"Don't let a few people shape your view on an entire faith."

I just recently watched a film about Muslim Americans and how 9/11 took a toll on their lives. The film, Mooz-Lum, was released in 2010, and was written and directed by Qasim Basir . It is one of the few American films that don’t portray Muslims in the usual light that they are put in, as terrorists. I noticed several things regarding to the storyline of the film and how it was produced. It explores ingroup and outgroup functions, cultural criminology and the culture of fear.

The film fights everyday notions that we see in Hollywood movies. To begin with, we see two groups. Muslims represent the ingroup and non-Muslims represent the outgroup. The outgroup is the group toward which members of an ingroup feel a sense of separateness, opposition, or hatred. We see this grouping when Tariq(Evan Ross)’s classmate makes fun of his Muslim name in class and everyone starts laughing.

The media creates a cultural criminology. Cultural criminology is the study of crime and deviance that places criminality and its control in the context of culture. It injects people’s brains with ideas that certain people what them to believe in. Cultural criminology against Muslims was even more evident in movies after the 9/11 attacks, when Muslims started being seen and represented as terrorists. In one of the scenes, we see Tariq’s own friends trying to attack his sister and her friend because they are both Muslim. Mooz-Lum demonstrates how even Muslims were chocked from the attacks that happened in New York City and it is unjust to punish them for what a group of extremists did.

The media also created a culture of fear, it created exaggerated threats in the public’s mind that some believe are designed to achieve political goals. Politicians create the fear of Muslims in the minds of the public and that can give them the rights to start wars under the name of defending their people.

Prejudice & Racism

Racism is a certain kind of prejudice, based on faulty reasoning and inflexible generalizations toward a specific group. The word prejudice comes from the Latin noun praejudicium, which means a judgment based on previous decisions formed before the facts were known. If a person allows their prejudiced beliefs to block the progress of another, it is discrimination. Those who exclude all members of a race from certain types of employment, housing, political rights, educational opportunities, or a social interactions are guilty of racial discrimination.



Racism is an unmerited fear or dislike of a people because of their ethnic heritage. When colour is not a reason, other reasons such as language, religion, nationality, education, sex, orage become the reason of prejudice.

Sociologists, believe that racial discrimination happens more often and most harshly when two groups with different skin colours and unique physical features come into contact with each other and the two compete for the same thing. A insult directed at a particular ethnic group is likely to get these results in a confrontation: pain, anger, shame, hostility, guilt and embarrassment. Students admitted that they had used racial slurs when angered.



Race hatred often leads to violence. People whom form groups to defend America from a minority takeover fall into the category of extremists. For Example, Mooz-lum is a 2010 American independent film written and directed by Qasim "Q" Basir and starring Danny Glover. Mooz-lum (i.e. "Muslim") tells the story of an African American Muslim family whose lives are changed by the September 11 attacks and their aftermath. The plot is about Amid a strict Muslim rearing and a social life he has never had, Tariq Mahdi (Evan Ross) enters college confused. New peers, family and mentors help him find his place, but the 9/11 attacks force him to face his past and make the biggest decisions of his life.