Strangers and stereotypes: The Spooks controversy and the framing of Muslims

Abstract

In 2003 an episode from the second series of the BBC television spy series Spooks provoked controversy, and a furious exchange of letters, between the Muslim Council and the Corporation, owing to the allegedly negative stereotypes of Muslims the programme deployed. Taking place at the same time as the erection of paralegal categories for dealing with those accused of being on the wrong side in the “War on Terror”, and the concomitant construction of what Paul Gilroy has called “infrahuman status” for certain “non‐citizens” in the nations of the West, the “Nest of Angels” episode was claimed to reinforce hostile perceptions of Muslims and mosques. Examining the correspondence against a close reading of the episode itself, this paper suggests that although simplistic stereotypes of “good” and “bad” Muslims are initially deployed, “Nest of Angels” in fact works to problematize such binaries, introducing a character who cannot easily be incorporated into the normalizing structures of dyadic ways of seeing, and who functions – in Zygmunt Bauman’s terms – as a “stranger”, troubling the homogenizing drives of the modern nation post‐9/11. Moreover, the narrative trajectory of the episode, and the fate of its enigmatic protagonist, can be read as symbolic of the position of British Muslims at that time: viewed as potentially hostile interlopers and required to prove their loyalty in an environment in which even affirmative gestures of belonging risked being read as untrustworthy.

Keywords:

• Spooks
• “Nest of Angels”
• controversy
• Muslim Council of Britain
• British Broadcasting Corporation
• Zygmunt Bauman

Notes

1. It is a long‐established commonplace of media studies, for example, that the encoding of messages and meanings in media texts is a fraught process, liable to subversion in the processes of “decoding” brought to those same texts by viewers. Although there might be “preferred readings” envisaged by programme makers, viewers can produce “negotiated readings” – where part of the message is accepted and part rejected – or “resistant readings” which recognize but reject the preferred meaning of a text. See Hall.

2. See Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs; and idem, Guilty. See also Findley; Afzal Khan; Sardar and Wyn Davies; Poole; Abbas; and Saeed.