ABC pulls TV show before it ever airs due to complaints from

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Alice in Arabia has been pulled from the ABC Family network following intense backlash. The show was about a teenager in Saudi Arabia who was living with her conservative Muslim grandfather against her will.

Muslim advocacy groups complained that the show was racist.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights organizations in the country, wrote a letter to ABC Family on Wednesday when the pilot was announced saying, “We are concerned that, given media references to the main character ‘surviving life behind the veil,’ the pilot and any resulting series may engage in stereotyping that can lead to things like bullying of Muslim students. As the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, we are concerned about the negative impact this program could have on the lives of ordinary Arab-American and American Muslims.”

ABC took the backlash seriously and sent out a statement confirming it had pulled “Alice in Arabia.”

“The current conversation surrounding our pilot was not what we had envisioned and is certainly not conducive to the creative process, so we’ve decided not to move forward with this project,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

ABC Family announced the series order for the Alice in Arabia pilot on Wednesday. The Council on American-Islamic Relations said that it had asked ABC Family to meet with Muslim and Arab-American community leaders to discuss concerns about potential stereotyping in the new series.

Although the group acknowledged that Brooke Eikmeier, the writer, had “noble intentions” for the story’s potential to give Arabs and Muslims a voice on television, it was still concerned about the negative impact the program could have on Arab-American Muslims.

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