MUSLAMIC RAY GUNS
MUNA MIRE
In March 2011, a curious video took the Internet by storm. In an interview with UK outfit PressTV, a member of the English Defence League (EDL), a far-right, racist, and Islamophobic “protest group,” gave a quote that would live on in Internet infamy. “The muslamic law…they’ve got their law. Obviously it’s their law, isn’t it, we can’t do anything about that but we’re just trying to stop…you’ve got muslamic rape gangs nowadays.” He trails off into incoherence. The gathering of protesters behind him is restless and dour. The crowd is angry, the broadcaster announces, but no one seems to be able to articulate why.
But the Internet, particularly on this side of the ocean, zeroed in on something else entirely. The EDL protester with his heavy accent sounded as though he said he was concerned about “muslamic ray guns.” This mishearing lent itself to the perfectly absurd tone of a meme. “Muslamic,” of course, isn’t a word. It’s a portmanteau of “Muslim” and “Islamic.” And ray guns are themselves a fictive technology reserved for the most cartoonish villains—the classic example is Goldfinger from the James Bond movies. Bring those two nonsense elements together and voila, the racist vitriol being spewed is a parody of itself, ripe for the memeing. At the height of the meme’s popularity in 2011, a remixed version of the EDL rant was set to techno music and garnered more than two million views on YouTube.
Black Muslims in particular, who sit at the intersection of Black Twitter and the newly self-identified Muslamic Twitter, continue to have a lot of fun with the meme. The word “muslamic” is by now memeic language, or meme elided into language. If we think of language as tech, the meme continues to be a usefully applied tool, one that serves several purposes: to ridicule racism by pointing out that it is as fanciful as it is ignorant, to identify members of an in-group, and to signify the aesthetics and ideals of that in-group.
MIRE