Turbans, Veils, and Villainy on Television: Stargate SG1 and Merlin

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/reorient.6.2.0151
• Pages: 151-172
• Published date: 01 April 2021
• Date: 01 April 2021
• Author: Katherine Bullock
• Subject Matter: niqab,turban,veil,face,Stargate,Merlin,Muslim women and men's dress,television,entertainment

ReOrient 6.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada

katherine.bullock@utoronto.ca

TURBANS, VEILS, AND VILLAINY ON

TELEVISION: STARGATE SG1 AND MERLIN

Katherine Bullock

Abstract: In this article I investigate why two shows from different television genres in

two different countries resort to nearly identical costume choices to convey villainy. I

argue that that the directors, writers, and costume designers for the US science fiction

show Stargate SG1 and BBC’s Merlin use orientalist tropes of the veil as exotic, oppressed

or threatening as costumes for their non-Muslim characters because of the centuries-long

association in Western culture between Muslim veiling and the Other, while differentiat-

ing between acceptable and unacceptable headgear and face coverings. I draw on Said’s

Orientalism, Hall’s Encoding/Decoding, medievalism, and the theory of the ethnonorma-

tive viewer to make this case. The “veil” has become an iconic negative sign in the West

wholly distinct from meanings given to it by veiled Muslim women themselves. I suggest

that anti-veiling ideology in Western publics stems in part from negative connotations

given to it in television shows like Stargate SG1 and Merlin.

Keywords: niqab, turban, veil, face, Stargate, Merlin, Muslim women and men’s dress,

television, entertainment

If there is one constant in my students’ reflections on Islam and politics, it is a

conviction that the mainstream Western media is biased against Islam and

Muslims and that this causes anti-Muslim attitudes and behaviour in the wider

society. For several decades, scholars have illuminated negative representations

of Islam and Muslims in mainstream media, including print, film, and television

(to name a few: Alsultany 2012; Arjana 2015; Byng 2010; Golnaraghi and Dye

2016; Jiwani 2011; Said 1979; Shaheen 1984; Shaheen 2009; Taylor and Zine

2014; Terman 2017). The instinctive feeling is that this negative representation

accumulates in the minds of many non-Muslim media consumers and is causally

connected to anti-Muslim racism. These hypotheses are explored and confirmed

with audience reception studies with caveats that viewers with exposure to dif-

ferentiated news, critical theory, orientalism, or Muslim friends are less likely to

adopt hegemonic meanings (Bullock 2015, 2017; Hall 1980; Rane et al. 2014: 36;

Saleem et al. 2017).

152 REORIENT

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When subjecting media products to critical analysis for their representation

of Islam and Muslims, media scholars, rightly and not surprisingly, focus on the

representation of Muslim bodies and their cultures. My analysis of Stargate SG1

and Merlin suggests that the lens needs to be widened to include an analysis of

representations of non-Muslim bodies that might also contribute to the cumulation

of negative representations of Islam and Muslims in the mainstream media. If ori-

entalism orientalised the “Oriental” subject (Said 1979: 6), orientalism on today’s

television is also orientalising the non-Oriental subject.

I was alerted to this accidentally while watching two different television shows

with my children: a US science fiction show, Stargate SG1 and the BBC’s (British

Broadcasting Corporation) Merlin. Stargate SG1 is a science fiction show cre-

ated by Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner, based on the 1994 science fiction

film Stargate by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, and part of Metro-Goldwyn-

Mayer’s Stargate franchise. It ran for ten seasons, from 1997 to 2007. Stargate

SG1 is about the US military’s discovery of a gigantic metal ring, known as a

stargate, that has stable worm hole connections with thousands of planets in the

universe. Twelve teams travel through the stargate to explore alien worlds. They

defend planets, including earth, from alien invasion and subjugation. Merlin is

a twenty-first-century retelling of the Arthurian legend, created by Julian Jones,

Jake Michie, Julian Murphy, and Johnny Capps for the BBC. It is about the leg-

endary wizard serving Prince, then King, Arthur, when they were young. It ran for

five seasons from 2008 to 2012.

In both shows villains were identified by black turbans with face veils looking

like a cross between a Taliban and a niqabi – a turban-veil. Yet neither show had

Muslim characters. With my training in orientalism scholarship, that caught my atten-

tion. Why did costume designers choose turbans and face veils to mark villains? How

could a British medieval show and a US science fiction show both resort to the same

costume device to mark evil? How could this costume choice not be related to deeply

rooted and widespread hostility to Muslim face veiling in Western cultural discourse?

How would this representation on entertainment shows impact those Muslims whose

everyday sartorial choices are turbans and/or face veils?

Said observed that, as a Palestinian growing up in two British colonies and

working as an adult in the United States, he never “lost hold of the cultural reality

of, the personal involvement in having been constituted as, ‘an Oriental’” (Said

1979: 26). While I do not wear a face veil, I do wear hijab, and I have friends and

colleagues who wear niqab, a face veil. We live in a society in which Muslim

women who wear niqab suffer institutional discrimination and both micro- and

macro-aggressions. Muslim women suffer from the highest rates of hate crimes

in many Euro-American countries (Chakraborti and Zempi 2012; Khamal 2019);

they are spat on, have their niqab pulled off while out shopping, or face people