Movies

Calling for “A Jihad for Love”

You know that director Parvez Sharma is serious about focusing on women in Islam when he opens his debut documentary, A Jihad for Love, with a lesbian couple at prayer. Kneeling in a mosque with their faces obscured on-screen, the pair implores Allah to “Protect us from committing acts you won’t forgive. Help us remove this desire and replace it with love.”

Neither utterly frustrated nor hopelessly conflicted, the women embody the timeless and universal question at the heart of A Jihad for Love: Why do humans long for acceptance from faiths, institutions and communities that reject them? In positing an answer as it relates to devout Muslims, director Sharma delivers a refreshingly lesbian-inclusive film that holds instructive value for anyone seeking a richer understanding of Islam, the world’s second largest and fastest growing religion.

Like other major belief systems, Islam exhibits a spectrum of views on homosexuality, from more widely acknowledged condemnation based on a few verses of the Qur’an and the Hadith, or sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, to lesser-known interpretations that allow space for same-sex love. Both perspectives drive A Jihad for Love, where ultimately, the glimmers of independent reasoning, or ijtihad, outshine the persistence of orthodoxy and make the film a hopeful viewing experience rather than a bleak exercise.

Billed as the first-ever feature documentary to explore the complex global intersections between Islam and homosexuality, the film took over five years and cost $2 million to complete. Sharma, an out gay Muslim, produced A Jihad for Love with Sandi Simcha DuBowski, director of Trembling Before G-d, the acclaimed 2001 documentary about gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews attempting to navigate their faith and sexuality.

A Jihad for Love is primarily a film about Islam created in response to the suspicion and outright hostility toward Muslims following Sept. 11, 2001. Even the title reflects a pointed effort to reclaim the word jihad, which in contrast to its inflammatory connotation in mainstream American media, for ordinary Muslims means the religious duty to “struggle” or “strive,” in a peaceful sense, toward improvement.

“There is a profound battle for the soul of Islam,” Sharma, 35, explained over the telephone from his home in New York City. “I was really concerned to make a film that would set the record straight about Islam. I took Islam’s most unlikely storytellers.”

Filmmaker Parvez Sharma

The cast of unusual suspects includes more than 10 gay and lesbian Muslims filmed in 12 countries and nine languages as they try to reconcile their religion and sexual orientation, with varying results and different degrees of disclosure. Notably, about half the film traverses lesbian landscapes, which the Indian-born Sharma covered as a print journalist for The Statesman in 1994, marking the first major newspaper presentation of lesbians within India. He remains committed to lesbian visibility now in his career as a filmmaker.

“I find that gay cinema has been in decline ever since the great films of the ’80s like The Times of Harvey Milk,” Sharma observed. “After that, the majority of gay cinema was focused on trash. I have been troubled by the inordinate focus on the sexual lives of gay men.”

As a screen remedy, Sharma unveils a diverse range of practicing Muslim women at different stages of acceptance with their sexual orientation. What they share is the struggle to accommodate both Islam and homosexuality in their lives.

Sana, a fiery 20-something survivor of female genital mutilation from Yemen, lives in Paris among the refugee diaspora, where she articulates feminist viewpoints, such as the observation that Mohammed approved women for political roles in the sixth century. Dressed in a black T-shirt with silver lettering that reads, “Au nom d’Allah J’aime les Femmes,” and with her face concealed, she finds a resolution for religious lesbians in the Muslim belief about the nature of God.

“If we know that God is benevolent, merciful and great,” she offers, “then God must have created us this way.”

 

More than 1,000 miles away in Istanbul, Ferda and Kiymet are an openly lesbian couple that takes solace in the Sufi traditions of the 13th-century mystic poet Rumi. Seemingly as well-adjusted as their nearly matching jackets and sweater sets, they make an anxious first visit to Ferda’s mother, and all three wind up joking about the lesbian prospects for her parrot, Lora, who has not laid an egg in 10 years.

However, even in secular Turkey, Sharma suspects that their unusual ease around him was prompted by the presence of a female cinematographer on his production team.

“In women’s lives these lines between public and private are clearly drawn,” he said. “It was hard for them to allow a man in their space. It doesn’t matter that I’m a gay man.”

A more alarming obstacle to filming and casting lesbians was the possibility of honor killings, committed against women whose candidness about their sexuality might bring shame to their families. In general, Sharma said he found his subjects through personal friends, the internet and the growing network of HIV/AIDS nonprofits that provide social connection in places where the gay and lesbian scene is not especially commercialized.

One lesbian couple contending with palpable fear and shame is Maha and Maryam, the lovers who appear at the opening of the film. Shuttling between their respective lives in Egypt and France for more than three years since the start of their relationship, they seem to consider their homosexuality an affliction that deserves a punitive response.

Together in a bookstore one day, they pore over a religious text that says lesbianism is forbidden in Islam, but because of the types of sexual acts it involves, the prescribed penalty is a mere scolding.

“I want to be punished,” said Maha, in a moment of unintended irony.

In contrast to lesbians’ private indignities, public abuse seems to be more closely associated with gay men in A Jihad for Love, a film that unflinchingly depicts welted skin, the cramped quarters of asylum seekers, and the ease with which some believers would cast the first stone.

In Cape Town, South Africa, where the openly gay Imam Muhsin Hendricks preaches an inclusive Islam, one caller to a radio show on which he appeared says, “I think Muhsin should be thrown off a mountain, or burned, or something like that,” before her virtual Valspeak erupts into a giggle.

Later, during a car ride, Muhsin tells his young children about his life and asks whether they believe he should be stoned for his behavior, and what they would say or do about that possibility.

“‘Oh, don’t let my daddy feel this, and just let him die one time with the first stone!'” suggests a tiny voice from the back seat.

As a gay Muslim filmmaker, however, Sharma seems more concerned with sparking education and conversation than he is worried about risks to his own life. He maintains a blog at www.ajihadforlove.blogspot.com expressly for the constructive purpose of what he calls “digital jihad.”

“I’ve had a few death threats,” he confirmed. “They usually arrive by email, and they usually come from people who haven’t seen the film.”

If the women in A Jihad for Love can offer any indication, it would seem that a more civil dialogue begins with an expansive understanding of love.

“Love is something powerful. It’s different,” says Maryam, in an effort to explain how her faith and sexual orientation co-exist. “To me, love is more important than sex.”

Watch the trailer for A Jihad for Love:

 

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