If you you think I am suggesting this because it’s “politically correct” (it isn’t) or for “diversity” you didn’t understand my point.
There’s a reason that Star trek has been around for 50 years. it’s bigger than just a fun sci fi franchise. It could do something that literally almost no other entertainment could do.
They could cast a mostly / all Muslim cast featuring Muslims of varying races and backgrounds.
They could also write the show with the Trek crew coming to terms with the policies of Starfleet causing the culture of another planet to devolve into chaos.
[A metaphor to explore the foreign policy of the US as it related to the Middle East and how America’s support for Osama over years inadvertently set the conditions which allowed for his organization to grow in reach and scope.]
OK, but I was responding to Sam Stone’s point that TNG “blatantly pandered to the styles and mores of the time” and was “thinly wrapped commentaries on some contemporary social issue”, which was apparently “common”.
I would not agree that a couple episodes on general religion (not specifically abortion, say) is enough to say that.
And I really hope that that isn’t what Sam Stone had in mind, since he contrasts it with TOS. As we’ve already discussed in this thread, there’s at least one episode where Kirk outs himself as a (mono-)theist. So that would be implying religious messages are fine in Trek, as long as they’re positive.
What, so that every thread on the series degenerates into the usual, you know. Not in your life.
They did!
Probably more by the OPEC crisis and the rise in Arab nationalism in 1974.
I’ve read somewhere that the line in question was either inserted by the writer, who was a believer, or the studio. TOS didn’t have a writing staff the way TNG did, so the adherence to the bounds of the universe was not so great, especially in later shows when Roddenberry didn’t care as much.
I don’t know if Sam was contrasting it to TOS - which did a lot more shows on issues of the time than TNG did. But back then doing those kinds of shows was a lot more daring than during TNG time. Not that ST invented this - Have Gun Will Travel, which Roddenberry wrote for, had a few really good social justice shows.
And I certainly don’t agree they are dated.
Yeah…
'74, tho, was around the time that I, personally, found the desert planet. Probably coloring my perception.
Bashir wasn’t there to represent any religion, he was daft but well educated Englishman to play against the more workman like but savvy Irishman Miles O’Brien.
Bashir and O’Brien barely interacted for the first several seasons.
Bashir’s role at the beginning was the naive new kid, and his pairing with Garak in the first couple seasons was a good example of his playing that role.
It was after the writers moved away from that for being too slashy that he (who had gotten less naive by that point) started hanging out with O’Brien. (When that got a slash following, the writers just shrugged and went with it.)
The Trek Slash Universe is more wonderful than anything in the Trek Mirror Universe.
Resurrecting this thread because I was at a Star Trek Mission New York panel on Discovery with Nicholas Meyer and Kirsten Beyer and they all but confirmed this is happening. There was a question from the audience who outright asked if there would be a Muslim character using similar reasoning as my OP. They did not confirm but hemmed and hawed in a way that seemed affirmative. Someone in the audience even yelled out, “That’s a yes!” and the crowd cheered. So not definite but I am 99% sure it’s happening.
In the Journey’s end episode it’s made clear that they felt they had to leave earth, to preserve their cultural identity. It seems clear what they’re really saying is that the tolerant federation, particularly earth, has no place for those with religious beliefs.
“Who Watches the Watchers?”
And yet…everyone that runs into an American Indian…ish…is suddenly FASCINATED by the spirituality.
And I’m a pretty tolerant guy, but even I find the idea of Bashir and O’Brien-In the middle of a WAR-running off with Worf on a crazy mission to get Jadzia into Stovokor to be noxious.
It was Dax who had the most Klingon connections. I would think Jadzia wouldn’t really appreciate Klingon heaven. And that’s taking everything at face value!!
Eh, I’m not sure what a “Muslim” character even is in a Star Trek context. Would you show him praying sometimes? Or turning down pork?
In any case, religions evolve, even the “conservative” ones. Rather than having a “Muslim” character, whatever that means, have a Maghrebi character, or an Arabian character, or something.
As mentioned above, southwest Asian ideas of modesty antedate Mohammed and are not exclusive to his tradition. (Nor are they even universal. Clothing in “Islamic” cultures is varied and changing.)
I think this is exactly wrong. TNG’s apparent scorn for religious conservatism was the opposite of pandering, by the time it came on. It was in some ways a holdout of the Swinging Seventies, but it offended because it was determinedly, offensively itself, determined to do the opposite of pander.
I would have been a lot less offended if Picard had pandered to my theism in “Who Watches the Watchers?”
As I understand it, the new Star Trek: Discovery (what an unfortunate set of initials for the fan boards) takes place 10 years pre-TOS and is planned to take place in the Prime Timeline. Of course, the various series have made a dog’s breakfast of any sort of in-universe sociocultural historic continuity, even disregarding the current film reboot, so who knows what this one will reflect.
As mentioned they’d be taking a risk in introducing a character of *whatever *ethnicity or religion in order to make the point that it need not interfere with coexistence and fundamental humanism, while at the same time trying to avoid making THAT the whole sole point of a cardboard character.
Well, one could say some parts of TNG, especially in the early more strictly Roddenberryist phase, did pander to a culture… Southern Californian Liberal culture 
But they’d tell you that was a feature, not a bug.
Well hopefully he or she gets cast with same subtlety and nuance given Chakotay. Meaning a non-Muslim taking the role and every episode featuring this person ham-fistedly shoehorning in ridiculous stereotypes…I know!!! A time travel episode where he has a chance to stop 9/11!!!
That it’s time to retire the Star Trek franchise.
Though a starship captained by Ned Flanders and dedicated to distributing Bibles throughout remote galaxies has a certain bizarre appeal.