Comics such as Ms. Marvel, which features a Muslim protagonist, deploy a seemingly simple language to explore complex subjects like religion and politics without commodifying or trivializing. Fun and entertainment do not imply superficiality or ephemerality. My Religiomics research project shows that comics are potent tools to explore and understand the complexities of our world. Ms. Marvel epitomizes the plurality of Islam—its contradictions and coherence. G. Willow Wilson, the title’s author and co-creator, not only represents Islam in global media but also engages Islam by embracing it, living it, negotiating with it, and questioning it.
The protagonist of Wilson’s 2014 reboot of the classic 1970s comic Ms. Marvel is a Pakistani-American teenager named Kamala Khan, living in Jersey City, New Jersey. Kamala as Ms. Marvel possesses body-morphing abilities, super strength, and super healing. She is the first Muslim superhero with her own series, one that connects comics, Islamic tradition, and American politics.
Wilson is a white, American Muslim convert whose knowledge of Islam, Arabic language, and personal experiences in Middle Eastern countries enable her to engage the multidimensionality of Islam. Ms. Marvel includes references to Quranic verses, the Prophet Mohammed’s sayings, and Sufi teachings. It rejects persistent stereotypes and associations of Islam with terrorism and extremism. The comic has invited new readers, particularly Muslims and young women, has received critical acclaim, and has become a symbol of resistance against fundamentalism and racism.
Along with her editor, Sana Amanat, who comes from an American-Pakistani family, Wilson engages Islam as heterogeneous but coherent, portraying everyday Islamic aspects while highlighting Islam’s universality, addressing big questions beyond the Muslim world. Other comic book authors’ attempts to represent a beautiful, positive Islam have had limited success. Craig Thompson’s Habibi (2011) reproduces Orientalist stereotypes about gender and violence, which fueled heated debates, despite his wonderful drawing technique depicting stunning Islamic calligraphy and architecture.
Kamala’s Pakistani background is presented in Urdu-language scenes—encountering Kamala, the prior Ms. Marvel, who Kamala idolizes, speaks to her in untranslated Urdu. Sketches of her life depict Pakistani habits and customs, including food, clothes, and cultural codes. She faces typical second-generation issues navigating mixed romantic relationships and feeling alienated from both Pakistani and American cultures, what Abdelmalek Sayad calls a “double absence.”
Negotiating Islamic tradition, Pakistani heritage, and her nerdy teenage life, Kamala questions cultural traditions, religious practices, and the American status quo. She sniffs bacon but resists eating the “delicious, delicious infidel meat.” More seriously, her first superhero outfit reproduces the sexy blonde 1970s Ms. Marvel, but she finds her own voice in a less form-fitting, Pakistani-inspired costume.
Her older brother, Aamir, is devout, holding firm beliefs about society, religion, and morality. He and Kamala frequently discuss politics, family, and gender roles. Guided by his sense of honor and tradition, Aamir disapproves of Kamala being alone with her romantic admirer, Kamran, believing this would compromise her dignity. The reader may identify with Kamala, the rebel protagonist, but Wilson simultaneously highlights her conservative brother’s humanity and complexity.
Wilson depicts the plurality of Islamic meanings associated with veils and head coverings. Tyesha, Aamir’s wife, has a very conservative understanding of the veil. Nakia, Kamala’s friend, also wears the veil but in a more modern style; for her, the veil is both a religious and a fashionable garment. Kamala never wears the veil outside the mosque. Tyesha, Nakia, and Kamala embody different ways of living Islam. Freedom or emancipation versus religious tradition is a false binary. Wilson writes in her autobiography The Butterfly Mosque (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2010) that “sometimes following the rules is a more radical act than breaking them.”
Kamala grapples with major issues across global society, including climate change, generational tensions, and social injustice. For instance, Ms. Marvel fought an evil real estate corporation that used her image without her consent for a divide-and-conquer strategy in Jersey City to marginalize minorities, creating unrest that would facilitate gentrification. Saying “Remember: Good is a thing you do, not a thing you are,” Ms. Marvel’s ethical message transcends religious and cultural boundaries.
Wilson engages Islam, but she also articulates a humanist ideal. Writing that acclaimed comic book author Alan Moore calls this ideal “the very last inch of us,” she explains this is “that immutable integrity. To live beyond the threshold of identity, to do so in the name of a peace that has not yet occurred but that is infinitely possible – this exhilarating, necessary, and within reach.”
In 2015, activists in San Francisco covered Islamophobic advertisements on buses—ads that offensively linked Islam with Nazism—with images of Ms. Marvel, reclaiming public space and transforming a message of hate into images of empowerment and resistance. Kamal would undoubtedly consent to this use of her image. Embodying Wilson’s ideals, Ms. Marvel became a symbol of resistance against fundamentalism, bigotry, and the rise of the extreme right around the world.
