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Riz Ahmed: Redeeming Multiculturalism in the Post-9/11 Era

Four Lions - water pistol fight

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Four Lions: Finding Comedy in Suicide Bombers    Ahmed’s satirical rap soon roused the interest of director Chris Morris, “one of Britain’s most revered comedians,” and won him a starring role in suicide bomber caper Four Lions (2010) (“Archive: Riz Ahmed in Issue 1”). In the film, Morris carries Riz Ahmed’s absurdist approach to terrorism and hybridized Islamic-Western identity to its logical extreme, insulating his jihadist characters with black comedy while simultaneously framing them as villains and village idiots loaded with multiple layers of symbolic meaning. Four Lions challenges the rhetoric that all terrorists are spawned by an imagined universal Islamic radicalism and Al Qaeda. While public instinct is generally to mythologize terrorists as fearsome bearers of apocalyptic doom, the reality, as Riz Ahmed’s character Omar demonstrates, is frequently far more farcical. Contesting the official claims of political ideologies in the U.K. and the U.S. which portray terrorists as ruthlessly intelligent, meticulously organized, and blindly faithful to their radical doctrines, Omar is incompetent, isolated, and gleans more theological inspiration from Disney films and pop songs than Quran verses.

   Omar’s tragic intercultural position is primarily apparent in the juxtaposition between his dull day job as a security guard and his much-anticipated role as martyred Mujahedeen. However, as the film progresses, his character increasingly confounds any categorization within East-West binaries. Most challenging to “Clash of Civilizations” ideological preconceptions is Omar’s family: his ostensibly secular lifestyle in a comfortable house with his good-humored wife, Sofia (Preeya Kalidas), and his young son is deliberately contrasted with that of his brother, Mahmood (Mohammad Aqil). Mahmood is a theologically orthodox Muslim who tries to warn Omar away from fundamentalist violence, but who earns accusations of hypocrisy from Sofia for purportedly locking his wife in a cupboard.

   Omar’s Janus-like nature is further revealed during his stay at a training camp in Pakistan when, in an attempt to bring down a drone surveillance aircraft, he shoulders a ground-air missile launcher backwards and inadvertently fires on an Arab camp. This sets up the punch line served up during the closing credits that Omar accidentally bombed Osama bin Laden, a moment foreshadowed by an obliquely framed bedtime story to his son in which Omar is Simba, bin Laden is Mufasa, and the drone is Scar from Walt Disney’s The Lion King (1994). His use of a Disney film to repackage his flawed heroism for his son ironically contradicts his vehement condemnation of “Western imperialism,” underlining the absence of any coherent Islamic theology in his violence. Rendered impotent by countless fumbles by the end of the film, Omar wanders into an abandoned pharmacy dressed as Honey Monster and blows himself up. The tragicomic catharsis of this futile gesture is compounded by the fact that Omar vetoed precisely this target when it was suggested earlier by one of his comrades.

   In his essay, “Ways We Allegorize Now,” James R. Simpson suggests that the “casualty-of-war concern” that emerges from Riz Ahmed’s character is that the State reads not only the South Asian and Islamic communities but also the population as a whole in a superficial manner, failing to comprehend the “hybrid vernacular of fundamentalist violence” (194). Indeed, by the climax of the film, confusions and anxieties about religious identity on the part of the State and the jihadists alike explode into a disorienting riot of cultural perspectives. It is worth noting that, amidst all of the ideological confusion, Omar’s contradictory ordinariness makes him the “vessel for the audience’s sympathy,” in the words of the New York Times (Scott, "Harebrained Plans by Half-Wits"). Humanization through hybridization is again the driving message of Riz Ahmed’s presence in the film, as it is in his music. Like "The Post 9/11 Blues," Four Lions injects nuance into the post-9/11 discussion. It humanizes its terrorists, dampening their "otherness" without defending their actions. We can see ourselves in Omar's sincere but woefully misguided desire for meaning, in his frustration with religious dogma and his self-destructive stupidity.