Ms. Marvel, Pakistani-American Muslim Female Superhero

The new Ms. Marvel’s real name is Kamala Khan, a 16-year-old Muslim Pakistani-American girl from Jersey City, New Jersey. “Kamala has all of her opportunities in front her and she is loaded with potential, but her parents’ high expectations come with tons of pressure,” says Marvel's press release. “When Kamala suddenly gets powers that give her the opportunity to be just like her idol, Captain Marvel, it challenges the very core of her conservative values.”

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Comment by Riaz Haq on March 13, 2014 at 8:54pm

Here's a Men's Journal story of Pakistani-American Mixed Martial Arts champ Bashir Ahmed:

In April 2013, Bashir Ahmad stood bleeding in a cage before a 12,000-person stadium crowd in Kallan, Singapore. Having defeated his Thai opponent, the mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter draped the green-and-white Pakistani flag across his shoulders and hoisted his gloved hands as the stadium. The crowd – along with a 500-million-person Asian TV audience – cheered for Pakistan's first national MMA champion. The accolade was made all the more precedent-breaking considering Ahmad's true identity: just a few years earlier, he had served in Iraq as a U.S. soldier. As relations between the U.S. and Pakistan remain strained due to drone strikes, Taliban attacks, and lingering resentment over the unauthorized commando raid on Osama bin Laden, Ahmad has become the unlikeliest of national heroes – an American soldier turned MMA champion. "I've gotten Facebook messages asking how I could be a part of the U.S. army and support the killing of Muslims," he says. "Does it get to me? No. My whole life has been a paradox."
Born in Lahore in 1983, Ahmad moved as a child with his family to Great Falls, Virginia. In 2002, he joined the National Guard to fund his tuition at Virginia Commonwealth University – thinking he'd only spend one weekend a month doing military drills. "When I first got there and asked if they'd served in Afghanistan, they laughed and said 'We can't even make it to the highway without getting lost,'" Ahmad says. Yet nine months after the beginning of the Iraq war, in 2003, Ahmad was deployed to work as a medic on a bomb disposal unit in Mosul – a stronghold of the Sunni insurgency. "Have you seen the movie Hurt Locker?" he says. "That was my day-to-day life. We'd drive five times a day to wherever in the city there was a suspected IED or car bomb."
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Despite his rising star in Pakistan, Ahmad says his time there has shown him how essentially American he remains. "When I came here I was like, 'oh I'll fit right in'," Ahmad says. "No, I was definitely different – a foreigner." Pakistan's pervasive anti-American rhetoric and uncritical nationalism irritated him. "It's so mixed up, it's so ridiculous," he says about the country's political climate. "There are Pakistanis whose whole family is in the U.S. and they want a visa, yet they hate America." One of Ahmad's proudest achievements, beyond the fame and growing success of MMA in Pakistan, is having created something that erases, however modestly, Pakistan's social divides. "These two young waiters at a roadside restaurant told me their lives had changed," Ahmad says. "Guys who would usually order them around were now the same people looking up to them and saying, 'This guy fights for my gym.'"
Ahmad is now splitting his time between Virginia and Pakistan while courting Pakistani expatriates to help fund his league – and admits to not feeling quite at home in either country. "The TSA held me for seven hours at Reagan airport, but then only questioned me for a couple of minutes," Ahmad says, "I expected it but was still like 'Screw you, I'm a vet.'"

http://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/races-sports/pakistans-fight-c...

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 27, 2015 at 8:42am

San Franciscans have been getting a dose of real live super-heroics lately, after an anonymous do-gooder took it upon themselves to do battle against a series of Islamophobic bus ads in the single most awesome way possible: By calling upon the highest profile Muslim superhero in the Marvel comics universe.

Recently riders of the San Francisco bus system have been forced to make their daily commutes to and from work on busses with covered in ads which compare Muslims to Nazis, and call for an end to all US aid to Muslim countries. Purchased by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (a wing of Stop Islamification Of America – an organization listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group) the ads are similar to ones the group has run in both Washington DC and New York. 

Knowing San Francisco, and that city’s history of proud progressivism, it’s not surprising, then, that the offensive ads provoked a strong reaction. What is surprising, though, is just how wonderful the response has been. As first noticed by Street Cred – Advertising For The People’s Facebook page, someone has been, *erm* “upgrading” the ads by plastering them over with images of Kamala Khan, known to comic book fans as Ms. Marvel. 

The ads now feature Khan urging viewers to “stamp out racism” and reminding them that “free speech isn’t a license to spread hate” 

http://magazine.good.is/articles/ms-marvel-fights-islamophobia-on-s...

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 19, 2015 at 4:03pm

Meet Sana Amanat, the Shonda Rhimes of #Marvel comics. #Pakistani-#American http://www.vox.com/2015/11/19/9757682/sana-amanat-marvel?utm_campai... … via @voxdotcom

As a woman and a Pakistani American, Amanat has made it her mission to redefine what is possible for women and people of color in an industry dominated by white men. Through her work as an editor on comic books like Captain Marvel, Hawkeye, and Ms. Marvel, she has helped reimagine what superheroes can be. Last year, the first issue of Ms. Marvel — a series and character that Amanat co-created with editor Steve Wacker, writer G. Willow Wilson, and artist Adrian Alphona — went into its seventh printing, a level of success that's extremely rare. Earlier this year, Amanat was introduced to National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates — that initial introduction would later develop into a successful deal orchestrated by editor Will Moss, Marvel's VP of Publishing Tom Brevoort, and Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso to bring Coates to Marvel and write the new Black Panther comic book series.

"My long title of director of content and character development — I always forget it," she tells me about four weeks after New York Comic Con. I've caught her on a busy Monday.

"I still double-check my card and ask, 'What am I?'"

"Just call yourself Ms. Marvel," I joke.

"That's what my nephew calls me. He's 5 now. It's super cute. I think he's kind of messing with me."

He's onto something.

Sana Amanat is the Shonda Rhimes of Marvel comics

There's something poetic about the fact that Amanat is a huge fan of Shonda Rhimes, one of the most powerful showrunners in the television industry and the woman who created the hit shows Grey's Anatomy and Scandal. Rhimes has mastered the art of what Amanat calls the "oh no," the gasp-inducing moments that pepper her sudsy, kinetic dramas. And when you think about it, Rhimes's TV shows, with their hyper swerves and hurtling dialogue, are a bit like live-action comic books.

"You need the 'oh nos.' That's the beauty of serialized storytelling. That's what Shonda does so well," Amanat tells me.

But Amanat and Rhimes have more in common than a love of drama and the utmost respect for Scandal star Kerry Washington. What Rhimes has done for ABC — create great, diverse work that's gone on to inspire more diversity in the network's programming — Amanat is doing for Marvel.

Since her promotion, her editing duties have been streamlined to Captain Marvel, Daredevil and Ms. Marvel, three books she's very passionate about, to make time for an endless array of strategy meetings. Amanat's goal is to determine how Marvel can evolve and make its superheroes more representative and diverse, and then to ensure that it happens. By doing less hands-on editing, she's able to work with the company on a grander scale and across multiple titles.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 5, 2022 at 4:34pm

Marvel Studios will be releasing Ms Marvel exclusively in cinemas only in #Pakistan. #Disney will create a cinema format version of the 6-episode series for Pakistan, split into 3 parts, to celebrate the first Pakistani Marvel #superhero Kamala Khan. https://images.dawn.com/news/1190034

Episodes one and two will debut on June 16, three and four on June 30 and five and six on July 14.

"This decision was made to celebrate the introduction of the first Pakistani Marvel superhero, Kamala Khan (played by Iman Vellani), into the MCU. The series also features a diverse cast both in front of and behind the camera," said Obaid-Chinoy. "Disney and Marvel did not want Pakistani audiences to miss out on seeing Ms Marvel and her story as Disney+ has not yet launched in their country."

Vellani plays 16-year-old Kamala Khan, who lives in Jersey City. Kamala is an aspiring artist, an avid gamer, and a voracious fan-fiction scribe, she is a huge fan of the Avengers — and one in particular, Captain Marvel. But Kamala has always struggled to find her place in the world — that is until she gets super powers like the heroes she’s always looked up to. The trailer for the series released on March 16 and the show will start streaming on Disney+ from June 8.

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