The idea in one minute
This page looks at how Jews, Christians and Muslims appear in films and on TV. It shares research showing that fewer than 2 in 100 speaking characters in popular films were Muslim, and that many were shown being violent. You will learn what researchers have counted, what they could not count, and wh
What the numbers say
The largest study of Muslims in film, by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative in 2021, looked at the 200 most popular films released in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand between 2017 and 2019. Fewer than 2% of more than 8,500 speaking characters were Muslim. In the UK films in the sample the figure was 1.1%, although around 6.5% of people in England and Wales described themselves as Muslim in the 2021 Census. More than nine films in ten had no Muslim who spoke at all.
Where Muslims did appear, violence followed them. About a third of Muslim characters committed violence, and more than half suffered it. Most were men, many were refugees or migrants, and many lived in the past. Riz Ahmed, who helped start the study, said: 'The data doesn't lie.' The older work of Jack Shaheen, who studied over a thousand Hollywood films with Arab characters made between 1896 and 2000, found the same pattern over a century: 936 negative portrayals, 52 even-handed and 12 positive.
Jews and Christians on screen
Jewish characters are far more common on screen than Muslim ones, but numbers are not the whole story. A 2024 study by USC's Norman Lear Center of 108 Jewish characters in 15 TV series found that almost all were white, that the same handful of jokes and types kept returning, and that half of the episodes that mentioned Orthodox Judaism either judged it negatively or treated it as strange and other (about a quarter, 27%, judged it negatively). The researchers asked writers to let Orthodox characters speak for themselves and to show Jewish joy, not only Jewish trauma.
For Christians in Britain, the picture has shifted. Andrew Crome's 2020 study of vicars and priests in Broadchurch, Broken, Fleabag and Rev. found them treated more warmly and seriously than in earlier decades. But the shows still mostly tell a story of empty churches, and the fastest-growing kinds of British Christianity, such as Black-majority Pentecostal churches and migrant congregations, are almost invisible.
Who makes television
Who is on screen depends partly on who works behind it. Ofcom's 2022 report on UK broadcasters found that 35% of staff followed a religion or belief, compared with 48% of the population used as a benchmark. Ofcom also said there was still a lot of missing data on religion, and it does not publish figures for individual faiths. So we know religious people are under-represented in British broadcasting, but not by how much for Muslims, Jews or Christians separately.
What we could not count
We looked for a study counting how often the word 'Allah' is heard on screen just before violence. We did not find one. The pattern is described by many writers, by the first question of the Riz Test and by the USC violence figures, but there is no peer-reviewed count. We say so rather than invent a number.
That gap is part of why this site exists. The word Allah is said every day by about two billion Muslims, and by Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews, at births, at meals, in prayers, and in 'inshallah' between friends. Our answer to the stereotype is not to complain about films. It is to let people hear the word the way most people say it.
What better looks like
There are good examples. Ms. Marvel (Disney+, 2022) shows a Pakistani-American teenager whose mosque, family and faith are simply part of her life; the producer Sana Amanat said, 'We're not trying to bash it over the head.' Channel 4's We Are Lady Parts follows a Muslim women's punk band in London. BBC Three's Man Like Mobeen is a comedy about a young Muslim man in Birmingham who prays and gets into trouble in equal measure. Netflix's Mo follows a Palestinian refugee family in Texas. Shtisel, from Israel, shows a Haredi Jewish family with tenderness and humour. Rev. and Fleabag gave British vicars depth.
None of these is perfect, and people within each community argue about them. But each passes a simple test: a person of faith is allowed to be a person first.
Think of the last time you heard someone say 'Allah' in a film or a TV drama. For many people, the honest answer is a few seconds before an explosion. Researchers have spent years counting how often Muslims appear on screen, and how. Others have counted Jewish characters, and how religious people work in British television. The numbers are worth knowing, because what we see on screen shapes how we see our neighbours.
Go deeper
- Pillars Fund: Missing & Maligned and the Blueprint for Muslim Inclusion (2021) · report
- The Conversation: 'The Riz Test: how Muslims are misrepresented in film and TV' · article
- Ofcom: equity and diversity in broadcasting · regulator
- Andrew Crome, 'Clergy on Contemporary British TV' (Religions, 2020) · paper
- ONS: Religion, England and Wales, Census 2021 · statistics
Sources (9)
- USC Annenberg 2021 figures: Pillars Fund release, 10 June 2021
- Violence figures; leads; Riz Ahmed 'The data doesn't lie': NBC News, June 2021
- Riz Test criteria; Bodyguard: The Conversation
- Shaheen's 1,000 films: Wikipedia, Reel Bad Arabs
- Lear Center Jewish representation study: USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center, Jews on Screen, December 2024 (also reported by TheWrap, 20 December 2024)
- Ofcom workforce religion figures: Ofcom, 2 November 2022
- Clergy on British TV: Crome, Religions 11(1):38, 10 January 2020
- Ms. Marvel producer quote: Variety, 8 June 2022 (via R9)
- Muslims about 6.5% of the population of England and Wales: ONS, Census 2021
