Sounds of Fear: The Sonification of Middle Easterners and Muslims in Hollywood Film, 1950-The Present

Sounds of Islamophobia, 1990-The Present

It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.

Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage: Why So Many Muslims Deeply Resent the West, and Why Their Bitterness Will Not easily be Mollified,” The Atlantic, September, 1990.

 
Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.
 
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1996.

 

There is an easy path and a hard path. The easy path is to view Islam and Islamic revivalism as a threat—to posit a global Pan-Islamic threat, monolithic in nature, a historic enemy whose faith and agenda are diametrically opposed to that of the West. This attitude leads to support for secular regimes at almost any cost (regardless of how repressive) rather than risk an Islamically oriented government’s coming to power. The more difficult path is to move beyond facile stereotypes and readymade images and answers…The challenge today is to appreciate the diversity of Islamic actors and conflicts, and thus to respond to specific events and situations with informed, reasoned responses rather than predetermined presumptions and reactions.
 
John Esposito, Islam and the West: A Clash of Civilizations? 1999.

 
 
In September of 1990 The Atlantic published “The Roots of Muslim Rage: Why so many Muslims deeply resent the West, and why their bitterness will not easily be mollified,” by Bernard Lewis, a historian of the Middle East, and renowned Orientalist. Lewis’s claim that the West was experiencing a civilizational conflict with the Muslim Middle East would go on to influence countless others with whom this idea resonated, including Samuel P. Huntington who brought the expression “clash of civilizations” to the forefront of American political discourse, first with his widely discussed article, “The Clash of Civilizations?” published in Foreign Affairs in 1993, and later with the 1996 release of his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. This concept of a civilizational conflict between a Christian West and a Muslim Middle East, a conflict influenced predominantly by the insurmountable differences between Muslims and non-Muslims, began to find expression in Hollywood film in the late 1990s, but would come to utterly dominate the ideological communication of films produced after 2001, when Lewis’s and Huntington’s theories gained new recognition and popularity among an American population traumatized by the events of 9/11. This dichotomous conceptualization of a Muslim Middle East and Christian West placed paramount importance on Islam as the ultimate defining difference between Us and Them. Islam was responsible for the inability of Muslims to sustain democratic governmental systems.[1] Islam was responsible for inciting Muslims to violence.[2] Islam was responsible for making Muslims hate non-Muslims.[3] And Islam was responsible for instigating a Muslim holy war against the non-Muslim West.[4]

At the same time that conceptualizations of the Middle East were narrowing to reductive dichotomies between a Muslim Other and a non-Muslim Us, the multiculturalism movement of the 1990s was in full swing, and, as evidenced above, critics of Orientalist and Islamophobic theorizing, such as John Esposito and Edward Said, were publishing works that opposed such reductive and damaging rhetoric. Multiculturalism called for a challenge to the dominance of Eurocentric and patriarchal ideologies and influenced multiple facets of American society, including education, popular culture and media, but it was not until after 9/11 that the movement’s influence reached Hollywood representations of the Middle East. For most of the 1990s filmic representations of Middle Easterners follow the patterns that were established in the 1980s. 1990s films dealing with the Middle East and its peoples are predominantly action thrillers about generic Arab terrorists who, for unspecified reasons, terrorize the American public by attacking innocent civilians and attempting to instigate worldwide nuclear war, or inflict significant damage to the U.S. using weapons of mass destruction. Toward the end of the 1990s filmmakers began to respond to increasing calls for a more evenhanded treatment of Middle Easterners in American media.

Filmmakers’ attempts to create more complex and balanced portrayals of Middle Easterners and Muslims changed the norms of representation after 9/11, but ultimately fail to effectively eliminate harmful anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes from American film.[5] What has resulted instead are filmic expressions of a curious amalgamation of reductive Islamophobic attitudes toward the Middle East, and the Multiculturalist concern with stereotypical representations of Middle Easterners. A new set of representation norms has been established, which on the surface seems like the product of a successful move away from the rampant anti-Arab racism of decades past, but ultimately serves only to perpetuate old stereotypes dressed up in the new and improved costumes of multiculturalism. Multidimensional terrorists and what has come to be referred to as the “good Muslim” characters fail to combat the deep-seated animosity toward, and suspicion of, Middle Easterners and Muslims still being communicated via various media and scholarly literature, as evidenced in the quotes above. Despite the illusion of having moved beyond anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia, films continue to present predictable, though updated, portrayals of Middle Easterners and Muslims within restrictive frameworks of violence.

Beginning in the 1990s efforts in Hollywood to create realistic representations became efforts to create hyperrealism, representations so realistic that the distinction between representation and reality is eliminated. Hyperreality in film is achieved both visually and sonically. In the second half of the 1990s sound design began to more closely resemble what it is today. Traditional standards in film sound were abandoned as sound designers followed in the footsteps of 1980s pioneers such as Walter Murch, who blurred the lines between musical score, foley, (an industry term for sound effects) and dialogue. Soundscapes grew richer and more detailed, as made possible by advances in sound recording, editing and delivery technologies. Cinematic hyperrealism dramatically influenced sonic portrayals of Middle Easterners, Muslims and Islam in popular American film. The sounds of the adhan and Middle Eastern languages have been appropriated and transformed into rhetorical tools used on the media front of the War on Terror. The adhan and Islamic language are frequently used to sonically indicate the motivation behind the violence of Muslim terrorists. During torture and terrorism scenes the perpetrators often exclaim “Allahu akbar!” just before detonating bombs, or pray in Arabic while torturing American prisoners. The adhan, along with ominous music, accompanies these scenes, compounding the Islamophobic messages being communicated by the verbalization of the characters’ Islamic identities at the moment of violence. Through routine accompaniment of the adhan with sounds of combat, including gunfire, explosions, and vehicle and aircraft motors, Islam is not only associated with violence but with war. After the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003 the adhan was absorbed into what J. Martin Doughtry has termed “the belliphonic,” or “the spectrum of sounds produced by armed combat,” as well as the “sonic material that is less directly or conventionally associated with warfare,” including “recorded devotional chants.”[6]

The adhan has been displaced from the minaret, stripped of its practical use as a call to Muslims to pray, and assigned the new task of alerting audiences to the presence of enemies or forthcoming danger, and incriminating Islam in the incitement of torture and terrorism. Often the adhan is broken up into melodic phrases subsumed by a film’s musical score, so that the voice of the muezzin becomes indistinguishable from the score’s Orientalist vocalizations. Sometimes these melodic phrases are simply inserted into the score during moments of particular tension, as a means of creating an atmosphere of mystery, danger, despair, and exoticism. In these moments it is impossible for an untrained ear to determine if the sound is of the muezzin’s voice, or unrelated vocalization, frequently described in production sound libraries as “vocal wailing,” or “vocal chants.”[7] Occasionally the adhan is used as it was in earlier decades to sonically place the scene in geographic space, thereby increasing the so-called authenticity of the films. However, the overwhelming use of the adhan to communicate Islamophobic ideology has redefined the role of the adhan within Hollywood soundscapes, making its occasional use as sonic geographic identifier insignificant. The fact remains that, since 9/11, within filmic soundscapes, the adhan has been disestablished as a simple facet of normal Islamic life, and reassigned an ideological meaning and rhetorical use, both of which demonize the faith, and dehumanize the faithful, of which the adhan has become a sonic symbol.


Sounds of Muslim Terrorism

In the 1990s, the 1991 Gulf War and its aftermath, and various terrorist attacks—including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia—impacted popular discourse and Hollywood representations of Middle Easterners and Muslims in predictable ways. The actions of Muslim extremists were used by Bernard Lewis and his ilk, as well as filmmakers as evidence of an innate bellicosity in all Muslims. As the decade progressed greater attention was paid in film to Islam, expressed in Islamophobic dialogue, the explicit Muslim identity of the villains, and the use of the adhan and prayer to create negative sonic associations.

Delta Force 3: The Killing Game (1991) and True Lies (1994) both feature terrorists who identify themselves as Muslim, and whose requests for the withdrawal of American forces from the Arab world and the Persian Gulf area, respectively, are in reference to the Gulf War and subsequent U.S. involvement in the region. These terrorists have political aims, but seem to be guided by their Islamic faith, as evidenced by moments like those in Delta Force when suicide bombers yell, “In the name of Allah!” and “Allahu akbar!” at the moment of detonation. Some films produced in the later 1990s attributed terrorists’ motivations solely to their Islamic faith. In Executive Decision (1996) for instance, Al-Tha’r, a terrorist who hijacks a plane full of Americans with the intent of using it to detonate a bomb containing nerve gas tells his colleague that their duty as “soldiers of Islam” is to “deliver the vengeance of Allah into the belly of the infidel.”[8] In Rules of Engagement (2000) Islam is presented within a violent context in which it has been used to instigate lethal attacks against American civilians and military personnel in Yemen. As in Executive Decision, Muslims are purported to believe that, “to kill Americans and their allies—both civil and military—is (the) duty of every Muslim who is able.”[9]

The dialogue from Executive Decision and Rules of Engagement constitute filmic expression of the kind of conceptualizations of Islam and of Muslim terrorists that was being promoted by scholars such as Bernard Lewis and Samuel P. Huntington. In “The Roots of Muslim Rage” Lewis states that “Muslim radicals” believe their duty as Muslims is to wage a holy war against the “infidel enemy,” as is the doctrine of “classical Islam,” to which he claims “many Muslims are beginning to return.”[10] In this way these films and others like them reinforce the Islamophobic ideologies proposed by Lewis and Huntington.

The Siege (1998) also utilizes the “holy war” trope in its depiction of terrorism. The film opens with what appears to be news footage that would have elicited memories of the Khobar Towers bombing, though within the filmic world it is meant to represent a fictional bombing attributed to a Muslim cleric, Sheikh Ahmed bin Talal. This footage sets the stage for the film’s exploration of the Muslim threat to the U.S. The Siege is about Samir, a Palestinian immigrant who, along with other generic Arab terrorists, launches a series of bombings in New York City for reasons that are not clear until the end of the film when Samir reveals his true identity to Sharon, his bewildered CIA handler and lover. After performing ablutions, he dons a suicide vest and chastises her for having operated under the impression that he could be swayed by money when really, he argues, it is not money that is powerful but belief, the implication being that his Islamic faith is his primary motivation in life, and what has led him to this moment. In this light the introductory reference to the unrelated Khobar Towers bombing makes sense. It is clear at this point that Islam is the common thread linking both the real-life Khobar Towers bombing and its fictionalized version with the bombings in New York City. The real Khobar Towers bombing and its fictionalization, along with the bombings of New York City and Samir’s plan to perform a suicide bombing are all united by the common element of Islam. Islam then is in direct conflict with the West, specifically the U.S., resulting again in a reinforcement of Lewis’s and Huntington’s theory of a clash of civilizations.

In the Gulf War film, Three Kings (1999), portrayals of Iraqi civilians are surprisingly nuanced. The prevailing trend in the early 1990s was essentially an extension of 1980s patterns of representation. Middle Easterners were depicted as nameless background crowds, or as one-dimensional terrorists and thugs. In the final years of the decade filmmakers began to respond to multiculturalists’ calls for the elimination of racist stereotypes and reductive representations in film and television. Three Kings is particularly representative of such efforts to challenge negative representations, most likely because Jack Shaheen was intimately involved in the production process.[11] It should come as no surprise then that he placed Three Kings on his “Best List,” for helping to “erase damaging stereotypes,” and “humanizing a people who for too long have been projected as caricatures.”[12]

Contrary to Shaheen’s interpretation of the film, Evelyn Alsultany and Tim Jon Semmerling both argue that despite efforts to present relatable Iraqi characters, Three Kings actually perpetuates the very stereotypes its creators set out to challenge.[13] Semmerling takes issue with Shaheen’s classification of Three Kings as an antiwar film, arguing that it is actually a pro-war film in its promotion of American militarism.[14] He also argues that the seemingly favorable depiction of Arabs falls short of a true challenge to anti-Arab stereotypes, and that the film actually perpetuates stereotypes of Arabs as senselessly violent.

Alsultany acknowledges the efforts made to humanize Arabs, but argues that the success of these efforts are limited. She discusses the representations of Arabs in Three Kings in the context of a post-9/11 representational standard, influenced by the multiculturalism movement of the 1990s, and characterized by the illusion of having established a post-racial society. Three Kings and The Siege, she states, are two early examples of this standard.[15] Both films utilize what she terms simplified complex representations, or SCRs, which are devices used by writers, producers and directors to create the impression that representations of Arabs and Muslims are complex.[16] These devices, of which there are seven, include the insertion of a patriotic Muslim and/or Arab-American, or a “good Muslim/Arab” character, and the humanization of the terrorist.[17] Three Kings, and The Siege both employ these two devices in their efforts to humanize the enemy and highlight the existence of good Muslims and good Arabs.

A similar discrepancy between interpretations is found in analyses of The Siege. Jack Shaheen criticizes The Siege for demonizing Arabs and Muslims, arguing that the film’s depictions of Arab immigrants as terrorists, and the association of Islam with terrorism could promote anti-Arab/Muslim hatred.[18] He takes particular issue with the portrayal of Arab immigrants in the U.S. as dangerous and violent, which implies that Arab-Americans should be met with some level of apprehension. Melanie McAlister on the other hand applauds the film for having produced unusually nuanced portrayals of Arab-Americans and Arab terrorists. She argues that the character Frank Haddad, an Arab-American FBI agent, as well as the film’s “fond” exploration of the Arab community in Brooklyn, challenge anti-Arab racism and dichotomous thinking about a Muslim Middle East vs. a non-Muslim West by presenting positive representations of Arabs and Arab spaces in the U.S..[19] Frank Haddad works for the FBI to eliminate Muslim terrorism in New York City. He is religious, but not too religious. When his son is rounded up and detained in the makeshift internment camp in New York City after the overzealous Major General Devereaux declares martial law, and calls for the detention of all Arab males of fighting age, Haddad puts aside his anger and indignation to continue working to stop the terrorists. Samir is a multidimensional character, and his—and other terrorists’—motivations, McAlister argues, are sympathetically portrayed.[20] Samir is humanized in moments when he solemnly describes his experiences as a displaced Palestinian, expresses his vulnerability, and behaves affectionately with Sharon. Based on McAlister’s approval of Frank Haddad and the treatment of Samir it would seem she has responded to the good Muslim/Arab and humanized terrorist SCRs in the exact way the filmmakers intended: reading them as progress toward a more evenhanded treatment of minority groups in Hollywood film.

The problem with SCRs, Alsultany argues, is that the illusion of post-racism they produce is just that, an illusion. As good Muslim/Arab characters were popping up in post-9/11 television and film, the civil liberties of Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans were being curtailed. The Patriot Act essentially legalized the systematic persecution of Middle Easterners and Muslims, enabling the surveillance, registration, detention, deportation, and incarceration of members of these groups based on little else than their ethnic and religious identities.[21] Discrimination and hate crimes against Middle Easterners, Muslims, and people who were mistakenly identified as Middle Eastern or Muslim rose in the years after 9/11, and in recent years have risen again.[22] Despite Hollywood’s efforts to create balanced portrayals of Middle Easterners and Muslims, popular film continues to present these groups within restrictive contexts in which they can only be good if they sacrifice their ethnic and religious identities in service of American interests, and terrorists are always, without fail, both Middle Eastern and Muslim, promoting a conceptualization of terrorism as somehow endemic to Middle Eastern and Islamic culture.

What Shaheen, McAlister, Alsultany and Semmerling all, likely unconsciously, fail to contend with in their analyses of The Siege and Three Kings is the use of sound. Sound in The Siege is used to draw unbridgeable boundaries between Arab spaces and non-Arab spaces—thereby othering the Arabs residing there—to indicate the presence of Muslims in New York City as dangerous, and to associate Islam with violence and terrorism. Sound in Three Kings is used in a totally different manner. Attending to the role of sound in these two films adds a significant dimension to the analysis of the ideological word being done in each film, especially as it pertains to the communication of attitudes toward Islam. The sound design of The Siege communicates very clear suspicion of and even disdain for Islam. In a 4.5-minute sound sequence at the beginning of the film a series of Islamophobic messages are communicated sonically. The scene begins with a bird’s eye view of a lone Mercedes driving through desert dunes as sinister-sounding Orientalist music plays. Sheikh Ahmed bin Talal, the man who the audience has just learned is responsible for the bombing of U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia, is sitting in the back seat. As the music continues the car approaches a small, run-down compound surrounded by goats. Two men dressed in thawbs are revealed to the audience—but not the passengers—to be part of a military mission to capture Talal. Military communications are superimposed over the quieted music, “Eagle Eye, this is Sand Leader, the sheikh is in our custody.” The two men drag Talal out of the car and put a hood over his head. The car explodes and the sound of Talal praying in Arabic is introduced as the scene fades out and in to the image of Talal in a dark, earthen cell, sitting and praying quietly as an American major general, played by Bruce Willis, looks at him with disdain. Talal’s prayers fade out and the music picks up as the adhan is introduced and the scene fades out and in to the image of men and boys praying, “Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar,” in what appears to be a private home, and then in a mosque. The music grows more ominous as the sound of the adhan is amplified and the scene cuts to the image of the muezzin in the minaret. The camera pans out and it is revealed that the mosque is not in the Middle East but in New York City. The adhan slowly fades out. The music quiets and then fades out as the camera moves through the city to finally rest safely in the FBI field office. 

The skillful blending of ominous music with Orientalist vocals sonically marks the Middle Eastern space in the first part of the sequence as not only utterly foreign, but also dangerous. The desert landscape and the sheikh who inhabits it are simultaneously exotic and threatening. The danger is sonically confirmed by the sounds of the gunfire and exploding car. Talal’s prayers underscore his villainy. He is a dangerous man, a “radical fundamentalist” whose faith, represented by his prayer beads, the star and crescent ring on his finger, and his praying, underscores his terroristic identity. The blending of Talal’s voice with the music gives his prayers the sonic quality of a vocal accompaniment to the ominous music. As Talal’s praying fades out and the adhan is introduced, the sound of the muezzin’s voice takes on this same quality. The transformation of the sounds of prayer and the adhan into a musical element of dramatic film scores strips the acts of praying, and calling the faithful to prayer, of their practical use, and assigns to them the ideologically performative task of sonically communicating meanings that transcend their original significance. As the camera pulls back from the muezzin revealing the location of the mosque to be in New York City, the sound of the adhan, and the ominous music it has become a part of, sonically marks the existence of Muslims in New York City as a dangerous and sinister presence. The color palette of the scene is cool and dark shades of blues and greys, combining a visual sense of discomfort to the sonic sense of danger. The same aural elements used to sonically indicate danger in the desert are used here to indicate a specifically Islamic danger in the U.S. The scene cuts away from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and the camera moves through the city as the muezzin’s voice and the music fade. The scene cuts to the interior of the FBI field office and the sounds of quiet chatter and telephones ringing create a sense of safety. The audience has been transported from the dangerous and foreign Arab/Muslim space in Brooklyn to the comfortably familiar space in the office. This transportation is performed both by camera work and the sounds. The adhan sonically marks the Arab neighborhood in Brooklyn as dangerous. The absence of the adhan sonically marks the FBI field office as safe.

The adhan and Orientalist vocals are used throughout The Siege to sonically indicate danger and demarcate Arab spaces. McAlister claims that The Siege explores Brooklyn’s Arab community “fondly and in some detail: the Arab markets and coffee shops in Brooklyn, the streets with signs in Arabic, the mosques and community centers.”[23] It is true that Arab markets, coffee shops and Arabic signs can be seen in the two scenes that takes place in the Arab community. The problem with McAlister’s classification of the community’s portrayal as fond is that the sounds that accompany these scenes communicate distrust of the Arab community, and hostility toward Islam. Suspenseful music begins immediately as the audience is introduced to the Arab community in Brooklyn for the second time. The FBI covertly pursues an Arab man through this community as the music grows more and more suspenseful until suddenly the man realizes he is being followed and begins to run. The covert operation turns into a dramatic chase scene through alleys and abandoned lots until the man is shoved into a van and spirited away by what turns out to be the CIA. Even without the suspenseful music this scene is not particularly genial. The context of this scene does not allow for an exploration of Arab-American life. There are no families or couples out enjoying each other, sharing meals, or walking hand in hand. Most of the people walking along the streets are young men and most of them are either frowning or looking quite stoic. The scene is dark, as is the mood, and within the context of this scene, and the film in general, the Arab community matters only for the fact that it is harboring terrorists.

Sound in The Siege sonically separates Arabs and Muslims from everyone else. Music, prayer and the adhan are used to judge the presence of Arabs and Muslims in New York City as a danger to Americans, as though to be “American” precludes the practice of Islam or the origination in the Arab countries. Consequently, the ideological work performed by the sounds is in direct conflict with any efforts that may have been made to present positive portrayals of Arab-American Muslims. In Three Kings sound is used in a completely different manner. The sounds of Muslims praying are projected softly, within a small space shared by Muslim Iraqis and American soldiers. An American, Christian soldier prays with the Iraqis. Another American soldier talks with two Iraqi men about Islamic burial rituals and the afterlife. The color palette of the scene is warm oranges, yellows and browns. The space is visually and sonically safe and comforting. In Three Kings sound is used to unite the Iraqi Muslims with the American soldiers. Sound is not used to disparage Islam or to separate Us from Them. Unfortunately, The Siege would turn out to have been foreshadowing the kinds of film that would proliferate after 9/11 rather than Three Kings. The use of Islamic sounds of praying and the adhan would follow patterns established in The Siege, projected as a means of differentiating rather than uniting, indicating danger rather than comfort, and underscoring war, terrorism, and violence rather than safety.


Sounds of 9/11

PASS devices, or personal alert safety system devices, are worn by firefighters, and are designed to emit a 95 decibel alarm if it does not detect movement for more than 30 seconds. The sound of the high pitched beeping of a PASS device indicates that a firefighter has been injured or otherwise incapacitated, and his or her fellow firefighters need to attend to the situation immediately. On September 11, 2001, after the World Trade Center towers collapsed in a colossal heap of steel, cement and glass, emergency workers on the scene were struck by the “very eerie kind of quiet” that was punctuated by the high pitched beeping of hundreds of PASS alarms.[24] A firefighter on scene said, “There were so many going off. It was um…it was disturbing.”[25] Blogger Mike LaMonica wrote a short 10th anniversary tribute to the firefighters at Ground Zero titled, “Ten years later, can you still hear the beeping?”[26] Ed Brouwer, a Canadian firefighter who was not present at Ground Zero writes this of his experience as a distant observer of the collapse of the towers:

Many people have stated that the images of 9-11 have been ingrained into their minds. For me, the memory of that day is a sound rather than an image which, even today, arrests my attention. That sound was heard during a very short video clip showing a doctor hiding behind a parked vehicle as the south tower collapsed. As the rumbling subsided, and the thick dust began to settle, the doctor stood up and said something about helping others, and then there was a complete and eerie silence. Then I heard it—the high-pitched alarm of a Personal Alert Safety System (PASS) device. Not one, but 10, then 20 and then, it seemed, hundreds. I feel no shame in telling you that I broke into tears.[27]

 
News anchors and witnesses described the sounds of the plane crashing into the first tower as “a big bang,”  “a tremendous boom,” and “a gigantic sonic boom”[28] The collapse of the first tower was described in a Guardian article featuring eyewitness accounts as, “a deadly, horrible thud—punctured by screams on the street: ‘Holy shit—it’s gone!’” while the second tower’s collapse is described variously as sounding like, “a rolling thunder,” and collapsing  “almost quietly until hitting the ground. There it erupted, and blind panic was back.”[29] Emergency vehicles “screamed  and screeched past.”[30] Geoff deLesseps, who was in his 80th floor office in the World Trade Center when the first plane hit, describes his experience: “Suddenly in my office I heard a great whooshing, a big sound of air being sucked…There was a violent eruption and the building was rumbling.”[31] According to the article people on the streets were hypersensitive to sound, “Even the smallest sound now startled them, and certainly the noise of helicopters and military planes overhead…”[32] At Ground Zero “a ghostly silence was pierced only by the screams of sirens, the shouts of firemen and paramedics upon finding any trace of survival and the weary plod of rescue workers changing their grisly shifts.”[33]

It is not a stretch to say that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 created lasting impressions on those who witnessed it, whether up close or via footage of the incidents. Every year on September 11 all of the major news corporations publish memorial pieces, bloggers like Mike LaMonica write commemorative posts, and people take to social media to remind themselves and their followers that they will “never forget.” It would seem safe to assume that the collective experience of 9/11 and the lasting sonic impression it created would influence the sound design of films produced after that day. This is true of at least one film, World Trade Center (2006). The sound design of World Trade Center (2006) is simple, direct and to the point. Dramatic music elicits fear when the planes hit the towers, sorrow as the towers fall, despair when the film’s heroes are trapped under the rubble, and hope when they are found and rescued. Emergency vehicle sirens, people screaming, multiple explosions and the deafening, thunderous collapse of the first tower make up the soundscape of the 9/11 attacks as they occurred in reality, and as they were depicted in World Trade Center. In one scene the persistent screeching of hundreds of PASS devices underscores the devastation of the emergency workers trapped in the collapsed buildings, a nod to those for whom the PASS alarms came to sonically symbolize both the devastation of the attacks and the bravery of the emergency service providers.


Sounds of Islamophobia

Despite what seems like an easy series of dots to connect, films produced after 9/11 do not demonstrate a significant influence of 9/11 on sound design. The majority of Hollywood films dealing with the Middle East produced after 9/11 are not about 9/11. They are about the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These wars, rather than 9/11 have had a remarkable effect on the sound design—specifically the use of Islamic sounds and Middle Eastern languages—in the ever growing collection of War on Terror films, a genre that for obvious reasons emerged in the years after 9/11 and, almost two decades later is only now beginning to fall out of vogue.

Just as the sound of the PASS alarms within the filmic soundscape of World Trade Center took on a meaning and communicative task beyond its intended use, so too did the sound of the adhan as the War on Terror came under way and Hollywood took to the studios to create its filmic representations. The result of the post-9/11 standard of cinematic hyperrealism, and the increase in Islamophobic attitudes toward Muslims and Islam, has been the proliferation of ideologically charged sonic representations of war and Islam, in which Islam is represented by the appropriated sounds of the adhan and Islamic language, and understood in terms of its communicative role during wartime to sonically signal danger and Muslim violence. The adhan has become an element of J. Martin Daughtry’s belliphonic. According to Daughtry many of the American soldiers in Iraq came to identify the adhan with a hostile Muslim enemy. The adhan was regarded by these soldiers as a, “sinister signal of Islamic aggression and unbridgeable cultural difference,” and represented a sonic production of Islamic spaces that were “inherently hostile to the troops and their mission.”[34] Soldiers’ appraisal of the adhan as a sound associated with the Iraq War has had a profound influence on the sound design of war films like Hurt Locker (2008), Green Zone (2010), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), and American Sniper (2014), so much so that the sonic framing of the adhan as an indication of Muslim aggression has become an industry standard in the representation of war in Middle Eastern spaces. This sonic framework has transcended war film and is now standard practice in other genres that deal with Middle Easterners and Middle Eastern spaces as well. The Kingdom (2007), an action thriller, and Body of Lies (2008) an espionage, action thriller, use Islamic sounds just as they are used in the war films mentioned above.

Often the adhan is projected during scenes in which Muslims are making or preparing to detonate bombs, as in Zero Dark Thirty. In American Sniper and The Hurt Locker the adhan opens the films along with other sounds of urban warfare including the mechanical clicking of weapons, the clanking and rumbling of a tank, the crunch of gravel beneath the wheels of a counter-IED robot, and screaming. In Body of Lies Islamic prayers accompany the screaming of the American hero being tortured by Muslim terrorists. Islam is associated with torture and violence against Americans. In another scene the adhan is projected along with solemn music as the camera pans over a literal wasteland filled with refuse, wild dogs, and the discarded corpse of a man who has just been murdered by Muslim terrorists. Two young boys stand amidst the garbage staring nonchalantly at the body, utterly unmoved by his presence, and exhibiting no signs of feeling compelled to do something about it. In this scene the adhan creates a sonic association of Islam with physical and moral decay. In A Mighty Heart (2007), a drama about the kidnapping and murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, the adhan is accompanied by solemn music and projected as Pearl’s wife worries about the disappearance of her husband. She is asked if the interview subject he was last known to have been meeting with, the religious leader, Sheikh Gilani, knew he was Jewish. Islam in this case is associated with Muslim violence, and antisemitism. War Dogs (2016), a dark comedy about two hapless arms dealers, associates Islam with corruption in a scene in which the adhan is heard while the protagonists secure the release of their shipment of Berettas from Jordanian customs through bribery. In many of these scenes the adhan is projected as a non-diegetic sound. The source of the adhan is unseen and in the case of American Sniper and Hurt Locker a realistic improbability. Both of these films open with the adhan being projected in cities that have been evacuated or, in the case of Hurt Locker, being evacuated. In an evacuated city there would presumably be no one available to start and stop the recordings of the adhan in the mosque, and any muezzin would be long gone. In these instances, the adhan is used purely as a means of creating tension and communicating danger.

The use of Middle Eastern languages remains the same as its use in previous decades in its continued lack of regular translation, its delivery by villains and its accompaniment by ominous music. In Iron Man (2008) for instance the Arab terrorists who kidnap Tony Stark burst into his cave cell and speak to him in Arabic as ominous music plays. The audience is only made privy to their meaning through an interpreter. At times the terrorists’ dialogue is not translated at all. This use of Middle Eastern language continues to be typical of films that feature Middle Eastern terrorists or enemies regardless of genre. Since 9/11 a new sonic phenomenon involving Middle Eastern languages has occurred, in its increasingly frequent use as a noise, indicative of danger, rather than as a means of dialogic communication. In this way Middle Easterners have become noise-makers rather than individuals with intelligible voices who are capable of communicating dialogically. Argo (2012), Green Zone, and American Sniper are representative examples of this transformation of Middle Eastern languages, Farsi and Arabic in particular. Argo opens to a scene of Iranian students protesting outside the American embassy in Teheran. The sound of their chanting is so loud it can be heard by the people inside the embassy, who are visibly shaken by the sound. The audience does not know what they are chanting however, because it is not translated, and even when the protesters break into the embassy and begin shouting at embassy employees the audience is still left in the dark as to what they are shouting about. The shouts and chanting of the protesters are raised to such a pitch that eventually the ability to discern syllabic breaks is eliminated and the protesters voices are reduced to a cacophony​, one that communicates danger and elicits fear. The same sonic phenomenon occurs in Green Zone and American Sniper. Much of Green Zone consists of street scenes in which hordes of Iraqis shout unintelligibly, their voices blending together and losing all dialogic quality. In American Sniper Middle Eastern voices are relegated to scenes in which terrorists shout in Arabic while engaging in violence against Americans, torturing children, mobbing American military tanks, or during scenes in which Arab civilians scream unintelligibly in terror as American marines break into their homes and interrogate them. There are no scenes in which Arabic-speakers converse at a normal volume about things other than violence. As in Argo, the Middle Easterners in Green Zone and American Sniper become a clamorous mass of sounds rather than individuals with communicative capabilities beyond the elicitation of apprehension and fear.

In an exceptional observation of the use of sound in Hollywood representations of Middle Easterners and Muslims, Corey Creekmur, a film studies scholar, calls for greater attention to what he has termed “aural Orientalism” in popular American film and television. Creekmur argues that just as the Middle East and its peoples have been reduced to a set of conventionalized visual stereotypes, Middle Eastern and Islamic aurality has been reduced to an unrepresentative and limited repertoire of sounds, used by contemporary filmmakers to represent Islam and the War on Terror. His attention to the use of the adhan and Middle Eastern languages in film and television as sonic indicators of danger is a welcomed addition to the current discourse on representations of Middle Easterners and Muslims, which lacks such attention to sound. Even so, Creekmur’s categorization of this kind of sonic representation as “aural Orientalism” fails to fully articulate the ideological forces at play.

As Creekmur rightly observes, the appropriation and utilization of Islamic and Middle Eastern sounds to represent the Middle East and Islam, and communicate Islamophobic and racist messages about them is indeed an Orientalist undertaking in so far as it is a mode of production of sonic “knowledge” about the “Oriental Other.” But the sonic phenomenon occurring in post-9/11 films, especially those dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and terrorism perpetrated by Middle Eastern Muslims, is representative of more than just Orientalism. Orientalism explains the activity of the appropriation and use of Islamic sounds in film, but it does not explain what exactly the sounds come to communicate, and what their communicative role implies about popular non-Muslim/Middle Eastern American attitudes and beliefs. The use of the adhan and Islamic language to slander Islam and Muslims is indicative of the conceptualization of terrorism as an inherently Muslim activity, of Islam as an inherently violent religion, antithetical to democratic modes of governance, and of Muslims as naturally inclined to turn to violence as a means of affecting change. In short, the standard use of Islamic sounds in popular American film today is indicative of the trend of Islamophobia that proliferated in the non-Muslim American public after 9/11.

The difference between the representations produced in the 1950s and those produced after 9/11 is evident of a shift in perception of Middle Easterners as an ethnic other to a religious other. In the 1950s-1980s at least, if not into the first half of the 1990s, Middle Easterners were presented within frameworks that placed greater significance on their ethnic and cultural differences over their religious differences. Middle Easterners looked different, they dressed, ate, travelled, lived and even loved differently. Their religious practices were usually left unexamined however save for the occasional prayer scene and diegetic projection of the adhan as a means of sonically locating the scene in geographic space. Even when greater opportunity to focus in on religious differences was made available by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict filmmakers still framed the conflict as one between a Jewish minority and a majority of Arab aggressors. This remained the case throughout the 1970s. In the 1980s and early 1990s greater attention was paid to Islam as a motivating force behind the actions of Middle Eastern terrorists, but still filmmakers were not preoccupied with creating communicative representations of Islam to the degree that they have been since 9/11. The post-9/11 increase in negative filmic representations of Islam, as evidenced by the establishment of new trends in sound design, is indicative of an increase in Islamophobia, not Orientalism. It follows that these new trends in sound design are not sonic forms of Orientalism, but sonic manifestations of the increase in Islamophobic attitudes among non-Muslim Americans after 9/11, and the subsequent predominance of the conceptualization of Middle Easterners as Muslim terrorists.



Conclusion: Sonic Repercussions

The constant use of the adhan, Islamic language and Middle Eastern speech to create sonic associations of Islam with violence, Muslim identity with terrorism and torture, and Middle Easterners with danger, has transformed the ideological meaning of these sounds for non-Muslim Americans, so that the fear they elicit within cinematic contexts has transcended theatre and television screens, and is now infecting real life in the U.S.. Attempts to project the adhan from mosques and universities have been met with intense opposition, and some are ultimately shut down. In 2015 Duke University announced plans to project the adhan from its chapel bell tower. The university backtracked on this decision however when its plans were met with, “a firestorm of controversy.”[35] In 2004 a mosque in a Michigan city petitioned to project the adhan, even though they were not legally obligated to, and was immediately met with scorn from non-Muslim residents, and considerable pushback from the community.[36] In both instances people opposed to the projection of the adhan expressed resentment against Muslims based on the illogical association of the Muslim students at Duke University, and Muslim congregants of the Michigan mosque, with the 9/11 terrorists and ISIS.[37]

Islamic and Middle Eastern language has also been marked by this kind of perceived linkage between speakers of Middle Eastern languages and Middle Eastern terrorists. Travelers of Middle Eastern descent have been removed from airplanes for speaking in Middle Eastern languages, or praying at the gate. Recall the story of the “Flying Imams,” which took place in 2006. Ten years later in 2016 Khairuldeen Makhzoomi was taken off a Southwest flight when a passenger overheard him say “Inshallah,” (an Arabic phrase meaning, God willing), and alerted a flight attendant. After being escorted off the plane by police officers an agent “asked him why he was speaking Arabic considering ‘today’s political climate.’”[38] According to a Southwest Airlines representative, Makhzoomi’s removal and interrogation was prompted by his “potentially threatening comments.”[39] In a reference book for pilots, Everything Explained For The Professional Pilot, a photographic caricature of a Muslim terrorist holding a Quran in one hand and a large knife in the other accompanies a small section called “Prohibition Against Carriage of Weapons.”[40] A text bubble by the man’s face says, “Allah is great…Life sucks!” It would seem the persistent use of Islamic language in film to sonically associate Muslims with danger has not only affected travelers but the way airline pilots are trained.

Almost two decades of systematically demonizing Muslims by relegating them to violent contexts, framing the non-Muslim public’s understanding of Muslims within restrictive binaries of “good” vs. “bad,” and constantly presenting Muslims in relation to terrorism, or some form of violence, has created conditions in which ideas like a Muslim registry and a Muslim ban resonate with a significant portion of the American population. During Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, the promise of a Muslim registration program and travel ban on Middle Eastern Muslims seemed to some like a frightening yet outrageous impossibility. But almost immediately after Trump won the election and was inaugurated, he and his cabinet issued not one but two executive orders that would effectively bar Muslims from immigrating to the U.S., the first of which severely hampered the movement of many U.S. citizens and green card holders on its first day in operation. The bans have been met with significant push back from various rights groups and a comfortingly large swathe of the American public.[41] But the bans and the general culture of Islamophobia that has been exacerbated since Trump’s campaign, have resulted in serious effects on the lives of people in the U.S. who are, or appear to be, Muslim.

The increase in Islamophobia since the Trump campaign is manifest in a rise in Islamophobic hate crimes targeting Muslims, or people who have had the misfortune of being perceived as Muslim by the criminal, and an increase in Islamophobic hate groups. The number of anti-Muslim hate groups tripled between 2015 and 2016 according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which cites Trump’s “incendiary rhetoric” as one of the factors that lead to this spike.[42] The FBI’s 2016 Hate Crime Statistics Report, an annual calculation of hate crime statistics, revealed a 67% increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2015, the highest it has been since the increase experienced after 9/11. The data on which the FBI’s report is based on should be taken with a grain of salt however. Given the difficulty usually involved in convincing authorities to investigate a crime as a hate crime, as evidenced by the frequent CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) updates regarding the organization’s attempts to do just that, not to mention the unknown number of incidences that have gone unreported, 67% is likely quite modest.
 
[1] Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage: Why So Many Muslims Deeply Resent the West, and Why TheirBitterness Will Not easily be Mollified,” The Atlantic, September, 1990., & Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1996).
[2] Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage: Why So Many Muslims Deeply Resent the West, and Why TheirBitterness Will Not easily be Mollified,” The Atlantic, September, 1990.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation After 9/11, (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 16.
[6] J. Martin Doughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3.
[8] Executive Decision directed by Stuart Baird, (1996; Warner Brothers).
[9] Ibid.
[10] Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage: Why So Many Muslims Deeply Resent the West, and Why Their Bitterness Will Not easily be Mollified,” The Atlantic, September, 1990.
[11] Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies A People, (Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press, 2009), 519.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Tim Jon Semmerling, “Evil”Arabs in American Popular Film: Orientalist Fear, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), & Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation After 9/11, (New York: New York University Press, 2012).
[14] Semmerling, 162.
[15] Alsultany, 11.
[16] Alsultany, 21.
[17] Alsultany identifies seven simplified complex representations: 1) Inserting a patriotic Arab or Muslim American character, 2) Portraying the discrimination of American Muslims and Arabs after 9/11 sympathetically, 3) Portraying Muslims as diverse in an effort to challenge the conflation of Muslim with Arab, 4) Flipping the enemy, or leading viewers to believe the Muslim terrorists are working alone and then revealing that they are actually working for a non-Muslim, American or European mastermind, 5) Humanizing the terrorist, by affording him or her screen time to express grievances and motivations, and engage in normal familial behavior, 6) Projecting images of a multicultural U.S. society by casting ethnically diverse actors, and 7) Fictionalizing the Middle Eastern or Muslim country being depicted.
[18] Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies A People, (Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press, 2009), 463.
[19] Melanie McAlister, Epic Encounters Culture, Media, & U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 262.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation After 9/11, (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 5.
[22] Katayoun Kishi, “Anti-Muslim assaults reach 9/11-era levels, FBI data show,” Pew Research Center, Nov. 21, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/21/anti-muslim-assaults-reach-911-era-levels-fbi-data-show/.
[23] Melanie McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, & U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 262.
[24] Lee Ielpi interview in 9/11: After the Towers Fell, directed by Ellen Harder, (2010; Towers Productions).
[25] Ibid.
[26] Mike LaMonica, “Ten Years Later, Can You Still Hear the Beeping?” Mike LaMonica’s Blog, (blog) Sep. 2, 2011 (8:24 a.m.), https://mikelamonica.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/ten-years-later-can-you-still-hear-the-beeping/.
[27] Ed Brouwer, “Trainers Corner: September 2011,” Firefighting in Canada, https://www.firefightingincanada.com/structural/trainers-corner-9611.
[28] Backflash971, “September 11th As It Happened: The Definitive Live News Montage,” YouTube video, 28:20, Oct. 5, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjXgbpkKnKo.
[29] Michael Ellison, Ed Vulliamy, & Jane Martinson, “We got down to the outside and it was an apocalypse,” The Guardian, Wednesday, 12, September, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/12/september11.usa20.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid.
[34] J. Martin Doughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 59.
[35] Stephanie Mulder, “Extremism at Home: Duke University’s Muslim call to prayer reversal was a victory for American intolerance,” US News, Jan. 21, 2015, https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/faith-matters/2015/01/21/dukes-muslim-call-to-prayer-reversal-was-a-victory-for-american-extremists.
[36] John Leland, “Tensions in a Michigan City Over Muslims’ Call to Prayer,” New York Times, May 5, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/05/us/tension-in-a-michigan-city-over-muslims-call-to-prayer.html.
[37] Mulder & Leland.
[38] Rachel Revesz, “Southwest Airlines kicks Muslim off a plane for saying ‘inshallah’, meaning ‘God willing’ in Arabic,” Independent, Oct. 5, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/muslim-passenger-southwest-airlines-khairuldeen-makhzoom-arabic-phone-uncle-baghdad-cair-statement-a7347311.html.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Richie Lengel, Everything Explained for The Professional Pilot, (Aviation Press, 2015), 308.
[41] Alan Taylor, “A Weekend of Protest Against Trump’s Immigration Ban,” The Atlantic, January 30, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/01/a-weekend-of-protest-against-trumps-immigration-ban/514953/.
[42] Mark Potok, “A Year in Hate and Extremism,” SPLC Intelligence Report, Feb. 15, 2017, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2017/year-hate-and-extremism. 

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