By Ada Tseng

Gay and lesbian Muslims struggle to reconcile their homosexuality with their faith in Parvez Sharma's documentary A Jihad for Love.

Filmed in nine countries and twelve languages, A Jihad for Love presents a collage of personal stories, told from the perspective of gay and lesbian Muslims around the world.

The documentary starts out with a radio debate, and we hear Imam Muhsin Hendricks, a religious teacher who has come out publicly in South Africa, fielding calls from a community that has excommunicated him. Later, there's Mazen, who was recently released from prison after being one of 52 men arrested at a gay club in 2001 under Egypt's law against fujur/debauchery. Amir, Arsham, Payam, and Mojitaba are four refugees who fled Iran for fear of their own safety; they stay in Turkey until the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) decides their case, and they hope to eventually make it to Canada. The documentary also follows lesbian couples in Egypt and Turkey, and the camera goes to India, home of the second largest Muslim population, to document a Sunni Muslim and a Shia Muslim.

Because many in the Muslim community believe homosexuality is forbidden and condemned by the Qur'an, one might expect these subjects to renounce their religion. A Jihad for Love concentrates on the gay and lesbians who insist that there is a place for them in the Islam that they cherish. Sana, one of the women in the film maintains that it's tradition, not religion, that causes their detractors to think homosexuality is haram [sinful]. In many ways, the interviewees in director Parvez Sharma's documentary perservere precisely because of their faith.

With the title of the film, Sharma wanted to take the word "jihad," which the Western world has reappropriated to mean "holy war" or "an act of violence," and highlight its original meaning -- in literal Arabic, the term means "struggle" or "to strive in the path of God." In light of problematic representations of Islam post-September 11th, he wanted fight these stereotypes and talk about personal Jihads for love, Jihads for Islam, Jihads for family and community.

Many of the subjects are blurred, either for fear of their own safety or the safety of their families. Much of the documentary was filmed undercover with a hand-held camera, with Sharma pretending to be a tourist or AIDS charity worker. As A Jihad for Love has been making its way around the world, the director has encountered his share of hate mail, threats, and rejections, but he has also provided a forum for a community of people who are happy to finally have public voices and faces after years of being hidden.

APA speaks to director Parvez Sharma about A Jihad for Love.

Asia Pacific Arts: Your documentary took six and a half years to make and spans numerous countries. Can you start by telling me how you decided to approach this topic from the beginning?

Parvez Sharma: I think the documentary was conceptualized around Sept 11th.  I was just very troubled when Sept 11th happened. I was a new immigrant in this country, and I felt that the Islam that the media, that this administration, and that Osama bin Laden were talking about was not the Islam that I knew and had grown up with. I was very deeply and profoundly troubled by all of the discourse in the media about Islam, and it continues to trouble me until this day.

I felt that I needed to come out as a Muslim. I was already done coming out as a gay man when I was 17 or so. And coming out as a Muslim was a profound political act as a filmmaker. I decided to make a film that would tell the story of Islam from the point of view of the most unlikely storytellers -- which was gay and lesbian Muslims. And to expand on that, I thought it would be really beautiful intellectually and substantially different to talk about Islam from the point of view of its believer: the believers that are condemned by traditional orthodoxy, but continue to hold on to that belief.

APA: How did you choose your subjects and which countries to go to?

PS: I followed the people who allowed me access into their life, and that is how the geographical considerations were made. It wasn't political, because I was more interested in the deeply personal. I realized early on that I didn't want to make a film about spiritual warfare. I did not want to make a film about theological bickering, where talking heads endlessly debate and question each other about what is said or not said in the Qur'an. I wanted to make a film in which I confront theology with humanity. I think that was a significant challenge, but I think that's one of the strengths of the film.

APA: How long did you spend with each subject?

PS: Six and a half years, meeting them at different times, meeting them over and over again. For example, I met Mazen in the beginning of the shooting -- now it's almost seven and a half years ago -- and when I first met him, he did not want to show his face, and you see that in the film. And it was only after two years of talking to him and trust-building that he turns around and faces the camera. So that is the kind of nurturing relationships that I had to engage in with these people. And I think that was the greatest challenge. More than the physical dangers of filming, it was the interpersonal interactions. It was about going into what was so invisible and making it visible.

Any documentarian that says they make fly-on-the-wall documentaries about the human experience, I think are bullshitting. You have to have the deeply personal relationship with your subject. In fact, my biggest battle was with the camera, because the camera was my tool, but all the time I was engaged in the battle to make the camera invisible. I almost wished it not to be there. I was fighting my own camera so I could have more access to my subjects, and to establish a relationship where the camera is present in the room but doesn't matter anymore.

APA: In one of the segments, you follow four refugees as they flee Iran.

PS: Yes, they were providing one of the dramatic arcs of the film because I realized that theirs would be a complete journey. So I decided to follow the journey. You meet them very early on in the film, and you meet them again when they're getting ready to leave, and only two of them make it to Canada. Two of them get left behind, which is where our on-screen interaction with them ends. So it was an interesting, deeply emotional, very private yet very external journey to film. The pain of leaving their homeland is very intense, and I think that speaks to the immigrant experience. It doesn't matter which religion or which country you come from, but that pain of leaving the homeland is very universal to many people. And what was interesting to me was that in spite of everything, they retain a strong patriotism or nationalist feeling towards Iran. And they talk about Iran with a great deal of emotion.

APA: It seems like that is related to the general perspective you wanted to show with the film: how all of your subjects are very proud of Islam and where they come from, despite it all.

PS: I think that coming out as Muslim in a post-September 11th world, for everybody, is an act of tremendous courage. Because I think right now, there is a battle that is being fought on many different fronts. And I think that the subjects of this film exemplify the battle in a very profound way, which is from the place of deep faith.

APA: Did you get advice from producer Sandi Simcha Dubowski [who had previously made Trembling Before G-d, about gay and lesbian Orthodox and Hasidic Jews]?

PS: I asked him to be a producer on the film because I had admired the film that he had directed tremendously. As a filmmaker, as a brown filmmaker, as a Muslim in an industry that has been dominated by white people, I would have not have had the doors of access opened to me if he were not there. I think a lot of the documentary film industry in this country is unfairly dominated by white people. There are not enough black filmmakers, there are not enough Asian filmmakers, and there are certainly no Muslim filmmakers, so people like me who enter this very white-dominated culture of filmmaking find it harder to get access to the people who fund our films, and therefore it's very important to have a producer like Sandi, because he is an immense and remarkable fundraiser and he opened those doors for me. And I'm very sure that, on my own, those doors would have been shut to me. And that's one of my major preoccupations: changing the unfair racial dynamic of the film industry. I think it's going to take a lot of time.

APA: Have there been Muslim filmmakers that have recently gotten success or funding for their films?

PS: In the States? No, not really. You have a Hindu filmmaker like Mira Nair who's married to a Muslim man. And God knows it's taken her long enough to establish a place and a niche for herself. There are Muslim filmmakers, but I think I have been one of the most fortunate in getting funded. Look at the credits of the film. And the others who exist have had to struggle tremendously to pick up the camera. But I think there's a lot of hunger in this country now to see films about Islam made from an Islamic land. Films about Muslims made by Muslims. But to actually get to the point of funding to completion still remains a challenge, unless you have a producer like I did who will open doors. There are gatekeepers in this industry.

APA: Through traveling with this film, have you been meeting more filmmakers that share this passion of breaking these barriers?

PS: Oh absolutely. I hear it all the time. I speak a lot to people in this industry and get a lot of emails, and yeah, people understand this struggle. People understand the weight that the color of your skin puts upon you. People understand what it means to be an immigrant in this country post-Sept 11th. I am not a US citizen, and I did this film as a non-US citizen, going to all these countries with an Indian passport and there were a lot of challenges.

APA: I'm wondering -- with an Indian passport, are there certain countries where you'll get easier access and certain ones where it'll be more difficult?

PS: No, Indians are very discriminated against because they're looked at as a huge immigrant group. It's always hard to get visas to go anywhere [laughs]. But at the same time, when it came to meeting Muslims, the way I look in Muslim countries, the invisibility I had... If I had been a white, blonde, blue-eyed American, I would stand out on the streets more than I did.

APA: So even though it was challenge, it took someone like you -- that looked like you, that came from your background -- to tell this particular story.

PS: Absolutely. Without a doubt. I would not have gotten the kind of access that I got into people's lives. I enabled them to be vulnerable in front of my camera because I came from where they came from. I don't think enough Muslims are picking up the cameras to tell the stories of Islam as they understand the religion.

I'm very critical of this genre of Iraq films that has emerged. I'm tired of seeing these films about Iraq made by people who live in New York and LA who have no experience whatsoever. You attack a country and then you descend by the plane route with your camera to film the spoils of war. This happened in Afghanistan and this happened in Iraq, and it's deeply troubling because the genre of filmmaking that has emerged from that -- not all of them, but for the most part -- has been incredibly shallow. It looks at these cases in the world through an American lens, without covering the knowledge of history, without really understanding that these are civilizations that precede America by thousands of years. So I would want more Iraqis to pick up cameras to make more films about their country and their occupation.

Published: Friday, August 8, 2008