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Troubled by a history of misconceptions on Western silver screens, Arab and Muslim filmmakers have kept their cinematic productions thematically close to the reality of their postcolonial cultural and social conditions, while trying to represent their communities in complex ways. In many efforts of artistic excellence, the films they make aim to reverse the frisson of alterity upon which the conception of their disgraced images have been historically predicated; in the process, the films aspire to alter these images and representations. Rarely however does the work of these Arab and Muslim filmmakers reach a global audience. This article locates themes and creative forms in many cinematic narratives of representation, and recommends their interpretation and mediation to a global audience. The article responds to a recent "intellectual turn" in contemporary debate on Arab and Muslim films, calling for the invention of a category called "Muslim Cinema". The article contextualizes this turn within the contours of Western institutions as sites of epistemological authority and examines its epistemological, racial, and ideological implications and underpinnings in connection to representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centers on the influx of Western fighters joining ISIS and locates its root causes in systemic and structural forms of alienation, discrimination, and Islamophobia. In Western discourse, understanding this phenomenon is characterized by a sense of denial that limits the interpretive paradigms to one of two approaches: either a racial discourse that confines the debate to antagonistic minoritized citizens with ambiguous loyalties and an inherent vulnerability for radicalism, or the powerful "glamour" of ISIS's propagandist spectacles that western media cannot dispel. This article suggests a third approach by examining recruits as pathologized individuals, essentially the product of their own troubled environments and failed experiences in the West with subordinate and second-class citizens' status. Deprived of sharing the perks of western identity, they start fantasizing about ISIS as an ideal alternative. The purpose is to explain how the West responds to its failure by immediately mobilizing media and politics to project it on the other. By relying on the insights of current theories on alienation, radicalism, and discrimination, the article engages with the way recruits remain so grounded in their identity and upbringing while venting out their frustration with lack of commodities, cultural collisions, and disappointment with life in Raqqa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]