Goat Peace Bro Funny Popular Memes
Equally a 2nd-generation immigrant with roots in the Muslim community, I sometimes see Muslim-themed memes in my social networks. They are fascinating to me, considering while they share many of the influences familiar to western audiences, they serve a completely different set of values. The result is a bit uncanny if you're not a part of that group, and reveals a more playful side of Islam that isn't as public as the trigger-happy side that is widespread in media. Inspired in office by Nick Douglas's excellent Medium write-upward last year on Facebook moms and the ascension of the "mail service-meme," I decided to apply a similar analysis to Muslim memes.
Douglas described an intriguing variation on the meme form that turned the almost familiar version on its head: Ironic humour past and for "nerdy middle-grade straight white men" was replaced with earnest and sassy inspirational messages "targeted at parents, Christians, and conservatives."
Personally I'1000 a bit unsatisfied with the Christian-axial viewpoint used to approach these kinds of analyses.
It turns out near every community has their fair cut of Facebook pages and Instagram accounts posting images that tin can only be truly appreciated by members of the group. And yous can learn a lot about a culture or religion by examining what its people share.
Digging into Muslim post-memes I discovered a variety of approaches, and a wide range of religious expression and tension. Many of these images can be interpreted as devout attempts to play within the premises of Islamic law while stretching it gently to run across pop culture at the edge. Others get much farther, offer more forceful attempts to bring Islamic thoughts and beliefs into a Western frame of reference, and revealing a much stranger human relationship betwixt the 2 in the process.
Religious memes
The very nature of memes as a visual form poses a problem for some Muslims. Aniconism has a long tradition in Islam. Because idolatry is a major sin, Islam forbids depictions of Allah and his prophets. Images of humans and animals have also historically been discouraged due to a prohibition confronting drawing anything with a soul. Some people believe an acceptable workaround to this is to avoid drawing optics. Others believe photography and television receiver are permissible, depending on the content. While the ruling has become fuzzy in the modern historic period, the inclination to avert depicting a man in creative renderings of living beings is nonetheless withal pervasive in about Islamic cultures.
This doesn't prevent Muslims from sharing the many memes that don't interruption this rule:
Similar to the typical mail-memes Douglas analyzed, they "lean hard on the 'benign' side of benign violation." That is, the state of affairs simultaneously is beneficial and violates expectation. These kinds of memes are fairly bourgeois in scope, and more or less autumn completely within the bounds of Islam.
But wait. This isn't weird. The cultural and religious identity implied backside these jokes are consistent. That's boring. What happens when they're not?
When the meme is on point but the sis isn't wearing hijab
Across the street from the Muslim pages that share content like the images above are pages that share these:
The obvious difference here is the pervasive juxtaposition of pop civilization and captions that espouse Islamic values. These memes utilize a variety of references that are relatively newer, revealing a younger audience than the Facebook moms in Douglas' commodity. The issue of aniconism is also ignored, indicating less adherence to traditional Islamic guidance on the employ of images.
One thing to notation is that none of these are making fun of Islam or its rules. The juxtaposition may be the core of the sense of humor but underneath it is a sincere belief in the values expressed. Bart Simpson writing "I volition tell(?) not talk during the khutbah" as a penalisation is funny because Bart is supposed to exist a Christian. Yet, Bart still represents a naughty kid and the Muslim idea that interrupting a khutbah is bad remains unaltered. Information technology'due south always the cultural reference that's flipped on its heel, never religion.
Some of the memes share a common theme, like reactions to Islamophobia:
Cultural dissonance:
Struggles of fasting:
Some reveal a dearest of Disney characters and their relationships, but not before sloppily retconning them into Muslims with beards and hijabs (Bonus: a makeup artist using her hijab to plow into Disney princesses):
And others use celebrities to promote religious principles:
Oh, and don't forget the ubiquitous Minions (Bonus: an original comic nigh Muslim Minions):
These could merely have been created by Muslims who have been deeply immersed in Western civilization and still hold strong to their faith. They are literate in both the language and expectations of their religion and the famous people and characters that surround them.
They alter the world to suit themselves. More than conservative Muslims who believe in the traditional Islamic way of life tend to avoid the influences of western culture, but those in bear upon with Western civilisation have the inventiveness to imagine how both can work together in harmony. With just a tweak in Photoshop, they can convert the entire cast of Furious 7 or edit Aladdin and Jasmine's loving relationship into a halal ane. These ii worlds might be at odds with each other, but they can just brand it work.
Double Violation
But does it work? The audition for these memes is a cross-section of people who care about beingness practiced Muslims but also appreciate popular civilization. If yous stand on any side of that demographic, they might feel very strange to you. If you're more of a conservative Muslim you might discover crime to associating Islam with these otherwise problematic references. You can pretend Leo DiCaprio is Muslim, but tin you really forget his functioning in The Wolf of Wall Street? If you're non very religious or not-Muslim, it all just seems similar a perverse appropriation of pop culture to fit the Islamic platonic. Is it okay to draw a hijab over a Disney princess? On either side something just doesn't seem right.
The benign violation theory may explicate why information technology feels then uncanny. To reiterate the theory, for a state of affairs to exist humorous, it must be benign and violate expectations. The higher up memes certainly violate the expectation that pop culture and Islam don't or shouldn't mix together. But are they benign? If you lot're not a member of that small-scale demographic you might be able to empathize with them anyhow and notice the humor. Only you might also sympathize with the other side of that demographic and find information technology an barb to religion and pop culture. It feels like a double violation.
And that's okay
This subsection of the Muslim customs is in a unique position of cultural dissonance. A peachy example is the 2d-generation immigrants in American Muslim communities. In Children of Clearing, Carola Suárez-Orozco and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco describe the three unlike types of social identities that immigrant children adopt:
…"ethnic flight" (abandoning their ain ethnic grouping and mimicking the dominant group), "adversarial identities" (constructing identity in opposition to the mainstream civilization and its institutions), and "transcultural [bicultural] identities" (developing competence to role in both cultures).
These detail Muslim immigrants likely find themselves falling into the latter category with "transcultural identities." Information technology's non an easy matter to deal with, as both cultural identities volition inevitably disharmonism with one another. These weird memes are just a symptom of that. They say "I'm hip enough to hang out with, but give me a sec I gotta pray Asr first."
That isn't to say that Muslim-Americans are the just affected group. Western culture is omnipresent throughout the earth, and Muslim countries are no exception.
The Muslim community hasn't been the well-nigh fortunate when it comes to its public image in the media. These memes reveal a more humorous side of young Muslims that many non-Muslims may non have always seen before. They show that cultural barriers are much more than fluid than nosotros think they are, and that the Internet can bring together Muslims but likewise equally Facebook moms.
Perhaps the initial uncanny feeling nosotros get is just a gut realization that Muslims are as similar to not-Muslims equally they are dissimilar.
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Source: https://www.wired.com/2016/05/the-uncanny-world-of-muslim-memes/