This post contains spoilers for Ms. Marvel. If you're not caught up just yet, check out our spoiler-free Ms. Marvel finale review.
Ms. Marvel’s first season finale has aired, which means we can finally talk about the series as whole, and how it did on bringing Marvel’s first ever Muslim superhero to life. While there were some pretty massive fumbles and questionable choices, altogether the series brought some welcome culture to an MCU that definitely needed it, and I’m thrilled to see where the character goes next.
Kamala Khan (Iman Velani)’s introduction to the MCU is a feat to be proud of, and it opens the door for so many more types of Muslim stories to be told in the world of superheroes. It introduced an audience of millions to essential Muslim rituals, like wudu — the ritual of cleansing your hands, arms, feet, and face three times before prayer — and the wedding ritual of saying you want to marry your partner three times. It also portrayed one of the biggest mass migrations in human history, The Partition of India, where nearly 7 million Muslims migrated from India to Pakistan, and gave the Marvel audience chances to learn about its effect on Pakistani families.
It was a thrill to watch as these things were given so much care and attention. From the various South Asian music overlaying the classic Marvel logo, to the art displayed in the end credits, Ms. Marvel is an undoubtedly authentic representation of Kamala Khan and her Pakistani origins. Of particular note, the episodes that took place in Pakistan and during Partition were beautifully crafted stories of motherhood and family that brought together generations and gave us rich explorations of a culture we’ve never seen up close in this universe. It was clear that the creative team behind Ms. Marvel wanted to ensure it kept the comic’s essential themes, and what made it stand out.
It’s especially awesome when you consider the only other major Muslim character we had before this was Phastos' (Brian Tyree Henry) husband, Ben (Haaz Sleiman), in Eternals. Even then, we only got a brief scene where the two spoke Arabic to one another. In Ms. Marvel, Urdu is spoken several times and the Arabic prayers in the Mosque gave audiences a chance to realize that Urdu and Arabic are two different languages, something that many people might not realize if they were to just see them written out or hear them spoken. If anything, Ms. Marvel does a fantastic job of educating audiences about the different cultures that are a part of Islam.
Unfortunately, not all of the attempts of representation were successful. With as many hits as this show had when it came to representation, it came with an almost equal amount of misses.
One of the biggest themes of the Ms. Marvel comics is an appreciation of your culture and faith, specifically Kamala’s appreciation of her Pakistani heritage and her identity and a Muslim in New Jersey. In the comics, when Kamala gets her shape-shifting powers for the very first time and transforms into Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) in the first issue, it makes her realize how problematic it was that she idolized Carol Danvers so much she literally wanted to become her. Through the journey of figuring out her powers and becoming comfortable with what she can accomplish on her own, she found strength in her own skin and her identity as a brown Muslim girl.
Because the show changed her power set, they had to work overtime to make sure the show addressed these very same themes.
For example, the series connects Kamala to a pre-Islamic folklore story of djinn, Also known as genies. With having no connection to this in the comics, the decision to bring in such an intrinsic part of Islamic culture is no doubt one of the ways the series sought to connect her to her faith. But, this inclusion of pre-Islamic folklore feels like a stretch, like the show had to go out of its way to get Kamala connected to her heritage, where the comics did it so easily. There’s a world of opportunities within the source material for Kamala’s identity as one of the most famous Inhumans in the comics and, while djinn make for good stories, this one could have been much better without them.
That said, the djinn storyline isn’t without its good moments, as we discover the bangle that activated her djinn abilities gave Kamala the power to travel back in time. It was pretty epic when we realized she was the one that helped her grandmother, Sana, find her way back to her father and on the train when she was a toddler during Partition in 1947. The magic that brought her to the past, while unexplained, was the best part of tying in djinn to the story. And though it was magic that connected them, the series is at its peak when it focuses on Kamala’s heritage and her family, like in the two episodes set in Pakistan, or episode three when Kamala’s brother, Aamir (Saagar Shaikh), gets married. Many of the familial moments in Ms. Marvel didn’t require any magic, and honestly, if the show focused on these components earlier on in the series, it might not have needed the djinn at all.
Western media tends to have an obsession over djinn, made famous in the folklore story “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” which originated in the early 600s CE and later became the inspiration for Disney’s Aladdin, which made them even more famous. Even though djinn are not the only type of Islamic and pre-Islamic folklore popular in Southwest Asian, North African and South Asian (SWANA) cultures, they’re the only ones that are consistently used in Western television and film. To attach Kamala to this repeated Islamic trope is honestly a little lazy, when there are so many other ways to connect her to her roots and faith. Had the show given Kamala more of an opportunity to explore her relationship with Nakia (Yasmeen Fletcher), the Mosque, and the troubles they faced from the Department of Damage Control (DODC), that would have been a far more natural and sensible approach to getting her closer to her culture. This approach also would have given Nakia a bigger role in the series, which comic fans definitely would have appreciated.
It could be said that Marvel is doing an honorable thing, by taking an Orientalist Marvel run, The ClanDestine, — a comic series that had awful stereotypical depictions of Islam — and turning it on its head so that it’s more true to the cultures it claimed to represent than its comic predecessor. But when you take the same characters and make them into villains, what good does it really do? Ms. Marvel was an opportunity to step away from the tropes that have been around the television industry for decades, but when the Djinn stories that continue to be told are centered around evil people that want to destroy our realm, it makes it look like Islam lore is filled with more evil than it is good.
Granted, there’s the argument that since Kamala is a djinn, as is her entire family, and technically then there are plenty of good djinn in the series, too. But the emphasis of Ms. Marvel’s depiction of djinn seems to be heavily focused on the evil ones, or at least they seem the most powerful (compared to Kamala). Sure, there are evil Djinn stories that many of us grew up with and are used to scare kids into doing the chores, but when pop culture is already filled with Muslim stories filled with negativity, it would have been nice to make all the djinn truly heroic, instead of putting such a heavy focus on Najma (Nirma Bucha) and her crew's nefarious intentions.
Then there’s the incredibly racist DODC agent, Agent Deaver (Alysia Reiner), which as a whole felt like an over-the-top and unnecessary storyline that Ms. Marvel tried to use and showcase the comic’s ability to address racism and Islamophobia. It wouldn’t be a Ms. Marvel adaptation if the show didn’t tackle these themes, as it’s a pillar of the original material. What’s off-putting is the show’s blatant approach to creating a character that had no type of personality other than racism.
Multiple times in the comics, Kamala has to deal with organizations or people that look down upon her or her family because of their Pakistani heritage or faith. There are Hydra politicians that create racist neighborhood watch groups, and instances of microaggressions from neighbors or classmates towards her and her friends, which are all handled with nuance and care. The DODC agent was not. Instead of really caring about the damage control, she only wanted to capture the Muslim, brown kids, and Ms. Marvel chose to, once again, go a very stereotypical route of showcasing how the government is Islamophobic rather than teaching audience about the microagressions that are much more common in the lives of Muslim Americans.
Agent Deaver isn’t a totally out-of-this world concept, and surely there are agents like that who work for the very real federal government to this day, but the emphasis on Deaver and her consistent racism with saying things like, “the wrong people getting powers,” is another stretch the series didn’t need to make. And while her partner, Agent P. Cleary (Arian Moayed), was the more level-headed one — the “nice” cop in a very obvious nice cop/bad cop scenario — he and the other agents clearly recognized Deaver’s racism for what it was, and didn’t really do much to stop her until she disobeyed orders at the very end of the last episode.
Overall, there were better ways that Ms. Marvel could have approached the subject of racism and Islamophobia that stayed true to what Muslims face on a daily basis. This particular Muslim critic hasn’t had much experience with Islamophobic government agents, but I have had multiple experiences with microaggressions and racism from the people around me. Like the comics, the show could have given us more examples of microaggressions coming from Kamala’s community, or her school. In the very first episode there was a teacher that constantly said her name wrong, which was a great microaggression to include but was immediately resolved in episode two. Zoey (Laurel Marsden) could have also been used as someone who didn’t really understand Kamala or her culture, and her arc from frenemy-to-friend would have been all the better for it, considering how quickly/randomly she turned up in the finale to help.
Instead of approaching the subject of racism with the same nuance and care as the comics, the show felt like it was hitting us over the head with the single racist DODC agent raiding mosques and making snide comments, insisting that this was the only way that the SWANA, Muslim community could really ever deal with this problem. In the end, she ended up not following orders and nearly killed Kamala and Kamran (despite giving orders to take them in alive) and ended up being fired for it. But honestly, what was the point of it all? Of all the ways to showcase themes of racism and Islamophobia, this was probably the weakest way to do it.
In the end, Ms. Marvel has created a brand new world for us to live in, and new cultures to emphasize in the rest of the MCU. While the fumbles were large and there were things left to be desired, there’s no questioning that the future of the MCU is incredibly bright. With Kamala and Carol Danvers switching places across the universe at the end of the series, Kamala’s newfound confidence in her abilities and Carol’s introduction to Kamala’s family and friends is bound to give us one hell of an experience in the upcoming movie, The Marvels.
The creative team behind Ms. Marvel should be proud with what they accomplished in the six episodes they were given, and as a Muslim, I am so proud to finally be represented so well in a franchise and an industry that has done my community wrong for so long. Ms. Marvel brought Islam to one of the biggest franchies in the entire world, and this is going to create so many more opportunities for historically marginalized communities to be seen in ways they never have before. I can’t wait to see what Phase 5 has in store for us next!