With the much-anticipated release of the TV series Bait, our screens have not been shy of Riz Ahmed recently. His media team pulled out all the bells and whistles to ensure he was featured everywhere young audiences consume their information. It seemed like every popular content creator had a segment with him, from podcasts to pedestrian interviews.
In one of these appearances, on Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo podcast, Ahmed shared that he had been approached to work for British intelligence on multiple occasions. Each of these instances, whilst different in context, shares a disturbing common thread of revelation: not even the arts are a safe space for Muslims to express their identity.
This revealed a lot about the relationship between arts, culture and state power, and what it means for Muslim participation in mainstream Western creative industries.
Bitter irony
The first time the British-Pakistani actor encountered intelligence services was when he returned to the UK after filming The Road to Guantanamo and was manhandled at Luton Airport. He recalls how he was put into an arm lock, and his phone was aggressively searched whilst he was being accused of “advancing the Muslim Struggle”.
The irony is not lost in the fact that the film he had been working on spotlights the reality of Muslims navigating life as subjects of state suspicion. To add further contradiction, the security officers were seemingly so impressed by the way Ahmed handled their questioning that they thought it appropriate to try to recruit him as part of their team.
The second time British intelligence attempted to recruit Ahmed was much closer to home; “through a family friend”, he shared on the podcast. To be approached by someone within your personal network to spy on your community is an uncomfortable reality to confront and cements feelings of mistrust that already exist within Muslim communities.
The third incident, which was perhaps most threatening of all, came from a “senior figure at the BBC ” who had just left their position.
Mistrust for the BBC as a media outlet is already at an all-time high, especially from within the Muslim community. This can be attributed to an undertone of pro-Israel bias during the coverage of the war in Gaza and Islamophobia, which was recently validated through analysis from research bodies.
As a self-proclaimed independent institution with no political affiliation and no service to the state, the BBC should play no role in advancing any counter-terror or surveillance programmes that form controversial government policy. The feeling that the BBC ’s institutional perception of Muslims is shrouded in suspicion is therefore validated when its senior figures are involved in actively recruiting Muslims for intelligence services.
The Riz Test
With a career that unfolded in the shadow of the post-9/11 War on Terror, much of Riz Ahmed’s cultural commentary (not just as an actor, but also as a musician, writer, and producer) has centred on this. Countless airport searches, racial profiling and increased surveillance defined his experiences as a first-generation child of Muslim migrants.
It is remarkable to think that the very services that profiled him then attempted to use him as part of the highly criticised surveillance apparatus that is used to spy on Muslims in the UK. Especially given that the actor’s prominence and contributions to the arts, both behind and in front of the screen, can be attributed to his criticism of typecasting Muslim roles.
It is thanks to his work and advocacy that the Riz Test was developed, after all. The five-point criteria test is now used to evaluate how poorly Muslims are represented in movies and TV shows. For example, Muslim men are often reduced to terrorists, villains, security threats and misogynists who are ‘culturally backwards’.
In contrast, the ‘good Muslim’ is not only the one who rejects ‘extremism’ but also the one who assists the security state and therefore cooperates with British intelligence.
For decades, the War on Terror has unfairly demanded that Muslims constantly prove loyalty to the state, with the idea that their freedoms and even citizenship status would be protected as a consequence. According to these policies, brown Muslim men, in particular, fit into two boxes: you either hate the system and want to bring it down (“advancing the Muslim struggle”) or you embed yourself within the system used to target and vilify your community and curtail wider civil liberties.
Ahmed’s case shows that even when Muslims succeed in reshaping racist stereotypes, they still remain trapped within politicised and securitised identity narratives that reinforce a dangerous good Muslim/bad Muslim binary. Furthermore, it echoes the US government’s Cold War tactics of using culture as a means of ideological supremacy. Similarly, Muslim artists are now being used to cement the harmful perception that their community is supposedly secretly plotting against Western society - and if they’re not, they should join in spying on those who might be to prove this.
Riz Ahmed’s revelation has left many Muslim creatives wondering: if it can happen to such a prominent cultural figure, what is the situation for other Muslims in the industry?
Sajidah Ali is a freelance writer and strategic operations professional in the third sector, based in the Midlands, UK.
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