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Georgina Maddox
A review of Jihad for Love
Parvez Sharma / 9 languages with English subtitles
81 minutes
Produced by Sandi DuBowski
Reinventing Jihad as a struggle of love over war and
reclaiming the identity of queer Muslims, Parvez Sharma
takes a leap of faith.
It was with baited breath and a few niggling doubts that
a segment of the city’s queer population and those ‘cool’
individuals who consider themselves queer-friendly,
gathered at the National Centre for Performing Arts,
Mumbai, to watch Parvez Sharma’s directorial venture
Jihad for Love, in January 2008. After all, such a daring film
on the Muslim gay and lesbian population had never been
screened in India and it was with a little trepidation that
people trooped in to watch the film.
Sharma and DuBowski had kept the event low profile, and
the press was kept out of it, a strategy that seemed to have
worked well, since there were no interruptions during or
after the screenings. Sharma’s five and a half year’s labour of
love, and personal Jihad went off without a hitch. After the
screening, Sharma made himself available for a chat with
his audience and there were both brickbats and bouquets.
While almost everyone loved Sharma’s brave endeavour
to tackle a subject as wide and difficult as this, some felt
that in his attempt to encapsulate several viewpoints he did
not give the viewers a chance to get into any one story
in-depth and they were left with a cursory understanding
with the dilemmas of being a religious Muslim who is also
a homosexual. Others were happy to see the inclusion of
lesbian voices, despite the fact that in the film, most of the
women were not comfortable facing the camera, while
most of the men were. Usually this inability to show faces
leads to a total exclusion of a woman’s point of view, but
Sharma’s dogged pursuit to include them shows up well in
the film. ‘I spent a lot of time with the women till they got
comfortable to speak on camera and it was a friendship that
lasted well beyond the film’, said Sharma.
The film moves across twelve countries, engages with nine
languages and has its fair share of cinematic moments, it
is an attempt in Sharma’s voice, to ‘look beyond a hostile
and war-torn present, the film se eks to reclaim the Islamic
concept of a greater Jihad, which can mean ‘an inner
struggle’ or ‘to strive in the path of God’. In doing so the
film and its remarkable subjects move beyond the narrow
concept of Jihad as holy war.’
We meet a young Mazen, who was beaten and arrested
when the police stormed the floating gay nightclub on the
Nile. We see his courage and defiance that overcomes the
public shaming at a trial on ‘habitual debauchery’, and after
four years in jail, he continues to embrace Islam and live
and love as a gay man, albeit in Paris away from his mother
and family.
At the very onset of the film we are introduced to the
radical and resilient Mushin Hendricks an Imam who was
cast out from his community and divorced by his wife when
he came out as gay. His little girls are, however, supportive
and loving and it is during this short visit of his life that we
learn that embracing Allah does not mean one cannot be
queer. In fact Hendricks has started a group that discusses
the possibilities of interpreting the holy texts differently.
‘All the people in my film are coming out as Muslims,’ says
the 34-year-old filmmaker who took a conscious decision
to not speak to atheists since the focus of the film was on
believers. ‘Islam is the heart of this film. They are proud to
be gay, but fundamentally they’re coming out as Muslims
and saying they’re as Muslim as anybody else, and their
Islam is as true as anybody else’s’. He also found that being
Muslim post 9/11 had very different connotations and to
see Islam depicted as a faith of violence was very difficult
for Sharma. The struggle is to follow the dictates of love
and not war.
We see that while the struggle for the men in the film has
been fraught with violence and hyper-visibility, the lesbians
have a harder time dealing with internalised homophobia
and invisibility. Maryam a Moroccan lesbian in Paris whose
partner lives in Egypt finds that she still feels the need to
be ‘punished’ for her sexuality and it was only till recently
she was able to use the term lesbian for the first time.
A contrasting voice comes through another couple of
older women who are out and visiting one of the women’s
mothers for dinner. There are others who proclaim their
love for God and their same sex partner in one breath, but
the indication that there is pressure and guilt underlying
these bold acts in some cases is brought out well through
not just the voices of the protagonists but the manner in
which these sections have been portrayed.
The India section is, however, disappointing. It begins
with a celebration of two Sufi saints who were openly
involved in a love relationship. It proceeds to show several
drag-queens getting ready for a mujra night and has a few
camera bites from some kothi boys who lead a dual life of
being married to women and continuing to have sexual
relations with other men. On the surface, India comes off
as a liberated and seemingly cool place to be gay. This, we
know is far from true. Indians are constantly encountering
homophobia, and the kind of violence and oppression that
occur as a result of being out, and this oversimplified film
segment does more damage than good to a film that is
otherwise quite comprehensive.
It is perhaps because Sharma himself had a secular
upbringing in India, where ‘Islam was all around me’. As
a gay man, he was acutely aware of his country’s stance
on homosexuality. But he chose not to march around
proclaiming his sexuality which is why things were fine.
‘India is a culture that tolerates same-sex behaviour in men
and women, but it can’t be in-your-face,’ says Sharma.
Perhaps that is yet another Jihad and yet another film.
Georgina Maddox is a creative writer, artist, musician and
maker of short films. She is currently working with the Indian
Express newspaper in Mumbai. Her art work has appeared in
queer magazines and she has performed as a singer/musician
in several cities in India. Her short film, Bombay Longing has
been screened all over India and the US. No Fixed Address
was screened at the World Social Forum in Mumbai.
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