The Good, The Bad, and The Non-Existent: Middle Eastern Representation in the Fandoms I Love

by Arezou

I was a lucky kid. By the time I was old enough for Disney to become my first “fandom” (not that I would have ever called it that), Aladdin had come out. There, on the big screen, and later on home video, was a Middle Eastern princess who looked like me: the one and only Princess Jasmine.

With the entire Disney canon presented to me without comment by my parents, I was free to pick and choose which parts of it I liked, never once questioning if a girl who looked like me could really be a princess. After all, Jasmine was right there. So I was free to grow my library like Belle did, collect all my whozits and whatsits like Ariel, with Jasmine there as a constant, unconscious reminder not to doubt my place in this narrative.

But while seeing myself represented in the media I loved got off to a strong start, it dried up really, really quickly as I got older.

Not that I noticed any of this as a child though. I think that I, like so many other underrepresented kids, found meaning and connection to characters that speak to us on some level. Especially when you grow up not expecting to find someone resembling you in the stories you consume. What else could we do, after all? This is so ingrained in us that it is only now as an adult that I acknowledge how important that kind of representation is, how important it would have been to me as a kid. 

Though I was exposed to Star Wars earlier, the first fandom I really dove into headfirst was Harry Potter. Much has been said, especially recently, about the representation issues surrounding the series. The minority characters range from casual stereotypes to downright offensive caricatures. And that’s not even touching on issues surrounding the depiction of women and the lack of LGBTQ+ representation, both of which are longer conversations for another day. 

I wandered into the Wizarding World unhindered, positive I would find my place in this story somehow. And I found it, like so many bookish, smart kids did, in Hermione Granger. I even found a bit of a physical resemblance between us, as I too had big bushy hair. Such was my confidence in our resemblance that I probably projected more onto her than the text called for.

As conversations surrounding the stereotypes in the Harry Potter series began to gain traction, I found myself very thankful that Rowling never attempted MENA (Middle Eastern North African) characters - or significant ones, anyway. For some reason, the only book that contains any MENA “representation” at all is the Goblet of Fire, with both instances appearing almost back to back at the Quidditch World Cup.

First, Arthur Weasley is warned that his ban on flying carpets has incurred the wrath of a man named Ali Bashir. Because of course, the Arabic-sounding man is out here trying to peddle his flying carpets.  The second is the referee for the World Cup, an Egyptian man by the name of Hassan Mostafa who, with his bald head and extremely thick moustache, reads like a caricature. In fairness, I am not Egyptian and cannot speak to this with any real authority. However, a book that introduces the series’ first and only East Asian character and names her Cho Chang does not get the benefit of the doubt from me. 

It is also important to note that neither of these characters ever gets a line. In over 4200 pages of story. In a tale that clocks in at over 1.08 million words. Not a single one of those words ever goes to a MENA person. 

Flash forward a few years to the mid-2010’s: The Wizarding World is preparing a whole new set of stories, in a globe-trotting adventure based on the little Fantastic Beasts book that came out in the early 2000’s. And to top it off, JK Rowling is expanding on the Wizarding World lore on her Pottermore website, with pages devoted to the International Wizarding Schools of the world! 

There is Hogwarts, of course, which serves the UK, and its American counterpart Ilvermorny which serves the entirety of the US and Canada, one must assume. There is the French-language Beauxbatons, Durmstrang up in Scandinavia, and one school in Russia. There is a single school in Africa, specifically Uganda, presumably meant to serve the entire continent. There is one in Japan, but nowhere else in East Asia. The only school in South America is located in Brazil. Which just at a glance means there are a TON of language barriers that go completely unaccounted for, many nationalities where the wizards have no school at which to educate their children. But hey, it’s fiction and I’m probably thinking about it too hard.

But then there is my personal favourite: there is not one SINGLE school meant to serve the Middle East. Presumably, North African wizards can head on down to Uganda (because all of Africa is the same and they all speak the same language/share a culture I guess?) but Middle Eastern wizards are shit out of luck. In what is essentially an encyclopedia entry rather than a narrative work, the Middle East is so far removed from this wizarding world, it is not given any kind of consideration. 

Even within the films meant to accompany all this brand new information, that globe trotting wizard adventure, the cast is 99% white American or English. Of the three prominent characters of colour that we do get, one is a black woman who is the product of kidnap and rape, and one is an exotic, East Asian snake lady. 

Yikes. 

Again, no Middle Eastern anything, but I’m definitely thinking that’s a good thing. The last thing we need is some witch or wizard who dresses like a Party City 1001 Nights character, has a genie sidekick, and unironically uses spells like “Abra Kadabra” and “Alakazam”.

Also in the mid-2010’s, just as the Harry Potter franchise started to make some very questionable decisions, another popular series was preparing to relaunch in a big way. That series, of course, was Star Wars. 

By this point in my fandom journey, Harry Potter just wasn’t the reliable source of joy it used to be. The cracks were starting to show, and the new material didn’t spark as much excitement anymore.

But I had always liked Star Wars. It was hard not to when you grow up in a nerd household like I did. I particularly liked the prequel trilogy, and would defend it any time tired prequels-are-garbage jokes came up. But there wasn’t much new material to latch on to post-Revenge of the Sith other than an animated TV show, so it served instead as nostalgic rewatch material.

Then the trailer for The Force Awakens came out. 

A bubble of unexpected joy rose to the surface. I spent half the trailer holding my breath, not wanting to miss a second, and the other half cheering and screaming as the Millennium Falcon raced, spun, and flipped through some mysterious canyon. A whole new cast of characters on a brand new adventure? Sign me up!

Of course, a group of famously very calm and collected “fans” also lost their minds at this trailer. Why? Because the opening moments featured a Black stormtrooper. “It’s not realistic!” they cried, about their franchise which previously had a tiny frog man lift a spaceship with the power of his mind. These same fans would later absolutely freak out at the presence of a Vietnamese woman, loudly proclaiming that their anger is solely because she’s poorly written, while also failing to provide any more detail than that.

The racist backlash these two faced was heartbreaking. It also did nothing to assure me that the creators would push on and continue to add diverse voices and faces to their story. Because for all that I love this franchise, when in doubt they default to the most conventional choice.

It’s fortunate that I hadn’t come to expect any kind of representation for me out of Star Wars. Because these three new movies came and went, and though there was plenty to love in them, though these films gave me one of my all time favourite characters in Rey, there was still no Middle Eastern representation to be found. The same can be said for the 2019 Disney+ series The Mandalorian, which is a fantastic show set in the lawless fringes of this universe, and still no representation.

Or at least, no significant, explicit representation.

I always consider representation/depictions under one of two umbrellas. Either the depiction is explicit, the character is coded as a certain ethnicity, and this coding informs characters story somehow, or the representation is incidental, the actor just happens to be of a certain background which doesn’t inform the character, and their presence acts as affirmation and representation to those who know what they’re looking for.

It is representation of the second kind that I found in The Mandalorian, when they cast Iranian-American actor Omid Abtahi to play Dr. Pershing, an accomplice of Werner Herzog’s Client. He’s in two episodes and doesn’t have many lines, but it was one of those things where I didn’t realize what I was missing until he appeared on my screen. A far cry from the howling savage Tusken sand people, which is realistically all we had by way of “Middle Eastern” characters in the Galaxy Far Far Away. In a series that takes place on a lot of desert planets, there aren’t many people there who hail from the more desert regions of the world. 

So where do we go from here?

We can continue to hope that stories we love, like Star Wars, see fit to incorporate MENA coded characters in a significant way. Gone are the days of something like Lord of the Rings, where the only way MENA people fit into the narrative were as genetically inferior villains. It is cases like that which I consider “bad” representation. It’s not that MENA characters cannot play villains ever, but we should be able to play the hero once in a while too. 

It is something like this that makes me hesitant about the upcoming film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. The story is set on a desert planet Arakis, and though the main character hails from elsewhere, he soon finds himself living among the Fremen, who are native to the planet. In a series that draws very heavily on MENA influences, none of the prominent named Fremen characters are played by MENA actors. I love Zendaya, Javier Bardem is compelling, but MENA audience members now find themselves erased from a story in which  they could and should have occupied a prominent, heroic role. 

MENA people are a forgotten minority. When conversations of representation come up, it is very rare for us to be included in that discussion. If we’re included at all, we are generally lumped in under the Muslim umbrella, with well-meaning people forgetting that not all Muslims are MENA and not all MENA people are Muslim. It is rare for a character to be incidentally MENA or MENA-coded, the way we see with other minorities. If it is not an explicitly MENA story, as soon as the stories being told veer from the realistic into the fantastical, we are left behind. 

The time is long overdue for us to be included in the fantasy stories we love so much.