Disgraced Essay Questions

In what ways is the setting of Disgraced significant?

The entirety of Disgraced takes place within Amir's spacious apartment, which is located in Manhattan's affluent Upper East Side neighborhood. An apartment in an area that houses some of the richest people in the world symbolizes Amir's success as an ambitious mergers and acquisitions lawyer. The symbolic setting is particularly significant given Amir's Muslim-minority background. As a first-generation American descendent of Pakistani immigrants of seemingly modest means, Amir has had to work especially hard to amass wealth and advance in his law firm's hierarchy. With his Upper East Side apartment, Amir's career success is represented in the material conditions of his daily life, and he appears to the audience to have attained the American dream—an exalted position from which he falls over the course of the play.

Disgraced ends with Amir looking at the portrait Emily painted of him. What is the significance of this final image?

Influenced by Diego Velázquez's Portrait of Juan de Pareja (1650), Emily decides at the beginning of the play to paint a portrait of Amir in which he strikes the same pose as de Pareja, who was Velázquez's his enslaved assistant. Emily creates the painting in response to an Islamophobic waiter who stared at Amir while the couple was out for dinner. To counter the mainstream American prejudice against men of Muslim backgrounds, Emily says she wants to depict Amir as a successful lawyer in his Manhattan apartment—the way she sees him. Even though he knows Emily has good intentions and that the original Velázquez painting showed his slave striking a dignified pose, Amir argues that it is "a little fucked up" that Emily's portrait likens him to a slave. Isaac adds to Amir's discomfort during the dinner party when he suggests that the portrait of Amir—like the original—leaves open the question of the subject's "place"; with this suggestion, Isaac implies that the appearance of having attained the sort of success that tends to imply dignity in American society has not necessarily been bestowed upon Amir. With the image of Amir staring into the portrait at the end of the play, once his career and marriage are over, Akhtar suggests that Amir is also unsure of his place in American society, and is likely wondering whether prejudice against his Muslim background led to his downfall, or if he was the architect of his own undoing.

Why does Amir spit in Isaac's face? Explain the significance of the gesture.

Toward the end of Scene 3, Amir and Isaac's animosity develops to the point that they face off as though they are about to fight. However, before either man throws a punch, Amir suddenly spits in Isaac's face, an action that brings an end to the fight and prompts Isaac to leave. The gesture of Amir spitting in Isaac's face symbolizes the antisemitism Amir's mother instilled in him and which he seems to have retained. In Scene 1, Amir tells the story of how his mother spat in his face when he was a teenager because she learned that his first crush was on a Jewish girl named Rivkah. Amir explains to Abe and Emily that he had harbored no particular animosity toward Jewish people, but his mother's cruel lesson stuck with him, and he in turn spat in Rivkah's face the next day at school. Amir tells the story to illustrate to Abe why he renounced his Muslim faith, which he associates with a hatred not just for Jews but for all of humanity. But despite his rejection of the lesson Amir's mother instilled, Amir spits in a Jewish man's face as an adult. With this motif, Akhtar implies that the antisemitic contempt Amir learned from his mother still lives in Amir.

What is significant about Amir's views on Islam?

Throughout Disgraced, Amir expresses a wholly negative opinion on Islam, pushing against Emily's and Isaac's embrace of Islamic traditional art forms with arguments that seek to paint Islam as a faith guided by anger and the Quran as "one very long hate-mail letter to humanity." Amir's views on Islam are ironic because they align with the prejudiced stereotyping of Islam that characterizes right-wing and largely white mainstream Western viewpoints on the religion in the post-9/11 era. Even though Amir is a man of South Asian descent who was raised Muslim, he puts forward a perspective on Islam that excludes the nuances of the faith and cultures associated with it. Amir's Islamophobia is informed in part by his negative personal experience of having grown up being taught lessons in cruelty from people like his mother, who threatened to break his bones when she discovered he was romantically interested in a Jewish girl. As the play goes on, Akhtar complicates Amir's views on Islam by having Amir reveal that he feels hateful aspects of Islam continuing to live deep within himself, despite his effort to root out the influence. Amir even admits that he felt a blush of pride when the Twin Towers fell because Islam was "finally winning." The confession prompts Isaac to call Amir a "closet jihadist," but the insult is an oversimplification. By establishing the contradictions inherent to Amir's identity, Akhtar introduces ambiguity in Amir's character. By the end of the play, the audience is left to question whether Amir's negative interpretation of Islam is a misdirected fear of a cruelty inherent to Amir himself—a cruelty he merely attributes to the faith he rejected.

What is the significance of the historical context in which Disgraced is set?

Disgraced is set in New York City in 2011 and 2012, a decade after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, which ushered in a new era of wide-scale fear of and prejudice against Muslims, and dramatically enhanced counter-terrorism measures. The shadow of 9/11 looms over each of the play's characters, but the impact of the traumatic event affects the Muslim characters most. While Imam Fareed is tried with little evidence under the Patriot Act (a law that greatly expanded the U.S. government's capacity to surveil, detain, and prosecute people suspected of being involved in terrorism), Abe and Amir both change their names to avoid Islamophobic scrutiny in their daily lives. The Islamophobia that pervades American culture during the war on terror leads Amir to worry that anti-Islam sentiment will derail his career path, as he knows that Muslim men are associated in the mainstream American collective consciousness with human-rights abuses and terrorism. Amir also resigns himself to the added scrutiny South Asian and Middle Eastern men face, giving himself over to airport authorities for questioning, which he justifies by saying, "The next terrorist attack is probably gonna come from some guy who more or less looks like me." Abe, however, gives up on hopes of assimilating into mainstream American society after Amir loses his job and marriage, and Imam Fareed loses his case. At the end of the play, Akhtar insinuates that Abe has become radicalized, inviting the audience to speculate about the extent to which young Muslims move toward extremism as a result of Western society treating them as though they are a threat.