I. The Mutation
Saturday morning in the sunny nineties. It’s the only day I don’t have school—not the big one down the street nor the shabby one at the mosque. I’m sitting on the floor, thumping my foot as I endure the commercials beaming from the big cathode ray TV. My mom plops down on the couch above me: “Is it time yet?” We’re waiting for the one cartoon she enjoys.
Marvel’s X-Men: The Animated Series.
It mystifies me why Ammi likes it. She talks about it with the same breathlessness she talks about Anna Karenina or War and Peace or Wuthering Heights—books I’ll never read, but which she delights in telling me she read at my age. It always feels like she wants me to only read good literature and all the good literature is by old, dead Brits or Russians.
So I ask her: what is it about the X-Men?
She leans forward onto her knees as she tries to keep up with the action on screen and answer my question. She loves the literary juxtaposition of the furry, blue Beast who quotes Shakespeare, she says. She’s intrigued by Wolverine and Rogue’s tragic, mysterious pasts. She thinks Gambit is a heartthrob with his thick Cajun accent and Storm is elegant as a goddess. She’s a prototypical fan, finding something to love in each of the characters’ pulpy melodrama.
But there’s something else. It’s what the X-Men mean. Mutants are a metaphor that can stand in for any oppressed people. A group of people united across the world in their differences, feared for their power, hated for what they are. In her eyes, it’s internationalism and intellectualism dressed up in pop art.
I didn’t realize it then, but part of my connection to the mutants was a yearning to belong to a group. In classes at the local Islamic Center, my mother taught the concept of the global Muslim community —the ummah — as well as the Prophetic model of anti-racism, and Islam’s advocacy for the poor and vulnerable. I connected to the feeling that Muslims would always threaten those in power if they were organized. And the mutants were a model for what that could look like, whether my mother saw it that way or not.
But even in this fictional world, there are fissures: Charles Xavier, with his respectability politics, against Magneto with his mutant separatism. Charles could read minds — he saw how hateful humans are — and still he empathized with his oppressors. Magneto’s argument is better, more magnetic: telling the mutants to be open and proud, to not hide from hatred, and to fight if needed. To me, Magneto was never just an “old terrorist bastard,” as writer Grant Morrison called him.
The two were frequently compared to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. At the time, I accepted this with what little I knew. Even at that age, I heard plenty about Malcolm X from the Black Muslim community that fled the Jim Crow South for the auto industry of Michigan, where I lived. It’s in the voice of that Islam, alongside my mother’s feminist interpretation, that I find something meaningful—a voice that fights for justice, even when it’s uncomfortable.
I use this as an excuse to tug at Ammi’s shalwar kameez and ask to buy X-Men comics at the grocery store. I act out conflicts between Wolverine and Cyclops late at night at tarawih. I play every single iteration of the Marvel vs. Capcom series at the local arcade.
And so it begins: my lifelong relationship with comics, a corporate medium as a method for understanding heroism, justice, and evil.
I eventually asked my mom: if the X-Men were supposed to be the oppressed, the downtrodden, the different, why weren’t any of them Muslim?
For the rest of my life, I’ve looked for Muslims in Marvel comic books. I wasn’t able to find one until this year, when Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel) was retconned into a mutant from an Inhuman.
II. The Marvel Formula
Retroactive Continuity and retcons are a form of time travel; the future reaches back and shapes the past. And in order to understand the editorial strategies (and interference) that led to Ms. Marvel’s Muslim Mutant retcon, we need to go all the way back to the start: to the early 1960s, when a scrappy company book named Atlas Comics began pumping out hit after hit under the Marvel imprint. Before the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), comic book historians frequently extolled the “Marvel Formula,” as applied to superhero comics. In contrast to DC’s Superman and Wonder Woman, the Marvel hero—pioneered by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Jack Kirby—was “a hero who tussled not only with monsters and mad scientists but also with relatable personal issues.” Put otherwise, the Marvel hero tapped into teenage angst and societal alienation.
The popular Marvel superheroes of my childhood—Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Hulk—were recluses, outcasts or loners. They were awkward, disrespected by the world around them. They struggled with inner demons. I was them and they were me. Except for the fact that the Middle Eastern and South Asian characters were mostly villains or grotesque orientalist depictions. The corpulent Shadow King Amahl Farouk in his fez. The master thief Achmed El-Gibár with his turban in the streets of Cairo. The Living Monolith, Ahmet Abdol, who created an unholy cult around his power to grow and absorb energy.
The Marvel formula in the early years was not one that was applied to characters of color, and especially not Muslims. In crossover comics like 1982’s Marvel Super Hero Contest of Champions, a full complement of international heroes gather like a superhero Olympics. In issue #2 of the miniseries, the Arabian Knight, an orientalist depiction with his scimitar and flying carpet and invocations of Allah—refuses to work with his teammate, Israeli superheroine Sabra, the implication being that he is misogynistic and antisemitic. In Orientalism, Edward Said argued that the West did not see the “Oriental” as a “true human being;” unlike other characters in the story like Iron Man, the Arabian Knight is barely a character and more like a prop. His act of heroism is saving Sabra despite his bigotry. The character would remain a footnote in Marvel’s history.
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby invented hundreds of characters together, some more successful than others. In their 1963 debut, the X-Men were a team of five prep-school educated white Americans at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. Born as mutants with the genetic ability to manifest a superpower at puberty, the heroes hoped to hide their differences while fighting to save innocent humans. The Inhumans were another team of misfits and freaks, introduced after the X-Men in the pages of Fantastic Four and Thor. The Inhumans push past the Marvel formula deep into lore-heavy sci-fi. Ruled by the powerful Inhuman Royal Family, they’re a genetically engineered super society that is initially depicted as living on the Moon and bestows a chosen elite of Inhumans with superpowers by exposing them to “Terrigen Mists” at puberty. Neither formula was perfect at first: the X-Men were canceled for a period of five years and the Inhumans didn’t graduate to a consistent solo comic book. They could not sell as heroes. In fact, the Inhumans worked better as antagonists.
But in comics, reboots are a double edged-sword. Sometimes reinvention holds the key to success and other times it leads to failure.
In the case of X-Men, a much needed reboot in 1975’s Giant-Size X-Men #1 propelled the mutants to star status; this was due, in part, to an international cast that allowed the Mutants-as-Minorities metaphor to flourish, a consistent system in which the Marvel Formula could be applied to characters of color and women. Most of this era’s writing was done by a young writer named Chris Claremont, who aggressively reinvented the metaphor at the core of the mutants. In fact, it is under Claremont’s pen that Magneto’s origin was retconned to that of a traumatized Holocaust survivor; prior to that, he had never been identified as Jewish or anything other than an evil supervillain. Claremont was the one who refined the fundamental Xavier/Magneto relationship to something resembling MLK Jr. and Malcolm X, though his inspiration had actually been Israeli Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Menachim Begin.
By the 1980s, Claremont’s international X-Men were operating on a different track than the rest of the Marvel Universe, and found much more success with their non-white characters. Morrison argues that Mutants “could stand for any minority, represent the feelings of every outsider, and Claremont knew it.” No longer focusing on those original five white American mutants, the new X-Men faced a double minority status. Claremont’s cast of X-people expressed their mutant identity and culture defiantly. They had to be doubly proud in their intersectional identities as immigrants, ethnic minorities, and mutants. Storm, with her dark skin and white hair, was compelled by a deep responsibility to nature and the value of life. Kitty Pryde was a young Jewish teenager who simply wanted a normal life. Nightcrawler was a faithful German Catholic in the body of a demon. Soviet Colossus should have been a symbol of the Iron Curtain, but at heart was a gentle artist. Short, scrappy Canadian Wolverine went on to runaway success, becoming the most popular X-Men character of all time.
Of course, some of the characters were initially straightforward stereotypes of different cultures. It is no surprise that more one dimensional, exoticized characters like the angry Apache, Thunderbird, and the arrogant Japanese nationalist, Sunfire did not have long-standing popularity, with their garish foreign garb and angry personalities. Characters like Storm, on the other hand, became central figures in X-Men mythos, in no small part because of their depth and defiance of stereotypes. The diverse new X-Men weren’t perfect people, nor were they encapsulations of their culture. They were people who continually chose heroism, and in doing so, became icons that readers could identify with and dream to follow.
From here on out, each new X-Men team was international. As Xavier built a supranational organization, Mutanthood became transcendent and intersectional, like the ummah or the international proletariat.
The New Mutants, the first spin-off X-team, featured Karma from Vietnam, Dani Moonstar from the Cheyenne nation, biracial Roberto da Costa from Brazil, and others. The Hellions, their antagonists, were a kind of anti-X-Men, and their leader was the first Muslim-adjacent superhero mutant: the emotional and angry Jetstream, also known as Haroun ibn Sallah al-Rashid. Described as a “Moor” and a “Berber” from Morocco, his character did not have lasting impact—he, and his team, were murdered to promote another antagonist. The occasional shallowness of Claremont’s formula was evident here. Yes, diversity was treated as an unequivocal good and characters were not defined purely by their ethnicity, but they frequently were not written with much cultural context, especially not side characters like Jetstream.
However, that diversity of origin—when mixed with the soapy sequential drama of conflict, jealousy, and love—turned out to be a highly effective publishing strategy. X-Men comics became a powerhouse brand for the whole industry. Chris Claremont led X-Men for 16 years and took the American comic book industry to its absolute apex in 1991 with the best selling American comic issue of all time, X-Men (Volume 2) #1, made in collaboration with the stylized art of rising Korean-American superstar Jim Lee. X-Men: The Animated Series followed up in 1992, synergizing perfectly with the Claremont/Lee books.
Marvel’s comic success never matched that of the 1980s X-Men. A speculation bubble, a massive crash, and near bankruptcy in 1996 led to Marvel selling off the film rights of their most valuable assets, including the X-men, leaving them with the C-tier heroes no one wanted to buy: the Avengers. While Spider-Man and the X-Men exist in the margins, Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor are avatars of power, emanating from white Western conceptions of war, patriotism, and mythology.
At their proud apex, all empires fall and new ones rise. Marvel Comics receded from their peak as superhero movies crested. Claremont left the series and the X-Men comics would spend the next few decades in a state of fugue. Things became edgier and more violent in the 90s, with less focus on the metaphor, and then in the 2000s and 2010s, Marvel invested more resources in properties for which they owned the film rights, including the Inhumans.
In these dark eras, I chose to believe in The Metaphor. Despite the exclusion of Muslims, despite a billion of my people being unwritten, fans like myself breathed our own spirit into the margins.
III. The New Muslim Mutants
It is difficult to make an effective superhero. Supervillains are easier and more disposable; any hated archetype can be turned into an exaggeration, a foil. They represent our deepest fears and psychoses, but a hero must have a motivating force, something that speaks to progressive visions of the world, some deep-seated desire to stand up and fight. A hero must emblazon a cover at the comic book store and sell and sell and sell, lest they be put out of print. A failed hero is a loss of vision. It is a failed symbol.
And the early Muslim mutants were not effective, at first.
In Grant Morisson’s New-X-Men 133 (2002), Marvel’s first openly Muslim X-person—the Afghan refugee Sooraya Qadir (Dust)—debuted. In my view, Morrison’s New X-Men run was typically sharp and thoughtful; they considered that Mutants would become a subculture that would be appropriated and targeted, like that of Queer folks or Black Americans. But Morrison’s depiction of Muslims was slapshot and riddled with inaccuracies, tied deeply to post-9/11 anxieties.
In her “heroic” origin, Dust’s sand-manipulation superpowers manifest when, faced with sexual violence from slavers, she stripped the flesh from their bones and passed out. Wolverine slaughters the rest of the bearded brown men imprisoning her and takes her to New York, When she wakes, she repeats over and over : “Turaab! Turaab!” Though Afghans are more likely to speak Dari or Pashto, Marvel says the word is “Arabic for “Dust,”’. Dust becomes her mutant codename. French Mutant Fantomex calls her niqab a burqa. Even in middle school, I knew that Afghans didn’t speak Arabic or wear Saudi niqabs. The framing was simply evidence of how Muslims were portrayed in that era: bearded fanatics who abused women. This was how they justified murdering us.
Strangely, Dust gave me hope back then. My gut churned looking at the horrific violence inflicted by mutants on Muslim-coded bodies on the page. But I believed things could be better. Retroactive continuity could reach back and grab the past by the throat, choking the windpipe of truth so the air flowed towards a different reality. I was used to comics spinning sweetness from salt. Just the way Claremont reimagined Stan Lee’s Magneto into a tragic fallen agitator, I believed some writer with a tender spot for Sooraya could retcon away the racist parts of her origin. They’d still exist in our history, but in the world of the comics, they could be wiped away. That is the logic of superheroes.
The post-9/11 era had a massive impact on how Marvel wrote their comics. Things had to be more “real,” as editors felt superheroes were impotent in the face of terror. While the United States pushed war in the Middle East, Marvel Comics began contextualizing older characters in the new political landscape. Longtime Vietnam veteran Frank Castle (The Punisher) was retconned into a Desert Storm veteran. And when Marvel Studios debuted Iron Man (2008), they took Tony Stark out of Vietnam and set his origin in Afghanistan. His jailers were not Viet Cong, but an international group of terrorists from Muslim countries called “The Ten Rings.” And it is on this basis that the multibillion dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe was built. Without the X-Men, without the minority metaphor. Instead, the War on Terror was the foundation on which a multibillion dollar movie franchise was built.
Still I felt that the truth would prevail. I believed the X-Men would take their rightful place as the moral and ethical leaders of the Marvel universe. Even if comics would never reach their peak again.
In the Obama years, representation and post-racial politics were en vogue for liberals, which Marvel typically aligned itself with. A person’s racial identity did not have to define their character. It was inevitable that Muslims would begin appearing in this context, in ways that would feel awkward and stunted. The writer Peter David retconned Monet St. Croix, an X-character I knew little about, into a Muslim. She debuted in 1994 in the title Generation X alongside Jubilee, a plucky teen from The Animated Series. Born in Sarajevo to an Algerian mother and a French—Monacan diplomat father, Monet’s power was simply perfection. She could do it all: fly, lift heavy objects, manipulate minds, and more. Her challenges in Generation X were not existential to her mutanthood: it was in her alienation from both friends and abusive members of her family, like her brother, the supervillain Emplate.
Monet was a dark-skinned woman whose parents were European, Black, and Arab. She was an obvious pick for a Muslim retcon, yet, in Generation X, it was not touched upon to my knowledge. If anything, she read like an elitist secular European. It took nearly two decades for her to announce to the other members of her new team, X-Factor Investigations, that she was Muslim. A retcon reaching back in time. It reshapes everything the character has ever been.
The retcon itself was tongue-in-cheek, acknowledging that the character had never before been depicted as Muslim. In 2011’s X-Factor 217, Monet descends from the sky in her superhero costume to break up a a mob of anti-Muslim and anti-Mutant protestors. “Oh really?” Monet says, her arms crossed. “I’m a Muslim and a Mutant… Care to take it up with me?” Her teammate Strong Guy (actual codename) expresses open confusion, because Monet never previously expressed a religious identity.
White comic book (and TV!) writers during this time—perhaps motivated by guilt—frequently introduced Muslim side-characters, “tokens” who would not be defined by religious identity except when faced with bigotry. And in this way, Monet became a Muslim. Colorblind. Secular. Unmarked by religion in any way except her self-identification. Future writers would frequently ignore this, except when convenient.
Monet and Dust’s Muslim characterizations were flimsy or non-existent in their debut, but have become more nuanced over time to the point where fandom embraces them as Muslim characters. Muslim fans love these characters, no matter how clunky their journey was, because they can become increasingly authentic. Even if a character was not depicted as Muslim on first appearance, a later writer can always retroactively imbue a religious character to their history.
Around the time of the Monet retcon, Marvel Editorial was successfully introducing more elegantly conceived diverse characters with the star quality of their white heroes. The writing quality of these characters improved, like with the Afro-Latino Spider-Man, Miles Morales, who debuted in 2011. Pakistani-Muslim writer and editor Sana Amanat was hired in 2009, and by the fall of 2013, Marvel announced that the defunct Ms. Marvel comic book series would be revitalized under her guidance. Carol Danvers, the former Ms. Marvel, was being promoted to Captain Marvel, and a Pakistani-American shapeshifter named Kamala Khan would replace Danvers as Ms. Marvel. It would be the first Marvel or DC comic book to have a headlining Muslim female superhero. Importantly, when compared to Monet, Dust and Arabian Knight, Kamala was not delineated as foreign at all.
Ms. Marvel would also be the first time a Muslim superhero was written and edited by Muslims, G. Willow Wilson and Amanat, respectively. In their hands, Kamala is not nominally Muslim, nor is she the stereotypical “oppressed Muslim woman.” Kamala is just allowed to be a teenager. She is the Marvel Formula for the modern age.
G. Willow Wilson: So in a sense, (Kamala) has a “dual identity” before she even puts on a superhero costume. Like a lot of children of immigrants, she feels torn between two worlds: the family she loves, but which drives her crazy, and her peers, who don't really understand what her home life is like.
Even though there is nothing particularly Muslim about Kamala, she also is fully Muslim. In Ms. Marvel #2 , her ethical and heroic framework comes from the Quranic edict: “whoever saves one person, it is as if he has saved all of mankind.” Future writers would depict her as consistently standing up against injustice. Terrorism, orientalism, colorblindness—none of the tropes are here. Like the Muslim comic book fans who waited for her, she is a fangirl with a big heart who envisions a world that includes her beloved Muslim, queer, black, and immigrant family and friends. The series was an unequivocal success: the collection of her first six issues, Ms. Marvel: New Normal, was the top-selling comic book in October 2014.
In Kamala’s debut, we see the politics of diversity and representation actually resulting in something good from its very debut. But her genesis as a character is as messy as any other comic book character beset by competing corporate interests.
The MCU was in full swing by Kamala’s debut. Avengers had broken a billion dollars at the box office. Marvel was becoming more mainstream than ever before. But comic books themselves were no longer very profitable. Instead they acted as a kind of testing ground for intellectual property.
As a result, Kamala was not a Mutant. This, to me, was a missed opportunity; a Pakistani child of immigrants rising to heroism in an America that hates Muslims plays wonderfully with the Mutant metaphor. Instead, she was aligned with a group Marvel did have film rights to — The Inhumans. They were a favorite of former Marvel Entertainment’s CEO Ike Perlmutter, who infamously rejected movie concepts that featured female or non-white leads.
If I could see Islam in the Mutants, I could only see eugenics in the Inhumans. Power is not shared freely or openly in their world; it is given to the chosen. Despite Marvel’s attempt to make the Inhumans as culturally relevant as the X-Men, they mostly failed. For me, there is a very simple reason for this—the readership can’t easily identify with the Inhumans, who are elites that live on the moon. But readers can see themselves as the X-Men, who live on Earth and are born with genetic aberrations which change their bodies and minds in unpredictable ways. To me, when the Inhumans gather due to their shared power, it feels like supremacy. For the mutants, it feels like hope.
Kamala brought many new comic book fans to the fold and for them, Inhuman-ness is core to who she is. But I’ve always had my own interpretation, which is that Kamala was always intended to be a member of the Mutant ummah, fighting tirelessly against oppression in this fictional world. This kind of headcanon was appropriate for Kamala, who is depicted in her very first appearance writing her own fan fiction about her favorite Marvel superheroes like Iron Man, Wolverine, and Captain Marvel.
In 2019, after the failure of the X-Men films and the television industry’s shift to streaming, Disney, which now owned Marvel, purchased Fox. This move finally brought the mutants back into the fold and made my personal interpretation a possibility.
IV: Kamala’s World
Kamala ended up becoming a major figure for Marvel. She was the narrative hook for the Avengers video game; her giving a thumbs-up is the primary emote on the phone game, Marvel Snap! If retcons are used to successfully recontextualize existing characters, reboots are the engine to introduce a new character. Sadly, new legacy characters are frequently relegated to the dustbins of history. In 2012, for instance, I looked forward to the new Green Lantern, Arab American Simon Baz from Dearborn, but the first issue was a fizzle and he was mostly forgotten. Kamala, alongside her peer Miles Morales, is the rare reboot that becomes mainstream.
Despite this multimedia success, Ms. Marvel’s comic book publishing history was mixed after 2019, when Wilson left her writing duties after 60 issues. Since then, she’s had one-shots and a few limited runs, none longer than two years.
The X-Men, on the other hand, were finally returning to the comic book spotlight, with the publishing of Jonathan Hickman’s House of X/Power of X (HoX/PoX) in 2019. The series rebooted the whole universe, fully abandoning the original setting of the Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. Xavier and Magneto put aside their differences and agree to build a nation for all Mutants, villains and heroes alike. The mutants agree that there is no compromising with the hateful humans. They move every member of their community that they can to the island of Krakoa. They begin building mutant technologies, mutant philosophies, mutant ethics. The story moves the characters out of an ontology of minority politics into one of full gnosis.
The Metaphor of the X-Men was in need of reinvention and HoX/PoX was a much needed intervention. Critics had long argued that the MLK Jr./Malcolm X metaphor was stale or inaccurate. Hickman, however, mines the post-war period ably by centering the idea of separatism, the great taboo in the popular American imagination of civil rights and racism. To me, this is the Mutants embracing the philosophy of Black Muslim Nationalism. This is Marcus Garvey. This is Malcolm X. If they will never accept you, build your own institutions. For author Jonathan Hickman, separatism is a matter of the mutants’ survival in a world that always wishes to destroy them. But it is not above critique either. At times, Xavier and Magneto look downright evil.
It’s thrilling, again, to see someone take a dangerous idea in comics and explore it. It recontextualizes everything that came before it. It brings the mutants into a history that had been villainized in the real world.
V: The Great Mess
But it is on television, not comics, that Kamala finally becomes a mutant.
It comes first with her Disney+ TV show, Ms. Marvel. At this point, I had lost interest in the representation debate, which so often is used to justify superiorities and shallow victories. I was looking for deeper engagement with philosophy and story, with developing worlds that can live on their own. But I couldn’t help but feel invigorated watching Kamala’s live-action debut. I was moved by the little things they get right, like the clothing at the mehndi, as well as the big things, like American Muslims grappling with questions of difference, surveillance, and community. I saw my own mosque community reflected in Kamala’s Jersey milieu.
All along, Kamala had all the elements of the Marvel formula and the show demonstrated this. Her biggest conflict was the most universal of all: growing up as a teenager in America with family and friends who don’t understand you. However, the Inhuman tie was heavy around her neck. Gladly, they ignored it entirely in the show, tying her powers instead to the ancestral trauma of Partition, in the shape of a bangle.
At the end of the show, they say that Kamala has a mutation, while the famous X-Men: The Animated Series theme song plays. My dream came true.
Comic book synergy with television was well-known at this point, so fans knew this meant that Kamala would become a mutant in the comics too.
But to make Kamala a mutant, they had to kill her. She died not in Ms. Marvel, but in The Amazing Spider-Man. Her death was a clumsy affair of a supporting character being killed to teach the hero (Peter Parker) a lesson.
Wilson and other writers returned for a one-night only issue of mourning for Kamala: The Death of Ms. Marvel. There are all sorts of delightful deep cuts the authors throw in for their growing Muslim audience. Wolverine in a thobe saying “Assalamualaikum.” Iron Man taking off his propulsor boots before entering the mosque. It’s funny, and yet, it’s about the death of a teenage girl. A fridging. The wild tonal mismatch that could only happen in comic books.
Kamala had spent nearly ten years as an Inhuman. That could hardly be erased, even if I disliked it. So, the baby was split in half: she would be an Inhuman and a Mutant, previously inconceivable by the rules of the character.
After her revival on the separatist utopia, Krakoa, it is revealed in 2023’s Fall of X #1 that she had been a mutant all along, but no one had been able to detect it because it had not manifested. A classic comic book trick. The reality had always been different: you just didn’t have the information yet. A retcon. Internet commenters noted that the artwork is different, that her skin had been lightened, her features made more European. And they’re right. This version isn’t working yet. This mutant version has white-washed Kamala.
But the thing that gives me hope is that after this, Kamala Khan would be written by a Pakistani Canadian young woman—Iman Vellani, who plays the character in the TV show. It should rankle as cynical corporate synergy, but it doesn’t feel like that. It feels right. Iman is a diaspora Pakistani comic fan like me.
Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant #1 and #2 the start of a new era for Muslim mutants. In it, Kamala operates undercover in an anti-mutant summer program for high schoolers. She rescues a crowd of students who, upon discovering her mutanthood, reject her. “If [the students] don’t care about how much we have in common, because they’re afraid of me, that’s their right,” Kamala whimpers to her best friend Bruno. Is this a Muslim metaphor? Is this teenage angst? I don’t yet know, but I have hope.
“I’m a Pakistani-American Inhu-Mutant! I’m literally walking proof that we can all coexist,” Kamala says in exasperation in issue #2. Her mentor, Emma Frost, brings her down and asks her not to solve the world's problems, but to look for peace within herself…because she doesn’t want to have to bury another young Muslim Mutant, like she did Haroun ibn Sallah Al-Rashid.
The most loyal Kamala fans reject this retcon. They fear that it’s a character assassination, that Kamala will be lost amongst the massive X-Men cast, which hasn’t always best utilized its characters of colors. But for me, it is a dream 30 years in the making.
Kamala Khan is a classic Marvel hero that will never die. I buy Ms. Marvel merch for my baby daughter, and I hope that Kamala is still a mutant when she’s old enough to read comics. I hope that writers continue to portray Kamala as being motivated by her Muslim morality. Maybe there will even be a Ms. Marvel animated series my daughter and I can watch together, like I once did with my own mother.
Kamala belongs not on the moon with the Inhumans, but on Earth, with the rest of us—beset with mutations, nosy family members, and a troubled relationship with religion.
