Secret identities: Osama, Dust, Ms. Marvel and the Muslim girls who had to hide

In June 2002, Siddiq Barmak began filming Osama in Kabul, with a girl he had found begging on the city's streets in the lead role. Six months later, in December 2002, Marvel published a comic that introduced a new mutant: Sooraya Qadir, a girl from Kandahar who could turn her body into a storm of sand. A few months before that, in August 2002, a baby named Iman Vellani was born in Karachi. Twenty years on she would play Ms. Marvel.

None of these stories knew about the others. Yet all three turn on the same question: what does it mean for a Muslim girl to hide who she is, and who decides when the mask comes off?

The real disguise: bacha posh

Before any screenwriter imagined it, the disguise existed in Afghan homes. Bacha posh, a phrase usually translated as “dressed up as a boy”, describes the practice of a family choosing a daughter to live as a son. She cuts her hair, wears boys' clothes and takes a boy's name. In return she can go to school, run errands, work and walk the streets without a male escort.

The reasons are practical. Families without a son face social pressure and lose a pair of hands that can earn money outside the home. The arrangement usually ends at puberty, when passing as a boy becomes difficult. The journalist Jenny Nordberg documented the practice at length in her 2014 book The Underground Girls of Kabul.

Osama: a disguise forced by hunger

Barmak took the idea for Osama from a newspaper report he read in Peshawar about a girl who dressed as a boy to go to school under the Taliban. He changed one detail that changes everything: his heroine does it to get a job, because the men of her family are dead and women are forbidden to work.

The girl does not choose her mask. Her mother and grandmother cut her hair, and a street boy gives her the name Osama. The disguise holds only until her body betrays it, and when the Taliban discover her secret she is handed over as a wife to an old mullah. Barmak had written a hopeful ending in which she walks under a rainbow, then threw it out because, as he put it, “it felt like lying”.

Osama won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film in 2004 and made its young star, Marina Golbahari, briefly famous around the world. Her own story, including the threats that later drove her into exile, is told on our page about women in Afghan cinema.

Dust: Marvel's Afghan mutant

Marvel's answer to the same moment was very different. Sooraya Qadir, known as Dust, was created by the writer Grant Morrison and the artist Ethan Van Sciver and first appeared in December 2002. She is a Pashtun Muslim from Kandahar. Her mutant power surfaces when slave traders try to pull away her niqab: her body dissolves into a cloud of sand that tears into her attackers.

She is rescued by Wolverine and Fantomex and taken to the Xavier Institute, the school for young mutants run by Professor Charles Xavier, where she becomes one of the students at the heart of the books of the following years. Unusually for American comics of the time, her faith is treated as part of who she is rather than a problem to be solved: she keeps wearing her abaya and niqab among classmates who wear almost anything. The critic Peter Eckhardt called her one of the most positive representations of Muslim women in speculative fiction.

Dust's covering works almost like a superhero costume, but she never wears it to hide from the people she lives among. The secret in her story belongs to her powers, not to her gender. Still, her origin repeats a familiar shape: an Afghan girl in danger and a Western hero who arrives to save her.

The Breadwinner: the disguise as a fairy tale

Fifteen years after Osama, the same situation reached a family audience. The Breadwinner (2017), an animated film by Nora Twomey of the Irish studio Cartoon Saloon, adapts Deborah Ellis's 2001 novel. Its heroine, Parvana, is eleven years old and lives in Kabul under the Taliban. When her father is arrested, she cuts her hair, takes the name Atesh and goes out to earn money as a boy.

The plot is close to Osama's, but the tone is not. Parvana tells herself a story within the story, a fable about a boy who confronts an elephant king, and the film moves between her dangerous days in the market and that brightly painted tale. Angelina Jolie served as executive producer, Twomey cast voice actors of Afghan heritage and worked with a dialect coach born in Kabul, and the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Seen together, the two films show what each medium could carry. Barmak, filming in a city still in ruins, refused to promise an escape. Twomey, working with animation and a younger audience in mind, gave her heroine a story she could use to survive.

Kamala Khan: a mask she chooses

When Marvel launched a new Ms. Marvel series in February 2014, the hero under the mask was Kamala Khan, a Pakistani American teenager from Jersey City. Created by a team that included the editors Sana Amanat and Stephen Wacker, the writer G. Willow Wilson and the artist Adrian Alphona, she was the first Muslim character to headline her own Marvel series. Amanat said the idea was to explore the Muslim American diaspora from an authentic perspective. The first collected volume, Ms. Marvel: No Normal, won the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story in 2015, and by 2018 the series had sold half a million paperback collections.

Kamala reverses the pattern of Osama. Nobody forces a disguise on her; she picks her costume herself, and what she hides is her power, not her gender. Her double life is also a cultural one: she moves between her family, her mosque and her school, and the comic treats that balancing act as ordinary teenage life rather than a tragedy.

In June 2022 the character reached the screen in Ms. Marvel, a six episode Disney+ series created by the head writer Bisha K. Ali. Kamala was played by Iman Vellani, the girl born in Karachi in 2002 and raised in Markham, Ontario, in her first professional role. She returned in the feature film The Marvels, directed by Nia DaCosta and released in November 2023.

From documentary to Marvel: Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy

The series also brought a South Asian documentary filmmaker into the Marvel machine. Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, born in Karachi in 1978, had spent her career on hard subjects. Her film Children of the Taliban, made for the PBS series Frontline World, looked at the effect of extremism on young people in Pakistan. She won two Academy Awards for documentary short films: Saving Face (2012), about women attacked with acid, and A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness (2016), about so called honour killings. Accepting the second Oscar, she said that Pakistan's prime minister had promised to change the law after watching the film: “That is the power of film.”

For Ms. Marvel she directed the last two episodes, becoming the first Pakistani director to work for Marvel Studios. Her episode “Time and Again”, written by Fatimah Asghar and released on 6 July 2022, sends Kamala back to the Partition of India in 1947, when the creation of India and Pakistan displaced millions of people. Obaid Chinoy said she worked from photographs of Partition and avoided the yellow color filter that Hollywood often uses for South Asia. Bisha K. Ali has explained that the team wanted to show a history that shapes families like Kamala's yet is largely missing from Western classrooms and screens.

The production could not film in Pakistan; Bangkok and studios in Thailand stood in for both India and Pakistan, with further shooting in Atlanta. It is a small reminder that even a story told from the inside is often shot somewhere else.

Four heroines side by side

What changed between Osama and Ms. Marvel

The distance from Osama to Ms. Marvel is not only the distance from an arthouse film to a superhero franchise. It is a shift in who holds the story. In 2003 the most powerful portrait of a disguised Muslim girl came from an Afghan man directing untrained actors in a city that had just emerged from war. Marvel's Afghan heroine of the same period was written and drawn by outsiders, however sympathetic. By 2022, a story about a Muslim girl with a secret was being written and directed largely by women of South Asian Muslim heritage.

What did not change is the reason the disguise matters. In every one of these stories, the mask exists because the world is not safe for the girl underneath it. In Osama that danger is literal and wins. In Ms. Marvel it is something a teenager can fight and survive. The real women who made films in Afghanistan after 2001, many of them now in exile, know better than anyone which of those two endings their country has lived.

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