from Muslim women.

3. Megan and I wrote a thing on RuPaul’s DragRace and Persian princess Jackie Cox that’s popculture and racialization. Salam, Khanoom Jackie Cox joon!

1. Just for good measure, here’s a reminder to check out Megan’s brand-new, out just this month book, Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions.

the grrls of summer have gone but season 2 is just around the corner!