Harum Scarum: Middle Eastern Mythologies

Jack G. Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs demonstrates the ways in which mythological, Westernized assumptions about persons of Middle Eastern decent filter from Occidental political standpoints into popular culture.  The culturally misguided mythologies, unlike other racially biased suppositions, are allowed to continue on unchallenged due to political strains between the West and the Near East.  As Shaheen aptly comments towards the end of his documentary, the stereotype of the Arab is one that has endured centuries of sociopolitical change; however, unlike other caricatures of minority groups, the Arab is still used today in the same detrimental manner.  This sort of racialized sentiment towards person of the Middle East, as it is recycled and re-presented through Hollywood film, allows only for a miniscule, skewed representation of their culture, heritage, and belief.  Rather than offering a well rounded, contemporarily contextualized view of Middle Eastern culture, Hollywood constantly (re)presents the same stereotypes.  This repetitious, recycled racism informs Western conceptions of Middle Eastern identity which in turn controls the way we politically conceive of these people and their respective cultures.  Here Edward Said’s definition of what constitutes Orientalism proves particularly enlightening: “As much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West” (Said 5).  As Said illustrates, the ways in which we conceive of the Orient as a Western culture are completely dictates by the corpus of knowledge that we have produced concerning it.  The perceptions of the Middle East that present Arab persons as racial inferiors stem from a historical viewpoint found within Western cultures that views Middle Eastern societies as lesser.  When combined with what Shaheen coins as Islamophobia, the traditional notions that the Arab world is uncivilized allow and promote bigotry within Western cultures.  The video that follows, from Harum Scarum (1965), demonstrates the prevailing conceptualizations of Middle Eastern culture as seen from a Western viewpoint.  The lyrics and imagery evoke the same repetitious myths found within the films that Shaheen speaks to: