Brothers and Sisters in the Ring (orginally posted at team)

Is it appropriate behavior for a Muslim woman, a feminist Muslim woman, to go to professional wrestling events and scream a lot? Scream things that maybe no one should ever scream, except for maybe at a professional wrestling event? This week I went with my buddies Kathleen, Hassan, and Mike to see Smackdown taping (showing tonight 6-23 on UPN) and a live taping for ECW on Sci-Fi. I love wrestling. It is a living comic book series of superheros and villians building stories by battling each other over years. Each match is an issue that hooks me for the next one. Better than a comic book, the audience gets to take part in it. Audience reactions to the wrestlers can push the way a wrestler's story will be told. The wrestlers are performers and have to work with us to hate or love their gimmick. They have to improvise when we do not cheer for the guys the company thought we would. The audience has turned gimmicks around in the past. The audience is also interacting with each other. We all have our favorites, our allegiances, our "issues" that come out in the posters and in the chants we yell for each other's benefit not just at the wrestlers.

I try to support all the wrestlers who are Muslim or who have Muslim gimmicks. At the Smackdown/ECW taping when the Iranian-American Davari and the Punjabi Great Khali came out I chanted "Alla-hu Ak-bar." Needless to say, yelling in Arabic to support the Muslim heels was not one of those chants that got picked up by my fellow wrestling fans around me. But I wanted to stand up for the "brothers" and hopefully confuse the fans sitting around me. Historically, things haven't always worked out for "Muslim" wrestlers. Italian-American "Muhammad Hassan" got forced out of WWE by UPN after he appeared in an Arab-Terrorist gimmick with Davari that aired on the very day of the London Bombings. Usually a wrestler just changes his gimmick after something like this, but he ended up having to leave. At the Smackdown/ECW match I wore a Sabu t-shirt I made at home. That is it in the picture there. It says "I love you" in Arabic. "I love you Sabu." Sabu is Lebanese-American. He may be a long-time heel, but he is so long in the game everyone cheers him like a babyface. Everyone loves Sabu. The "brother" is honored by all the fans and fellow wrestlers. He is living history, a wrestling war vet. When he pulls out the camel clutch everyone knows he is doing a move taught to him by his uncle The Sheik and used by the Iranian wrestler, The Iron Sheik. We know his ijaza on that move. We know his ijaza on every move he makes. He is in a Golden Silsilla of wrestlers that extends now to greats like Rob Van Dam. Sabu and RVD's famous stretcher match in ECW demonstrates Sabu's brutal, skillful, and unyeilding wrestling style. All told, I love it when Sabu bends on one knee and points to the heavens with the shahada gesture. He'll look up towards God, then he'll turn to destroy his opponent.

I'm conflicted over the women of wrestling. I love the game women like Beulah McGuillicutty of ECW and female wrestlers like WWE's Lita who can take a bump and sell it. Her recent heel work with Edge and Mick Foley has been brilliant. She really didn't need the second boob job for this gimmick. I think Vince gets female wrestlers like Lita confused with his Playboy Bunnies he hires for bra and panty matches. Vince even got the skilled wrestler and 100% ham Mickie James to get a boob job. I like the punk rock tough women. I like comic book/sci fi women. Hard ass women who know how to fight. I think about those women who wanted to go into battle with the Prophet (s), and I wish they had a comic book series of their own. But the boob-jobs, the creepy sexuality played out to the male fans, it is wrong. At the ECW taping that night there was part two of an extremely stupid strip tease performed by some woman made to seem like a barbie doll. It was supposed to bring back the edginess of Kimona's strip-tease back when the ring broke during an old ECW match. Kimona didn't even strip then. She pulled off her bra and panties from behind a towel while the ring was fixed. Vince does not grasp what ECW was all about or what it could be now. He does not grasp what women wrestlers could be. But he does grasp what sells t-shirts and tickets to the 14-30 male fans. How much can I change things even in an audience that plays off and to each other? When the Barbie Strip was going on and the arena was fairly quiet, I started chanting "More Blood, Less Tits" over and over again. While everyone around us thought it was funny--and a few women there certainly smiled at me--no one picked it up and carried it. One kid turned to me and said, "But we want more blood and more tits."

There is just no way around wrestling being exactly what it is. I guess the question is whether or not my audience participation is sufficient to correct for my own conscience's needs. I'm not worried about what other people think of me going. In no small way, the allure of wrestling is that it offends nearly everyone. Well and there is the fact that I get to scream at the top of my lungs at the shows without anyone thinking it is weird like they tend to at the grocery store or the park.

I guess I'd better examine my conscience and protect my screaming voice because Kathleen, Mike, Hassan and I just got weekend tickets for Wrestlmania 23 (4/1/07), on the floor by the Ring.

Smackdown Update: We got on TV! From left to right, Hassan, Laury (note the Sabu t-shirt), Mike, Kathleen. How funny is that?