This article investigates how Islam is framed in mainstream English-language cinema through a computational analysis of film scripts. Drawing on a corpus of 2,858 scripts spanning multiple genres and decades, the study uses word embedding techniques to explore the semantic relationships surrounding the term “Islam.” Islam serves as the primary focus of analysis, with Christianity and Judaism included as comparative benchmarks necessary to establish the differential and asymmetric patterns of representation. The results reveal that Islam is frequently associated with themes of violence, governance, and ideology, in contrast to Christianity, which clusters with spirituality and personal faith, and Judaism, which aligns with historical and philosophical discourse. These script-level semantic patterns suggest that cinematic language situates Muslim identity within political or securitized frameworks rather than cultural or spiritual ones. The study frames its findings as preliminary linguistic indicators rather than definitive claims about filmic discourse in its full multimodal sense, and acknowledges that further qualitative and contextual analysis is required to establish the specific discursive mechanisms at work. The article contributes to the growing intersection of digital humanities, media representation studies, and religion-and-film scholarship.
Eid Mohamed (Tue,) studied this question.