It was around that time that I became a playwright. At the University of California, Berkeley, my short story professor, Ishmael Reed, encouraged me to write “The Domestic Crusaders,” a traditional American family drama told through the lens of a Muslim family. He told me as a black man he learned early that arts and culture are a means for the rest of us to fight back and set the record straight.
But for my generation of Muslim writers at that time, that battle was often an exhausting, creatively bankrupt endeavor. It felt like our fictional stories had to be potent talismans. They couldn’t afford to simply exist and breathe like our white colleagues’ narratives. They had to entertain, correct stereotypes, represent the community, educate Americans and fight Islamophobia.
Mr. Youssef’s generation still suffers from the consequences of the 9/11 tragedy, but he plays by new rules and refuses to be the perfect ambassador of Islam. “I don’t want to explain Islam to people on a show, because it’s a comedy and I wouldn’t be good at doing that,” he told me. “But I can show how people are living it.”
In “Ramy,” the “people living it” are messy, sinful, complicated, hypocritical — and hilarious. They are both good and bad. Mr. Youssef also wants audiences to do their own homework. When it comes to the show’s liberal use of Islamic practices and Arabic, “If you get it, you get it,” he said. “If you don’t, Google it.”
“Ramy brought the WhatsApp thread to the screen, and I think that’s so amazing,” the comedian Hasan Minhaj told me, referring to the raw, honest conversations Muslims have with their friends on private social media apps but rarely in public or in the mosque. Mr. Minhaj believes Mr. Youssef’s show ushers in a “seminal moment” that will open doors for new, odd and wild perspectives and stories from Muslim Americans to finally emerge into the mainstream.
For example, in one episode this season, Ramy meets the former adult film star Mia Khalifa while waiting for an audience with a wealthy Gulf patron, who later challenges Ramy to an archery competition to decide whether or not he will donate to his sheikh’s mosque.
We’ve come a long way from endless images of terrorists. Throughout the show, Ramy inflicts only emotional pain upon himself and his loved ones, as he mumbles and meanders his way through one humiliating sexual episode after another without committing physical violence. He’s not an icon like Muhammad Ali or a villain like Osama bin Laden. He’s like a Muslim Portnoy — but with a deep love of faith, which only compounds his guilt and endless masochism.