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Islamic Artist Rida Fatima Designs a New Life in Wisconsin
ART Islamic Artist Rida Fatima Designs a New Life in Wisconsin
Waiting for the pandemic to end to share the joys of creativity
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BY SANDRA WHITEHEAD
Artist Rida Fatima’s professional life has a pattern: move to a new city, create a studio and work schedule, develop her business and then move and start over – a consequence of her husband’s path from medical school to residency to fellowship to professional opportunities.
Along the way, the 32-year-old artist has paved a trail of success. Since moving from Pakistan to the U.S. 11 years ago, her architectural drawings and calligraphy have been exhibited in galleries in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Richmond, Columbus, Portland, New Brunswick (New Jersey) and Laguna Beach (California). Her work won “Best in Show” at an exhibit at St. Louis’ The Old Orchard Gallery. A company chose one of her designs for its logo. CAIR displayed her work at its annual banquet in Cleveland for three years running.
Now in Wisconsin, it looks like Fatima, her husband and two children will stay put, for, she remarks, he’s working at the Milwaukee College of Wisconsin and “likes it very much.”
In an interview from her studio in their new home in suburban Milwaukee, Fatima shared her journey as an artist.
IN HER MOTHER’S STUDIO It began in her mother’s studio in Islamabad. “I was born into a family that appreciated art. I am the youngest of my siblings and was
Islamic artist Rida Fatima
the lucky one who spent a lot of time with my mother,” she says. “There was always a lot going on in her studio and I was always there. She loves to sew and do carpentry, making wooden furniture.”
Fatima’s mother also moved about every two years, following her husband, an air force officer. In each new house, she found space to make her studio. “It wasn’t fancy, sometimes a storeroom, sometimes a space under the stairs. She made amazing stuff in those small spaces,” Fatima reminisces.
“For me, the seed was always there. I knew from an early age I wanted to do something with art.”
Fatima studied interior design at Islamabad’s Hunerkada College of Visual and Performing Arts (https://www.hunerkada.edu.pk/) and did a few commercial projects after completing her associate degree. Her interior design drawings led to her interest in architectural paintings.
Calligraphy entered Fatima’s repertoire when well-known calligrapher Rasheed Butt (http://www.rasheedbutt.com/) conducted a three-day workshop at her college. “I just loved it,” Fatima recalls. “I talked to my mom after the workshop and told her I wished I found a community that was “really into art” and her business boomed.
CREATING ART AND LIFE IN MILWAUKEE Islamic art symbolizes God’s transcendent, infinite nature via repeated, stylized patterns known as arabesque.
Like Islamic art, Fatima arranges the space and time of her life into repeated patterns. Her time with her children flows naturally in and out of her workspace and professional life.
I’M RENDERING – THAT’S ISLAMIC ART FOR ME.”
could get ahold of him to take classes.”
That same day in an art store, Fatima heard a familiar voice. Butt was there with his daughter. She asked him for lessons, and for a month he taught her the kufic script used by early Muslims to write down the Quran. “He didn’t charge for it,” says Fatima. “‘Just come and show me you really want to learn,’ he told me.”
THE ROAD TO MILWAUKEE At 22, Fatima married and moved to Cleveland. In the dead of winter, with her husband busy in his residency, “art was almost the only thing that kept me sane,” she states.
The couple moved every two years – from Cleveland to St. Louis, then Richmond, and, finally, Milwaukee. “I like meeting people and I am thankful for the people who have crossed my path. But it takes time to develop friendships,” Fatima notes. In each new place, she immersed herself in her art and found her biggest support.
Art also provided connections. In Cleveland she volunteered as an art teacher in a home for older residents. She became a regular at CAIR’s annual banquets, exhibiting her calligraphy. “A lot of people in the organization became my good clients,” she says. In St. Louis, she worked and also displayed her art in a gallery. In Richmond, she
In her new home’s spacious, opened basement, which became her studio, she set up stations. She practices calligraphy at a tilted drawing table, which makes drawing more comfortable, flanked by a collection of bamboo pens and inks.
Another area is for her acrylic and texture painting work. “On the side sometimes, I like to experiment with wood. That’s in the corner,” she says. An extra room became a classroom where she offers art sessions.
Her children have stations to do watercolors, and adjacent to the studio is a play area arranged with Montessori materials. Fatima likes to share the activities with them.
On weekends, she makes schedules to have an idea of what she’ll be doing in the week ahead. “I love schedules,” she says. “I love making files and doing time-slots, and check-marking the time-slots at the end of the day and at the end of the week.”
On a typical day, Fatima wakes up at 4:30 or 5 a.m. A couple of hours in the early morning and another two hours in the afternoon, when her 4-year-old daughter is in school and her two-year-old son naps, “is my studio time.” That’s when she practices calligraphy.
The rest of the day she is with her children in the studio. “They grew up with paint stains. I consider myself lucky that I have company in the studio.” In the early evenings, when it’s nice, they go outside together.
Her work process involves sketching or painting samples of the art she plans to create, then moving to a bigger canvas to work in pastel watercolors or acrylic and texture painting on wooden boards.
For her architectural pieces, she usually draws on the photographs taken during her annual visits to Pakistan. She visits her husband’s family in Lahore, “a city filled with beautiful arches and architecture from the Mughal era (1524-1752),” she says. Her mother-in-law takes her to her favorite sites, Badshahi Mosque, Lahore Qila (Fort) and Shalimar Garden.
“Pakistan is filled with mosques. Every few miles you drive, there’s a mosque. Then there’s another mosque just a few minutes later.”
While Fatima loves the range of perspectives and dimensions she explores in her architectural drawings, she considers calligraphy her Islamic art. “Islamic art is a vast field. A lot of people do a lot of other beautiful things and call it Islamic art. As far as I’m concerned, it’s Arabic calligraphy and the verses from the Quran or the hadiths that I’m rendering – that’s Islamic art for me.”
Thankful for the lakefront and natural surroundings in Milwaukee, she’s happy to see an active Muslim community. But having moved here shortly before the pandemic closed everything down, she doesn’t know much about the art scene yet.
She hopes that Milwaukee will be a place of growth for her art, business, family and for her personally. ih
Sandra Whitehead is a journalist and teaches in the Journalism and Media Studies Program at the J. William and Mary Diederich College of Communication, Marquette University.
[Note: The original version of this story appeared in the Wisconsin Muslim Journal; https://wisconsinmuslimjournal.org/islamic-artist-rida-fatimadesigns-a-new-life-in-wisconsin/]
Do you know that all video games are not as innocent as one may assume – so beware!
BY TANNER MIRRLEES AND TAHA IBAID
The rise of the U.S. as an empire has long been intertwined with Islamophobia, the widespread irrational fear or hatred of Muslims. The work of those researchers who scrutinize how American news and entertainment products may perpetuate it offers a great deal of information in this regard.
The two of us are communication and media studies researchers who are interested in how popular culture contributes to Islamophobia. In our article “The Virtual Killing of Muslims: Digital War Games, Islamophobia, and the Global War on Terror,’ published by Islamophobia Studies vol. 6, no. 1 (Spring 2021, 33-51), we probe how some digital war games are linked to the U.S.’s Islamophobia. Here is the gist of our findings.
Digital war games are produced and sold by a global interactive entertainment industry. But more than being “apolitical” entertainment, they intertwine with and support real U.S. wars. For the past two decades, the U.S. and some of its NATO allies have been involved in military conflicts, either directly or indirectly, with Afghanistan (2001-), Yemen (2002-), Iraq (2003-), Pakistan (2004-), Iran (2005-), Somalia (2007-), Libya (2011-) and Syria (2014-). Throughout all of them, the U.S. military has used war simulation games to recruit teenagers, promote a positive image of itself to the public, train personnel how to fight and treat soldiers afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Video game companies have kept up with these real conflicts and made billions of dollars selling products that immerse civilian players in the roles of male Anglo-American soldier-heroes who virtually invade “enemy” countries and kill a wide variety of “villains” who threaten the American way of life.
To find out if digital war games depicted Muslims as the “enemies” of the U.S. and buttressed Islamophobia, we analyzed ten popular war games: “Conflict: Desert Storm” (2002), “Conflict: Desert Storm 2” (2003), “SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs`” (2002), “Full Spectrum Warrior” (2004), “Close Combat: First to Fight” (2005), “Battlefield” (2011), “Army of Two” (2008), “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” (2007), “Medal of Honor” (2010) and “Medal of Honor: Warfighter” (2012).
We chose these games because they were published between 2001 and 2012, a period characterized by the U.S.-led global “war on terror.” In addition, they contain interactive stories in which the
U.S. military battles people implied to be
Muslim. Furthermore, they were among the bestselling and best reviewed games in the war game genre for this period. As part of our research process, we played these games from start to finish and examined their trailers, marketing materials and walkthrough guides, all the while making detailed notes about how they represent Muslims. We found that they convey largely simplistic stereotypes of Muslims as “Arab,” “foreign,” “violent,”
“terroristic” and “anti-American.” For example, the stereotypes of all
Muslims being Arab and all Arabs being
Muslim seem to frame the enemies. The
Muslim Iraqi characters in “Conflict:
Desert Storm” (2002) speak Arabic.
Similarly, “Conflict: Desert Storm 2” (2003) represents Muslims as Arabs in the stage “Air Strike,” during which
Arabic writing appears on Kuwaiti street signs, and in “Prisoners of War,” where
Arabic appears on Iraqi street signs. Overall, these digital war games also represent Muslims as foreigners, not
American citizens. In “Conflict: Desert Storm” (2002) for instance, the player wars across several Muslim countries in the boots of a virtual American soldier. In “Close Combat: First to Fight”(2005), the enemies are Lebanese, Iranians, Syrians and Yemenis, and the game contains no Lebanese, Iranian, Syrian, or Yemeni Americans. Similarly, the Muslim characters in “Army of Two”(2008) are Afghani, Somali, Iraqi and Chinese, not American. In “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” (2007), Muslims of many nationalities are shown, but no American soldiers or civilians are represented as Muslim.
Furthermore, these games by and large cast Muslims as violent enemies of, and terrorist threats to, the U.S. and “the West.” “In SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs”(2002), the Allah Sadikahu terrorist group is comprised of Muslims. In “Full Spectrum Warrior” (2004), al-Qaeda and Taliban forces commit acts of terror throughout the game’s story. “Battlefield 3” (2011) follows suit, as the main enemies to neutralize are Muslim Iranian soldiers who have taken over a public school and a bank and are holding civilian hostages. In “Army of Two,” four of the five key enemy leaders are “Islamic extremists.” Additionally, these digital games mostly represent Muslims as anti-American and anti-Western. In “Army of Two,”the terrorist Mo’Allim chastises U.S.
AS ANTI-MUSLIM FEELING HAS INCREASED IN NORTH AMERICA AND ELSEWHERE, THE U.S. EMPIRE’S ISLAMOPHOBIC DIGITAL WAR GAMES INDUSTRY ADDS INSULT TO INJURY AND INTERSECTS WITH THE CURRENT PATTERNS OF ANTI-MUSLIM PREJUDICE, DISCRIMINATION AND VIOLENCE IN SOCIETY. SUCH STEREOTYPES PLACE UNNECESSARY PUBLIC ATTENTION ON, AND MAY INSTIGATE ANXIETY ABOUT, REAL MUSLIMS LIVING IN THE U.S. AND ELSEWHERE.
troops for their country’s vices. In “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare,” Muslims seem to express resentment toward, or hatred for, the West.
Briefly, the ten digital war games we analyzed vilify Muslims as a threat to American security. In addition, they invite their millions of players to virtually play out militarized fantasies of killing Muslims to save the U.S. (and win the game). In effect, these games’ narratives both add to the popular cultural repertoire of Islamophobia and contribute to the notion that the exceptional global military superpower known as the U.S. uses its immense might for good, defeating bad Muslim terrorists and rogue states and saving civilians from evil.
Although one can distinguish between the U.S.’s real wars and playable war games, these games risk desensitizing their players to war’s embodied horrors and deterring the public from democratic deliberation about war’s causes and human consequences.
For decades, U.S. wars in Muslim-majority countries and American Islamophobia have marched in lockstep, and so this digital vilification of Muslims is not surprising. And yet the games’ stereotypes of Muslims should not be treated lightly, because Islamophobia is a real and growing social problem.
As anti-Muslim feeling has increased in North America and elsewhere, the U.S. empire’s Islamophobic digital war games industry adds insult to injury and intersects with the current patterns of anti-Muslim prejudice, discrimination and violence in society. Such stereotypes place unnecessary public attention on, and may instigate anxiety about, real Muslims living in the U.S. and elsewhere. This, in turn, may sanction the intensification of state surveillance and policing of Muslims, not to mention public support for the ongoing disproportionate allocation of public resources and national security projects to combatting the perceived Muslim terrorist threat instead of white supremacist organizations and other greater — and growing — terrorist threats.
Furthermore, these games’ major Islamrelated representations are so negative there is a risk that players who have had no contact with a real Muslim may think that this digital portrayal is true. While digital games do not unilaterally cause people to dislike or harm Muslims, they may reinforce already existing prejudicial outlooks, especially among those on the far Right who are responsible for so much anti-Muslim hate speech and hate crime.
While it would be an exaggeration to claim that all such published and played digital war games convey an Islamophobic representation of the community’s diversity, the immensely profitable and globally played games that we studied mostly do. How, then, can we challenge their role in buttressing Islamophobia?
We hope that our study will make both current and future digital war game developers and players aware of this issue. Developers should make a concerted effort to create more multi-dimensional representations of Muslims, and players need to understand that the motley group of Muslim “enemy” characters do not reflect the majority of real Muslims who live, work and play in the U.S. and around the world. If the portrayal of Muslims in digital games is to change, then those with the power to design, produce, publish and sell these games must be made to care and change their designs.
Over the past two decades, Muslim Americans have pressured the U.S. film and TV industries to stop stereotyping Muslims; however, only now is the interactive entertainment industry beginning to face similar pressure. Much more work needs to be done.
Importantly, the U.S. digital game industry must do more to include and represent Muslim game developers in its workforce so they can represent themselves, tell their own stories about Muslims living in the U.S. and elsewhere and counter Islamophobic stereotypes. We hope that our study contributes to the steps being taken in that positive direction. ih
Tanner Mirrlees is an associate professor in the Communication and Digital Media Studies Program at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada. Taha Ibaid is an Oshawa, Ontario-based independent researcher.
