Disgraced

Disgraced, by Ayad Akhtar, premiered in Chicago in 2012. Later that year, the play opened Off-Broadway at Lincoln Center. Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2013, opened on the West End in 2014, and made its Broadway premiere in 2015. Like the main character, Amir Akhtar is the son of Pakistani-American immigrants and was born in the United States. His work addresses the experience of being Muslim in America and the way Islamophobia has become integrated into American culture since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Disgraced received critical acclaim as well as the Obie Award for Playwriting in 2013 and a nomination for the Best Play Tony Award in 2015.

The play confronts western views of Islam, both romanticized exotification and prejudice. Disgraced asks how three major world religions—Islam, Christianity, and Judaism—instill and ingrain values that can create cultural bias, and the way the lens of our religious upbringing affects the way we view the world. The “disgrace” of the title refers to both the shame within the Muslim religion inflicted on those who separate from the faith and the shame that occurs in western society that demands that followers of Islam defer to and make up for the unsavory aspects of the western stereotypes associated with the religion.