“Ramy” and the Difficulties of Self-Examination Under the White Gaze

When “Ramy” first débuted, in 2019, it was astonishingly fresh. The semi-autobiographical comedy, co-created by Ramy Youssef, an Egyptian American who plays himself, introduced us to a sweep of Muslim characters who felt real: Muslims who believed in God, but also in material things. Muslims who drank, had sex, lied to their parents, and felt guilty about it. Set in New Jersey, a state with one of the highest percentages of Muslims in the U.S., the show captured the immigrant-Muslim American world in its specificity: the wallah bros with their religious hypocrisies, the masjid uncles with their haughty self-righteousness. Brisk episodes, each with its own internal plotline—one episode entirely devoted to Ramy’s mother, another to his sister—stood on their own like neat vignettes. At long last, here was a Muslim “Atlanta,” a “High Maintenance” for New Jersey Muslims.

If this feels like a low bar, that’s because it is. Outside of countries where they are a majority, Muslims are often seen as the unmediating executioners of an abstract religion, as if their faith robs them of all other desires and conflicts. Onscreen, these characters are clumsy or flat—weak and pitiable (if they are women), odious villains (if they are men). That is, of course, unless they are secular Muslims—the kind beloved by liberal Americans, who like to feel virtuous for having “diversity” in their friend groups. Ramy is not a secular Muslim. He subscribes to the same set of beliefs that have long made Muslims such impregnable narrative characters. He actually believes in God—“like, ‘God’ God, not yoga,” as he puts it in Season 1. Most of the narrative tension comes from Ramy’s misguided attempts—and repeated failures—to live a life in accordance with Muslim ideals. Many of these ideals, as we find out in the first season, are no longer upheld by his peers in Egypt, where his father is from; and, yet, Ramy remains attached to them, at least aspirationally. In practice, he masturbates constantly. He blithely hooks up with white women, but expects purity from Muslim women. By the end of Season 2, he has had an affair with his cousin, wrecked his new marriage (to a virgin) the very day it began, and is estranged from his sheikh, who also happens to be his father-in-law, whom he’d grown very attached to. The season closes with Ramy sitting in an abandoned car listening to a CD about ablution, the Muslim cleansing ritual performed before prayer—a spiritual gesture of repentance.

Season 3, which premièred on September 30th, isn’t much cheerier—at least not until the very end. But it’s also the season with the clearest plotline and character development. At its worst, “Ramy” can feel like a disjointed sketch comedy—a vessel for Youssef’s humorous observations about urbane Muslim-immigrant culture. The third season, like its predecessors, sometimes relies on graceless provocations that never mature in a way that advances the story. A guest appearance from Bella Hadid, a model who is half-Palestinian, calls to mind an earlier cameo—by the Lebanese-born former porn star Mia Khalifa, in a bizarre Season 2 episode in which a rich Emirati drinks Khalifa’s breast milk in order to transform her from an object of lust into a maternal figure. As he explains, “I cannot jerk off to my own mother.” (The episode appeared to be lampooning a controversial fatwa that was issued by a lecturer at Egypt’s most prestigious religious university, Al-Azhar, in 2007, which suggested that male and female work colleagues could use breast-feeding to get around a religious ban on being alone together—but, ultimately, the joke doesn’t land.) This season, we get Hadid playing Lena, a turtleneck-wearing, “The Office”-obsessed love interest of Ramy’s friend Steve (Steve Way), a man who has muscular dystrophy. After meeting Lena, Ramy declares that she is “spectrum-ish.” Hadid’s appearance is somewhat gratuitous; it feels like a lazy gamble on the supermodel’s popularity.

In other episodes, Youssef simultaneously captures and subtly mocks Muslim pop culture with his usual tart precision. I shuddered at the depiction of a televangelical convert Muslim sheikh (James Badge Dale), who uses his large Instagram following to trade on his Muslim popularity. (“I spent many years of takfeer honing my vibe,” the sheikh brightly tells Ramy.) Ramy, who has a thriving jewelry business, hopes to bank on the sheikh’s large social-media following. He offers the sheikh a gift—an enormous diamond necklace that says “Allah”—in the hope that the sheikh will advertise the brand. Upon presenting the necklace to the sheikh, Ramy is initially self-conscious, seemingly aware of the potential for his “gift” to seem sacrilegious. But the sheikh is unbothered. “So, it’s a hundred grand for a promo post,” he tells Ramy. “Or we can do a seventy-thirty split on any sales directly linked to my Instagram.” After the sheikh brandishes the “ice” and plugs Ramy’s brand on camera, the two men live-stream themselves praying together. It’s Muslim sponcon.

But even the most astute of these pop-cultural musings can feel somewhat familiar three seasons in, and so “Ramy” has made a clever decision to focus on character exploration this time around. As a result, we get some dark plotlines, such as when Ramy’s uncle Naseem (Laith Nakli), a closeted gay man, nearly loses his mind at the thought that he’d been outed by a younger man he’s been seeing, who turns out to be friends with Ramy’s sister Dena (May Calamawy). When Naseem’s anxious attempts at confronting his niece are thwarted by a long-winded family dinner, he pulls out a gun and demands that Dena come speak to him alone.

The children are not doing much better. In one scene, early in the season, Ramy discovers that he has trouble getting it up, and consults his doctor friend, Ahmed (Dave Merheje). After conducting a test, Ahmed concludes that Ramy is overstimulated: he watches too much porn, or, as Ahmed calls it, “the Muslim drug.” (“Muslim men are at war,” Ahmed’s wife, Yasmina, played by Rana Roy, says. “We lost our men to porn, white women, general colonized thinking.”) Ramy begins attending group-therapy sessions for sex addicts, and, in the season’s emotional climax, he delivers a powerful four-minute monologue in which years of internal examination finally come to fruition. With remarkable clarity, Ramy examines his upbringing and the inheritance that came with it. He also comes to understand the exact tenor of his religious woes: “I look at my parents. They say they believe in God, but I think they’re just fucking anxious about God. And I am, too.”

Ramy is not the only character to go to therapy this season; his sister Dena and his mother, Maysa (Hiam Abbass), attend counselling sessions as well, both with the same white therapist, played by Amy Landecker. When Dena opens up about losing her virginity, the therapist replies with a sweeping generalization, asking if Dena agrees that brown cultures have an emotional relationship to food. Later, when Dena brings her mother to group therapy—and after Maysa, having had enough, storms out—the therapist asks two other patients in the group to role-play as Dena’s mother and father. The reënactment quickly devolves into crass stereotypes: the woman playing Maysa puts on an Indian accent, and the father dials his patriarchal assumptions up to eleven. In the background, we hear the therapist encouraging them: “Nice, nice.”

Three years ago, when I reviewed the first season of “Ramy,” I wrote that it was likely to anger some Muslims, because it exposes the kinds of uncomfortable truths to which they are tempted to turn a blind eye: the sons and daughters who might be allowing themselves more liberties than their parents wish to know, the closeted lives that friends cannot bear to broach with each other. Season 3 ups the ante by examining the brunt of this secrecy, awkwardness, and shame. On American TV, the season can feel like an open-air therapy session in front of a wider, ignorant audience—a reflection on the challenges of self-examination under the white gaze. But it’s also the story of many families: parents trying to correct their lives through the lives of their children; parents who are loving, well-intentioned, but also wrong. This is true even of the younger parents—Ramy’s supposed peers. We see Ramy’s friend Mo (Mo Amer) put immense stress on his young son, who is competing in a Quranic-recitation competition. “Why are you putting so much pressure on him?” Ramy asks. “You don’t even memorize the Quran.” To which Mo replies, “If he memorizes it, it’s like I memorized it. God accepts the good deeds of our children. If you make them better than you, it’s like I did it, too.” Ramy gently chides him: “Yeah, that sounds like a really healthy relationship.” ♦