‘Your Mother’ sweet title, bitter stereotypes

I was initially moved to discover that Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, starring Mahershala Ali, takes its title from a beloved Islamic teaching. When asked who most deserved his good companionship, the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, answered “your mother” three times before naming “your father.” This teaching honours mothers and calls us to gratitude, compassion and responsibility.
The title gave me hope. Here was an opportunity for cinema to introduce audiences to the tenderness and moral depth of Islam.
Instead, I left troubled by the distance between the teaching that inspired the title and the images that dominated the screen.
I believe that the main driver behind this movie and similar soft power and psychological operations (PsyOp) campaigns is hitting generational and racial sympathy for Palestinians among America and especially Black Americans.
The December 2023 Times-Siena poll found that 34 per cent of Black voters sympathised more with Palestinians, compared to 28 per cent who sympathised more with the Zionist regime.
Having studied and worked in the United States, I deeply appreciate its cultural diversity, religious freedom and the richness of Black American culture. My concern comes from that appreciation: stories should help communities understand one another, especially when prejudice already places barriers between them.
Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism deserve to be taken seriously. They cannot be dismissed as matters of audience sensitivity. When Muslims are repeatedly associated with violence, or Arabs with cruelty and exploitation, those portrayals can reinforce prejudice against real people.
The film’s central character, Latif, is a Muslim hitman struggling with faith and fatherhood after his wife’s death. A film-maker can explore such a contradiction. But the distinction between a character’s actions and his religion matters. Murder and exploitation violate Islamic teachings; a criminal’s religious identity does not make his crimes an expression of Islam.
In my reading, the film does not establish that distinction convincingly enough.
I was particularly disturbed by the portrayal of Arab characters, whom I experienced as overwhelmingly associated with criminality, exploitation and menace.
Their accents and behaviour seemed to reinforce an exhausting screen stereotype: the Arab as someone to fear or distrust. I struggled to find an Arab character whose humanity offered a meaningful counterweight.
The problem is not that an Arab character commits a crime. It is the cumulative impression created when Arab identity repeatedly accompanies depravity, with little room for ordinary decency, compassion, or moral complexity.
An accent should never function as shorthand for moral inferiority. Arab identity should never become a convenient costume for villainy.
The cruelty directed by Arab characters towards Black characters also troubled me. Racism within and between communities can and should be confronted. Yet confronting racism requires care: a story should expose prejudice without encouraging audiences to transfer it to an entire people.
Black dignity and Arab dignity deserve equal protection. Neither community’s humanity should come at the expense of the other.
I was also disturbed by the children, who were in the movie between the ages of 10 and 14, in proximity to extreme violence, exploitation and adult criminality. Their vulnerability deserves more than a role in sustaining the tension of an action film. The question is whether the story helps us understand the cost of violence to children or turns their suffering into another spectacle.
Parents, too, should look beyond the title before allowing children to watch. A reference to a teaching about honouring mothers is no assurance that the content is appropriate for young audiences.
The treatment of faith left me equally uneasy. A character may express doubt, grief or hostility towards religion. But the film’s wider framing determines whether audiences encounter a person’s spiritual struggle or leave with contempt for the faith itself.
Islam teaches mercy, justice, accountability and respect for human dignity. It does not ask us to excuse wrongdoing because its perpetrator claims to be religious. Nor should Muslims have to accept demeaning portrayals of their faith as the price of appearing on screen.
Cinema is a powerful instrument of soft power. It shapes how audiences imagine people they may never meet. That influence carries responsibility when it touches communities already burdened by suspicion and discrimination.
Artistic freedom allows film-makers to confront hypocrisy, abuse and religious manipulation. It also allows audiences to challenge Islamophobia and anti-Arab stereotyping clearly and firmly. Respect for creative freedom does not require silence about prejudice.
For me, the poisoned honey lies in invoking a teaching of compassion while presenting images that risk deepening distrust. Whatever the intention, the effect deserves scrutiny.
Children should grow up able to recognise injustice without being taught to despise another faith or ethnicity. They deserve stories that help them distinguish wrongdoing from identity and encounter people beyond stereotypes.
“Your mother” is a call to honour, care and mercy. A film borrowing those words invites us to ask whether it carries that spirit into its portrayal of others. That is the standard I hoped it would meet.