Mona Eltahawy is a talented Egyptian journalist based in the US. I include her piece, What Does a Muslim Look Like?, in my first lecture to my university course on Islam because she shows that the media typically limits representations of Muslims to the angry bearded man and the oppressed covered in black woman. Well, this video is Mona's response that young Muslims are attracting media coverage that completely undermines the standard stereotypical representations of Muslims in the media. Miss USA, Rima Fakih, happens to be an Arab Lebanese-born Muslim raised in the US, and she certainly is not your silenced and oppressed veiled Muslim woman that the media puts on tv so often. Likewise, Muslim comedians such as Aziz Ansari are definitely nothing like the bearded Muslim man paraded on the nightly news burning an American flag. Perhaps a shift in media representation is underway precisely because Muslim-Americans are quite visibly breaking down stereotypes in ways that have been going on for years, except that now they cannot be ignored because of the high tv ratings they attract.
