Hello!
Hello.
Welcome to Gaming Islam, a series of films
about video games and their complicated relationship
to Islam, Muslims, and the Middle East.
I'm Ghenwa.
And I'm Alireza.
We're two gamers who also happen to be professors
of the Middle East at the University of Chicago.
In our series, we bring these two interests together.
We play video games to understand how they
represent, reimagine and remix a whole host
of things from Middle Eastern and Muslim life.
Books and rituals, historical events and
personas, art, architecture, poetry, fiction
and so on.
We want to think about video game
depictions of Muslims and the Middle East in relation
to a much longer history of cultural
representation, from art books to comics to film to academic scholarship.
We think that the images and stories we all
consume are just as powerful in shaping our
worlds as political and economic events.
The electronic game industry is the biggest
and fastest-growing entertainment industry
in the world.
Islam and Muslims are represented and
appropriated in all sorts of ways across a vast selection
of titles.
There's fantasy adventure games like Prince
of Persia and Heaven's Vault, even The Legend
of Zelda, speculative histories like
Assassin's Creed and the upcoming Nasser Son of Man,
and adventures like Uncharted 3, and
first-person shooters like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
This is to say nothing of the many
independent games produced by Muslims for Muslims.
We both grew up playing video games and we
learned to be sensitive to how Muslims and
Middle Easterners are represented.
Whether in the original Prince of Persia
game, the strategy games based on Frank Herbert's
Dune, or any of the numerous first-person
shooters based in the Middle East, we were consuming
media that depicted people like us and our cultures, not always in positive ways.
And of course, we came of age also watching films
with problematic and stereotypical representation
of people like us.
Aladdin, True Lies, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
and Alireza's favorite film, Not Without My Daughter
One of the worst films of all time.
Just to name a few from the 1990s.
We've called our video series Gaming Islam,
but it's important to emphasize that there
are many more Muslims than there are Middle Easterners
and a lot of Middle Easterners
who are not Muslim.
In the popular imagination, these complexities are often flattened.
In video games, as in other media, Muslims
are de facto Middle Easterners, and people
from the Middle East are typically imagined to be Muslims.
That's one of the critical perspectives we bring to our videos.
We try to unravel some of these assumptions as we focus on specific games.
We'd love your feedback and suggestions.
Tell us what you think about our videos.
And let us know what games you think we should be playing next.
We're on YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, and Instagram.