New Approaches to Islam in Film 9780815393221, 9780367723408, 9781351189156

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NEW APPROACHES TO ISLAM IN FILM

Edited by Kristian Petersen

Routledge Studies in Religion and Film

NEW APPROACHES TO ISLAM IN FILM Edited by Kristian Petersen

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16-03-2021 17:47:15

New Approaches to Islam in Film

Many global flm industries fail in expanding the role of Muslims on screen. Too often they produce a dichotomy between “good” and “bad” Muslims, limiting the narrative domain to issues of national security, war, and terrorism. Naturally, much of the previous scholarship on Muslims in flm focused on stereotypes and the politics of representation. This collection of chapters, from an international panel of contributors, signifcantly expands the boundaries of discussion around Muslims in flm, asking new questions of the archive and magnifying analyses of particular cultural productions. The volume includes the exploration of regional cinemas, detailed analysis of auteurs and individual flms, comparison across global cinema, and new explorations that have not yet entered the conversation. The interdisciplinary collection provides an examination of the multiple roles Islam plays in flm and the various ways Muslims are depicted. Across the chapters, key intersecting themes arise that push the limits of how we currently approach issues of Muslims in cinema and ventures to lead us in new directions for future scholarship. This book adds new depth to the matrix of previous scholarship by revisiting methodological structures and sources, as well as exploring new visual geographies, transnational circuits, and approaches. It reframes the presiding scholarly conventions in fve novel trajectories: considering new sources, exploring new communities, probing new perspectives, charting new theoretical directions, and ofering new ways of understanding confict in cinema. As such, it will be of great use to scholars working in Islamic Studies, Film Studies, Religious Studies, and Media. Kristian Petersen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Old Dominion University, USA.

Routledge Studies in Religion and Film Edited by Robert K. Johnston and Jolyon Mitchell

The Silents of Jesus in the Cinema (1897–1927) Edited by David J. Shepherd The Holy Fool in European Cinema Alina G. Birzache Divine Film Comedies Biblical Narratives, Film Sub-Genres, and the Comic Spirit Terry Lindvall, J. Dennis Bounds and Chris Lindvall Hermeneutic Humility and the Political Theology of Cinema Blind Paul Sean Desilets Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick Edited by Christopher B. Barnett and Clark J. Elliston Noah as Antihero Darren Aronofsky’s Cinematic Deluge Edited by Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch and Jon Morgan Transcendence and Spirituality in Chinese Cinema A Theological Exploration Kris H.K. Chong New Approaches to Islam in Film Edited by Kristian Petersen For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ religion/series/RSIRAF

New Approaches to Islam in Film Edited by Kristian Petersen

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Kristian Petersen; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kristian Petersen to be identifed as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-815-39322-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-72340-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-35118-915-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Contributors 1 Reframing the study of Muslims and Islam in flm

vii 1

KRISTIAN PETERSEN

PART I

New sources 2 Race, torture porn, and the menacing Black Muslimness of Five Fingers

11 13

MIKA’IL A. PETIN

3 Muhammad as a synthesis of meditation and action: a 1932 screenplay by Nikos Kazantzakis

27

PANAYIOTA MINI

4 Being a (Muslim) worker in the Egyptian flm industry

41

CHIHAB EL KHACHAB

PART II

New communities 5 Puerto Rican Muslims in post-9/11 documentaries: authenticity, cultural identity, and communal belonging

53 55

YAMIL AVIVI

6 Performing identities: intersections of Muslim sexuality, gender, and race in Touch of Pink and Shades of Ray AMAN AGAH

70

vi

Contents

PART III

New perspectives 7 “Oh, what if we call him Allah?” ambiguous orientalism in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Crusades

81 83

DAVID BLANKE

8 Mystics in the movies: Sufsm in global cinema

96

EMILY JANE O’DELL

9 Depicting Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) without showing him

123

BILAL YORULMAZ

PART IV

New directions

137

10 “I Can Take Your Eyes”: re-envisioning religion and gender in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

139

MEGAN GOODWIN

11 Negotiating borders, gender, and identity: a transnational feminist study of an Iranian documentary

148

NAJMEH MORADIYAN-RIZI

12 Film as a scene of “Rupture”: religion, gender, and rights in Muslim communities

161

MILJA RADOVIC

PART V

New understandings of confict

179

13 Islam, gender, and extremist violence in contemporary Egyptian cinema

181

CLARISSA BURT

14 Citizenship, ethnicity, and religion: Muslim immigrants in German cinematic arts

196

ANNA AYSE AKASOY

15 Together in the midst of war: Muslim and Christian coexistence in Lebanese cinema

210

SÉRGIO DIAS BRANCO

Index

222

Contributors

Aman Agah is Adjunct Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies, Global Studies, and Religious Studies at UNC Charlotte, USA. Anna Ayse Akasoy is Professor of Islamic Intellectual History, Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA. Yamil Avivi is an Independent Scholar, University of Michigan, Department of American Culture, USA. David Blanke is Professor of History in the Department of Humanities at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, USA. Sérgio Dias Branco is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. Clarissa Burt is Associate Professor of Arabic Language, Literature and Culture, United States Naval Academy, USA. Chihab El Khachab is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, England. Megan Goodwin is Program Director of Sacred Writes: Public Scholarship on Religion, a Henry Luce-funded project hosted by Northeastern University, USA. Panayiota Mini is Associate Professor of Film History, Department of Philology, University of Crete, Greece. Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi is Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of Kansas, USA. Emily Jane O’Dell is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute, People’s Republic of China. Kristian Petersen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Old Dominion University, USA.

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Contributors

Mika’il A. Petin is an Independent Scholar, Chief of Diversity, Equity  & Inclusion at All Hands and Hearts – Smart Response, USA. Milja Radovic is Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Bilal Yorulmaz is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Marmara University, Turkey.

1

Reframing the study of Muslims and Islam in flm Kristian Petersen

The academic study of Muslims and Islam in flm has developed into a rich interdisciplinary subfeld. New Approaches to Islam in Film builds on this critical scholarship by ofering several chapters that add innovative perspectives on the subject. Our coverage includes the exploration of regional cinemas, detailed analysis of auteurs or individual flms, comparison across global cinema, and new explorations that have not yet entered the conversation. The interdisciplinary collection provides an examination of the multiple roles Islam plays in flm and the various ways Muslims are depicted. Across the chapters, key intersecting themes arise that push the limits of how we currently approach issues of Muslims in cinema and ventures to lead us in new directions for future scholarship. Due to the wide array of contexts through which scholars explore this subject, there is no singular point of departure or distinct intellectual path that focuses on the study of Muslims and Islam in flm. The epistemological architecture behind this research comes from a variety of disciplinary domains and is constructed by the particular idiosyncratic assumptions and objectives of those felds. Giving central attention to the ways religious norms, practices, or ideologies structure and defne flmmaking and spectatorship occurs at varying degrees by authors, even when analysis concentrates on the depiction of Muslim subjects or in cases where flmmakers are producing cinema in Muslim social contexts. In fact, very few authors prioritize the category “Islam” as an analytical framework for the study as a whole.1 All these approaches, coming from Media Studies, Political Science, or Religious Studies, bring their methodological expertise to the subject, which helps yield diverse and well-rounded perspectives. This matrix of scholarship has provided a durable framework that can now be expanded on through both renovation of initial methodological structures and sources and exploring new visual geographies, transnational circuits, and approaches. Our volume reframes the presiding conventions of this scholarship in fve novel analytical trajectories: considering new sources, exploring new communities, probing new perspectives, charting new theoretical directions, and ofering new ways of understanding confict in cinema.

2

Kristian Petersen

New sources Film scholarship frequently employs cinema as a “text” to be read. The extensive flm archive provides readers with numerous overlooked examples to examine where Islam plays an integral part in shaping the narrative of the story. However, other types of sources, such as screenplays or flm sets, can further enhance the study of flm sphere. Several authors in this volume explore novel sources to see how Muslims fgure into cinema, flm narratives, and production. Mika’il A. Petin explores a signifcant but unstudied American flm, Five Fingers (Laurence Malkin, 2006), which conforms to many Hollywood stereotypes about Muslims but simultaneously subverts some of them through issues of race. The flm takes place in the context of the “War on Terror” and utilizes many of the established tropes about far-of Muslim lands and exotic people. However, the heart of the narrative alters the expected racial confguration of “terrorist” and “counter-terrorist,” moving from the recurrent racialized Arab Muslim and white protagonist to a white Dutch insurgent being interrogated by a Black Muslim. Black Muslims in America were portrayed as the original extremist community, especially through mainstream programs such as The Hate That Hate Produced (Mike Wallace and Louis Lomax, 1959), which frightened white American viewers as they were introduced to Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam.2 Black Muslims were gradually displaced by “Brown” Muslims, racialized Arab, Persian, and South Asian communities, as those who should be distrusted in the American social imaginary.3 Petin explores how this exchange is made possible through the inversion of terrorist and interrogator in Five Fingers, which utilized the threat of Black Muslims as a form of justifcation for U.S. unlawful detention and torture. Another novel source for thinking about the history of Muslims in flm is the 1932 screenplay of Nikos Kazantzakis’ never-produced picture Mohammed. Panayiota Mini introduces readers to the famous Greek novelist who is well known to moviegoers because of adaptations of his 1946 Zorba the Greek (directed by Michael Cacoyannis in 1964) and the 1955 The Last Temptation of Christ (directed by Martin Scorsese in 1988). Mini demonstrates the cultural reservoirs Kazantzakis draws from when constructing his screenplay using a genealogical approach to plot the aesthetic, intellectual, and narrative components of Mohammed. In the flm, Muhammad would be framed within the great hero tradition, embodying a divine intuition, and shown to ardently fght for his beliefs and on behalf of his community of believers. Kazantzakis’ narrative and visuals were infuenced by folks such as Thomas Carlyle and Henry Bergson, as well as French Impressionists. The case study is a unique example for thinking about non-Muslim depictions of Muhammad that fall outside of polemical indignation over the permissibility of picturing the Prophet.4 It shows how one’s social position greatly shapes how Muhammad is to be understood, and how his subjectivity speaks diferently to particular times, places, or audiences.

Reframing the study of Muslims in flm

3

Finally, we move from on screen to on the ground to see how Islam informs the flmmaking process. Chihab El Khachab provides a rich ethnographic account of Muslim technical workers on the sets of the Egyptian flm industry to consider how religion afects the practical creation of flm, the industrial cycle of releases, and the possible social limits for flm practitioners.5 Egypt has the most commercially successful Arabic-language cinema in the world and its transnational circulation makes Egyptian cinema consequential globally.6 El Khachab shows how Islamic holidays that are part of the Egyptian public sphere organize when scripts must be completed, the speed at which scenes need to be flmed, and when movies hit screens for audiences. He also explores the ethical grounding for personal engagement that many workers navigate when they fnd themselves in social dilemmas. For many Egyptians, the production and consumption of flm are antithetical to religious sensibilities and public norms. Some flm workers fnd their economic livelihood at odds with their own understanding of what may be good and permissible behavior.7 In the end, El Khachab shows that for workers in the Egyptian flm industry being Muslim has a wide spectrum of meanings, each with their own attending personal convictions, social norms, and limits.

New communities Another turn the volume takes is to introduce cinema that depicts Muslim populations that are often not seen in media. The diversity of the global ummah makes for unlimited possibilities when telling the stories of the community. These chapters explore groups that for many public audiences are unexpected members of the tradition. This type of work helps extend the boundaries of what we mean when approaching Islam in flm. A growing population of U.S. Muslims are Latino. While this population is still small compared to other racial groups, they are beginning to get some representation in flm.8 More particularly, reframed outside of the context of previous depictions in prison, Latino Muslims are featured in documentary flms about the daily life of Muslims in America. In New Muslim Cool (Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, 2009) and A Son’s Sacrifce (Yoni Brook, 2007), viewers get a glimpse of everyday life for both second-generation and convert Muslims. Yamil Avivi places these narratives within the contexts of racial stereotypes, familial obligations and expectations, heritage language learning, and the quotidian efects of the “War on Terror.” He shows how notions of Latino masculinity in these examples are tied to motherhood as a cultural force shaping children’s lives, since both subject’s mothers are Puerto Rican and Christian. The ostensible tension between their Muslim identity and their familial heritage is played out through discussion of authenticity and belonging. Avivi skillfully reveals how the “true life” presented through documentary realism is also structured in particular ways, which highlights some aspects of Latino Muslims identity but obscures other important

4

Kristian Petersen

aspects. While incomplete in presenting the expanse of Latino Muslim life, the flms disturb static notions of Muslim identity as being rooted in particular racial and ethnic groups. Another understudied population in the study of Islam in flm is LGBTQ Muslims.9 We should not say that the dearth of scholarship is due to the relative absence of feature flms focused on the lives of Queer Muslims, of which we can consider Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz, 2011), L’Armée du Salut (Salvation Army, Abdellah Taïa, 2013), Naz  & Maalik (Jay Dockendorf, 2015), Signature Move (Jennifer Reeder, 2017), The Wedding (Sam Abbas, 2018), or Breaking Fast (Mike Mosallam, 2020). Aman Agah explores the depictions of Muslim sexuality through flms that critique and question heteronormativity within Muslim cultures, specifcally Touch of Pink (Ian Iqbal Rashid, 2004) and Shades of Ray (Jafar Mahmood, 2008). They show how Muslim masculinity disturbs social expectations in the white-dominant spaces of Europe and North America. This disruption is further amplifed through the queering of the cinematic structures of the romantic comedy genre. Agah’s theory of performative queerness to counter-dominant social norms and genre expectations establishes an interpretive juncture useful for future analysis of LGBTQ Muslims in flm.

New perspectives Other chapters in the volume take new perspectives on subjects that are seemingly familiar within the study of Islam in flm, but these authors mark out exciting unexplored terrains. Returning to subjects of central importance, these chapters provide new ways of thinking about the mythic power of events, the social and political utility of tradition, and the deployment of visuality in biographical depictions. David Blanke turns to Cecil B. DeMille, a longtime favorite in Cinema Studies,10 to investigate how Muslims are portrayed in his 1935 flm The Crusades, which one would assume would align with the tropes of its day.11 While orientalist in many of its visual depictions and framed within the context of martial confict between Christians and Muslims, DeMille infused his picture with an ecumenical spirit. For the director, the benefcent kernel of Islam is staged through the personality of Saladin, who embodies a common spiritual quest despite his historical dispute with European Christians. The chapter marks how the subjects’ motives, dialogue, and symbolism are ambiguous and do not allow the audience to come to a clear resolution about how they should feel about each side of the confict. Blanke also places the flm within the personal factors shaping DeMille’s life and universalist attitude toward religions, as well as the economic and foreign policy goals of the United States following the Second World War. Blanke persuades readers to look past apparent defcits that are easily noted in order to rethink the flmic archive in nuanced ways.

Reframing the study of Muslims in flm

5

Emily Jane O’Dell focuses on Sufsm not as a neatly defned social or intellectual entity but rather as a cultural repertoire of practices, dispositions, symbols, and spiritual results. She explores a wide range of global cinema that uses Sufsm as a foating signifer to organize social, political, or religious meanings. Films from Africa, Eurasia, and Southeast Asia often use the potentiality of Suf practices or principles to disrupt dominant social norms, whether confronting ableism, patriarchy, classism, or other social marginalization. O’Dell argues that Suf aesthetics and narratives enable communities to form around shared organizing ideals that are denied in broader publics. Some of the flmmakers use Sufsm as means to counter the stereotypical essentialization of Islam as inherently violent in EuroAmerican contexts. It is also imagined in ways that interrupt nationalist and imperialist constructions of the role of Islam for modern Muslim subjects. O’Dell’s creative conceptualization of Sufsm as a symbolic device serving flmmakers can be applied in future thematic contexts with similar success. The fnal chapter in this section addresses the subject of biographical cinema that depicts Muhammad.12 Instead of placing these flms within the context of iconoclasm and modern-day polemics, Bilal Yorulmaz traces the long heritage of prophetic portraiture and visualization to help us understand contemporary flmmaking techniques as a continuation of this artistic tradition.13 Medieval Islamic art generates an established interpretive matrix that enables us to draw new conclusions about how Muhammad can be depicted in flm. After cataloging the various methods that artists historically used to capture the personality and perfection of Muhammad, Yorulmaz demonstrates how the two most famous biopics, Moustapha Akkad’s The Message (1976) and Majid Majidi’s Muhammad: The Messenger of God (2015), replicate these strategies on screen. This innovative approach opens up a new horizon when thinking about cinematic technique and the depiction of Muslims in flm.

New directions Some of our authors have sowed fertile new interpretive ground that will provide future scholars with hearty intellectual nourishment. These chapters ofer rich analysis with theoretical sophistication and methodological skill. Collectively, they bring together various strands from feminist scholarship, transnational theory, political theology, and flm studies to map out new directions for thinking about the relationships between cinema and Muslims, both on the screen and in the social world. Our frst chapter taking us in new directions explores a number of apparent and hidden contradictions. Megan Goodwin provides a penetrating analysis of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014), the frst “Iranian Vampire Western.” The flm crosses space by displacing its location, neither Tehran or L.A. nor anywhere in between. It provides an active feminism while rejecting the Western framework for feminist struggles

6

Kristian Petersen

and centers around a Muslim protagonist who does not personally account for any religion. Goodwin uses the flm to consider the constructed graphic image of Muslim women in American imagination, which designates her as weak and lacking agency. While historically Muslims have been formulated as monstrous in popular culture, Amirpour employs a visual Muslim monster as a means for demolishing patriarchy and misogyny. Goodwin provides a blueprint for deconstructing a broader social context from the details of cinematic representation. Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi also equips readers with a new orientation when thinking about even well-trodden territories. Her terrain is postrevolutionary Iranian cinema, which has a robust body of scholarship already,14 specifcally flms focused on Afghan refugees and migrants. Even this seemingly narrow subject has been the focus of a great number of flms, such as Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The Cyclist (1987), Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997), or Majid Majidi’s Baran (2001). Moradiyan-Rizi introduces the reader to the well-known documentary flm Sonita (Rokhsareh Ghaem-Maghami, 2015), which follows the story of a teenage girl who rejects her parents’ arranged marriage for her and channels her angst through music. She employs a transnational feminist approach to help the reader grasp how Sonita disturbs rigid notions of Iranian national identity and breaks gendered social expectations. The documentary reveals the power of female alliances and how gender politics structures one’s subjectivity much more than geography. Moradiyan-Rizi provides sharp analytical tools to understand how identity is forged due to displacement and mobility while crossing the circulation of global popular media. Finally, Milja Radovic provides readers with new vocabulary for talking about the transformative power of flm for communicating new forms of political practice and mediating self-representation.15 We are encouraged to consider flm as a scene of “rupture,” through which flmmakers produce a creative expression of novel politics. This aesthetic and narrative rupture interrupts existing social norms and invites the audience to replicate the flm’s principles in their own local context. The open-ended nature of this flmmaking furnishes viewers with the opportunity to become activist citizens because the creators claim rights for underserved communities that require advocacy. The potentiality of such a cinematic practice has enormous possibility in reshaping cultural traditions. Radovic explores this argument with special attention on the intersection of gender and religious practice as they inform the rights of citizens, shape legal patterns, and answer public demands.

New understandings of confict The fnal section of the volume takes up the theme of confict, cultural and religious, violent and dialogical, as a way of rethinking the role of Muslims in the cinematic arts. Frequently, Muslims in flm are depicted as inherently savage and excessively brutal, characteristics that are implicitly or explicitly

Reframing the study of Muslims in flm

7

tied to narrow, and often incomplete, understandings of Islamic theology. These authors challenge these restricted depictions to examine sites of confict as a productive force that unsettles spectator assumptions rooted in clichés and forces them to contend with the origins of social friction. Through an analysis of specifc zones of dispute within national, social, and political conditions, we can come to new conclusions about how genre, narrative, or imagery shape understandings of confict. The frst chapter tackles this subject through one of its most extreme forms – violent terrorism. Clarissa Burt locates her analysis in the social world of Egypt and the range of interpretations of Islam found in the country that are conveyed in several flms. The features examined outline the conditions that make violence appealing, how it is perpetrated, and its consequences in local communities. Burt demonstrates how flmmakers use comedy, drama, and tragedy to reveal contrary positions about the utility and power of violence to efect social change. She shows that the Egyptian struggle with violence is rooted in opportunities for youth, gendered social expectations, sexual norms, stifed economic success, and governmental inadequacy in advancing the quality of life in Egypt. Burt helps readers understand how cinematic depictions of terrorist violence reveal new ways of thinking about Muslim identity, piety, and theological values. Another approach is to think about the potential of cultural confict in flm. Anna Ayse Akasoy ofers a profle of the long history of Turks in German cinematic arts in order to examine the transforming image on screen and their position in the national body. Early flms largely portrayed Turks as part of a mass of labor migrants, omitting explicit or implicit questions of Islam, but relied on stereotypical tropes about the religion in their depiction, such as the victimization of women. Productions also were unable to introduce communities with much nuance, confating Kurdish and Turkish communities with little understanding or care to their political and cultural divergence. More recent features set up polemical encounters between Turkish Muslim and German nationals that push racialized representations where minority life is structured by organized crime, drug trafcking, and violence. The cinematic transformation from Turkish immigrants to Muslim German identities has regularly been couched in an assumed inherent division between them and local Germans. Akasoy’s approach helps problematize analysis that blurs the lines between culture, ethnicity, and religion by arguing that we should approach each of these categories as heterogeneous and nuanced rather than confating these designations. It is only recently that it seems flmmakers are imagining how Islam might shape the practical or ethical choices of social actors beyond criminality and violence in the Germans’ cinematic arts. The fnal chapter looks at religious diference as another site of potential confict. Sérgio Dias Branco addresses this possibility in Lebanese flm that focuses on the relationship between Muslim and Christian communities, especially those set during the civil war (1975–1990). Instead of inevitable tension between traditions he shows how cinema can make a path for

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Kristian Petersen

dialogical and productive engagement across religions. In several flms, war structures material social pluralism and coexistence between religious communities because personal exchange and the possibility of communication between individuals are amplifed in unique ways. Through cinema issues of sectarian violence within these diverse communities can be resolved with imaginative solutions. Branco reveals how flmmakers dissolve rigid understandings of the so-called religious strife in order point to the social realities of hardship and sufering caused by political resolutions and partisan demands. These pictures show an alternative formula to building peace where Muslim and Christian actors operate side by side in order to alleviate the consequences of difcult circumstances. Collectively, the contributions in this volume attempt to advance new approaches to Islam in flm that may support further scholarship. The authors reframe our subject by introducing creative materials, presenting under examined groups, recontextualizing previous subjects, pushing new theoretical positions, and promoting original analytical formulations of confict. Our eforts can be built upon in future work through a robust consideration of both national cinemas from Muslim-majority social contexts and minority flm cultures working against dominant portrayals of Muslims. The volume’s organizing themes can be expanded in new cinematic geographies to continue to build the study of Muslims and Islam in flm into vibrant future directions.

Notes 1 Some notable exceptions include Eylem Atakav, “Women, Islam, and CinemaGender Politics and Representation in Middle Eastern Films and Beyond,” in The Routledge Companion to Cinema & Gender, eds. Kristin Lené Hole, Dijana Jelača, E. Ann Kaplan, and Patrice Petro (New York: Routledge, 2016), 227–236; Cherif Correa, “Representations of Islam and the Question of Identity in Ousmane Sembene’s Ceddo,” in Ousmane Sembene and the Politics of Culture, eds. Lifongo Vetinde and Amadou T. Fofana (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 33–47; Gönül Dönmez-Colin, Women, Islam and Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2004); Amir Hussain, “Islam,” in The Routledge Companion to Religion and Film, ed. John Lyden (London: Routledge, 2009), 131–140; Alicia Izharuddin, Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Nacim Pak-Shiraz, Shi’i Islam in Iranian Cinema: Religion and Spirituality in Film (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011); and Bilal Yorulmaz and William L. Blizek, “Islam in Turkish Cinema,” Journal of Religion & Film 18, no. 2 (2014). 2 For media portrayals of Black Muslims in the US, see Sean McCloud, Making the American Religious Fringe-Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955–1993 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 3 For an analysis of the intersection of US culture, xenophobia, and the racialization of diaspora communities, see Kumarini Silva, Brown Threat: Identifcation in the Security State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 4 A great deal of scholarship has been produced on images of Muhammad, both historical and contemporary. Most relevant for readers interested in the relationship between Islam and flm could be Ahmed Al-Rawi, Islam on YouTube:

Reframing the study of Muslims in flm

5 6

7

8 9 10

11 12

13 14

15

9

Online Debates, Protests, and Extremism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). For Chihab El Khachab’s broader study and ethnography, see Making Film in Egypt: How Labor, Technology, and Mediation Shape the Industry (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2021). Some key texts are Malek Khouri, The Arab National Project in Youssef Chahine’s Cinema (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2010); Viola Shafk, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2017); Viola Shafk, Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class, and Nation (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007); and Magdy Mounir El-Shammaa, The National Imaginarium: A  History of Egyptian Filmmaking (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2021). The counterpart of this moral dilemma, the question of “is flm spectatorship respectable,” can be seen elsewhere. For example, see Laura Fair, Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018); and Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Harold Morales, Latino and Muslim in America: Race, Religion, and the Making of a New Minority (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). One excellent exception is Alberto Fernández Carbajal, Queer Muslim Diasporas in Contemporary Literature and Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). There is a great deal of scholarship on Cecil B. DeMille but very little considers depictions of Muslims in his religious flms. See for example Robert S. Birchard, Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2004); David Blanke, Cecil B. DeMille, Classical Hollywood, and Modern American Mass Culture: 1910–1960 (New Work: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and John Kobal, The Lost World of DeMille (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019). For a broader investigation of the Crusades in flm, see Nickolas Haydock, Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes (Jeferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2009). Earlier analysis includes Freek Bakkera, “The Image of Muhammad in ‘The Message’, the First and Only Feature Film About the Prophet of Islam,” Islam and Christian – Muslim Relations 17, no. 1 (2006): 77–92; and Andrea L. Stanton, “ ‘The Message’: From Radical Terror to ‘Old But Good’,” in Muslims and American Popular Culture, Vol. 1, eds. Anne Richards and Iraj Omidvar (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger), 129–146. For a comprehensive introduction to images of Muhammad in Islamic visual culture, see Christiane Gruber, The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019). Key works relevant for this volume’s readers include Blake Atwood, Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Negar Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); and Hamid Nafcy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). For a broader framework on this subject, see Milja Radovic, Film, Religion and Activist Citizens: An Ontology of Transformative Acts (New York: Routledge, 2017).

Part I

New sources

2

Race, torture porn, and the menacing Black Muslimness of Five Fingers Mika’il A. Petin

How are Muslims framed as the victims or villains within the social imagination of the United States to justify political and military actions during the era of permanent war? Seems like a facile inquiry at a moment of heightened Islamophobia. The reality is very messy, and the portrayal of Islam in U.S. popular culture, even messier. The counter-terrorism thriller, Five Fingers (2006), ends up dancing along the line of thought behind the above question. Directed by Laurence Malkin, and co-written by Malkin and Chad Thumann, the flm is an intriguing cultural text because of the range of discourses it taps into. One of the most hotly debated, and real, moral dilemmas Five Fingers features is the standardization of torture by U.S. political and military powers to gain information. Ironically, for a period now, most of that abuse has been enacted against Muslims. Broadly, this chapter touches on the national debate regarding torture during the Bush and Obama administrations, questions about the illegality of certain types of detentions, and the ramifcations of American exceptionalism. More narrowly, the focus here is on how torture is deployed in this flm, a psycho-political thriller. This chapter zeros in on the central villain in Five Fingers who is a Muslim of African descent named “Ahmat” (Laurence Fishburne) whose mix of race, religion, and gender in scenes when he is orchestrating and implementing torture are intended to make him easily identifable as “evil” for moviegoers. Although, who he really is, what he is doing, and why become exceedingly more convoluted, because like other post-9/11 representations of Muslim men of color, Ahmat is linked to a duality. He is a manifestation of the post-9/11 era, the “torturer-hero,” which I  combine with Evelyn Alsultany’s idea of the “simplifed complex representations” to interpret how race works in this movie.1

Cut diferently: Five Fingers against the genre Five Fingers is unique, because of its perceived commentary on the cultural moment in counter-terrorism narratives after 9/11, and the fact that the story revolves around “torture porn,” the voyeuristic pleasure of watching the painful humiliation and sufering of others. My understanding aside, it

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should be expected that this flm is a bit diferent if compared to notable torture porn franchises, such as Saw (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010) and Hostel (2005, 2007, 2011). The latter movies are about the spectacle of bodily annihilation, whereas scenes of mutilation in Five Fingers are secondary to a story that is much more polemical toward the U.S. government and the global North in general. Something else that makes the flm uncharacteristic of the genre is that the story’s torturer and primary villain is a sadistic Black man. In a broader historical context, people of color have rarely been represented as guileless main characters in horror ficks, brilliant supervillains in superhero movies, or calculated main antagonists throughout popular culture.2 People of African descent, in particular, infrequently inhabit the role of putting suferers in chains and torturing them in modern narrative cinema. Likewise, the Arab sheik/White slaver stereotype in Jack Shaheen’s work notwithstanding, there are even fewer examples of Muslims serving as perpetrators of bondage on screen.3 In spite of the dearth, a calm, confdent, and cerebral Ahmat leads a small, multicultural group of kidnappers, and administers the cruelty in Five Fingers. His African heritage – though the details of his background are unclear – and his individual diference as a Muslim are signifed through accented speech, a full beard, and cultural attire (e.g., kuf, thobe, and prayer beads). Something else that is signifcant about him is his composition. He is a fgure who is all too familiar, because of the flmmakers’ gleaning from readily available, pre-existing narratives in racial, geopolitical, and Orientalist discourses. With that type of design, it is easy for audiences to recognize and fear him. To that end, the key surprising plot twist is that his identity is a ruse. The flm is structured around the convention of the tormenter-victim dyad, and Ahmat is actually an American clandestine agent working for the CIA to extract information. His target is a seemingly northern European altruist, Martijn (Ryan Phillippe), who is set to depart to Morocco in order to perform what seems to be humanitarian work. At no point prior to his departure are there any hints to suggest that Martijn might have questionable motives. However, once he, a White Dutch man, arrives at the airport in-country, he is quickly abducted by some of Ahmat’s tawny fellow kidnappers, and immediately, the flm’s confict ensues. Five Fingers can be read as a somewhat cautionary tale for Westerners traveling in less-developed countries. It relies on a common convention in the torture porn genre where the White “First Worlder,” or group of “First Worlders,” travels to some far-of place that is, or appears to be, a “Third World” country. Once there, they end up getting tortured, exploited, or killed by terrible people whose bodies are most often primitive, bloodthirsty, non-human, Black, Brown, and/or blatantly non-White. This contemporary trope can be imagined as a continuation of earlier colonialist flms, such as King Kong (1933, 1975) and King Solomon’s Mines (1950, 1985), though the theme is more clear in flms, such as The Ruins (2008),

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The Last Resort (2009), Turistas (2006), and the Hostel (2005, 2007, 2011) franchise (Wetmore 2012). In spite of everything that establishes Martijn’s victimhood as a “First World,” freethinking, White European man who precariously travels abroad, it is Ahmat who is the most interesting of the two. His “sadist Muslim maleness” paired with his agency on behalf of the U.S. is a common post-9/11 strategy (see Alsultany 2012). As I mentioned earlier, Ahmat encapsulates the constant theme of duality that routinely accompanies flmic and televisual representations of Muslims.4 Consider two comparable examples, Samir Horn (Don Cheadle) from Traitor (2008) or Darwyn Al-Sayeed (Michael Ealy) in Sleeper Cell (2005–2006). Both of those characters are framed within the “good Muslim vs. the bad Muslim” binary where everything about them is entirely uncertain. The inference, of course, is that as Muslim men of color, they have plenty to hide. Black Muslim men are represented in narrative flm and television series with new cultural meanings. Where they are frequently sensational and rarely prosaic, it is often the case that who they identify as and what they look like are the reasons they pose the greatest security threats to the nation – even as they are called upon to safeguard it. In the number of bifurcations Five Fingers ofers, Ahmat synchronously symbolizes a racialized unscrupulousness that is commonly attributed to the entire “Muslim World.” At the same time, he embodies an assiduousness that the U.S. is a benefcent, postcolonial, democratic, and multicultural paragon for societies in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Race is relevant here, because it is necessary to consider how the United States authoritatively indicates who is bad, a thug, immoral, an enemy combatant, “not the best and brightest,” or a terrorist, along with who may be a helpless citizen, a defendable human being, and free. I bolster this argument along with Ahmat’s dual roles and subsequent actions by Edward Said’s notion that “Orientalism is premised upon exteriority” in his seminal work Orientalism (1978) (21). It is conceivable then that the realities of the War on Terror stimulate an experience where Ahmat’s flmic subjectivity mortifes the flm’s intended audience while they are concurrently enamored and entertained.

Pain of others while getting of: politics, representations, and consuming torture Five Fingers takes full advantage of one-time public support for the perceived returns on torture or institutionalized interrogation tactics. From a civil liberty standpoint, the act of detaining an individual who is not formally charged with a prosecutable ofense undercuts the ideal of egalitarianism in the United States. Hence, why the detainees who have been held in the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for close to two decades have made plain the hypocrisy of U.S. democracy by their treatment.

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Torture’s rise in the social imaginary of the U.S. can be tied to political and military powers assuming responsibility for how it confnes and controls prisoners of war, enemy combatants, and suspected terrorists.5 The application of torture became a useful plot device on screens after 9/11 as national debates over its legality as a tactic by the U.S. government continued in reality.6 Images of torture in television and cinema have become a standard in disparate narratives ranging from action thriller flms, psychological drama TV, and espionage flms to melodramatic flms. Scenes with varying degrees of intense bodily harm can be found on network and cable television, such as Fox Network’s 24 (2001–2010, 2014), NBC’s Hannibal (2013–2015), ABC’s Alias (2001–2006), CBS’ Criminal Minds (2005–present), Showtime Network’s Dexter (2006–2013), and in feature flms, such as aforementioned Saw and Hostel series, The Passion of the Christ (2004), Captivity (2007), Wolf Creek (2005), The Girl Next Door (2007), Untraceable (2008), Quantum Solace (2008), and Zero Dark Thirty (2013). In face of pervasive torture, its availability does not provide clarity for why it has gained so much popularity in post-9/11 entertainment. Film critic David Edelstein’s oft-cited New Yorker magazine article, “Now Playing at your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn” (2006), is the frst attempt at making sense of the increase in images that show torture sequences. He rhetorically inquires, “why is America so nuts about torture?” and coins the new term, “torture porn.” In his rumination, he makes an attempt to decipher a lot of the perplexity in what moviegoers seem so eager to watch during the mid-2000s.7 Edelstein seems to think that some of what moviegoers are seeing today asks many of them to suspend moral judgments. Like other critics, he suggests that showing torture is popular now because of shifts in social attitudes and consumer tastes. Provocatively, some commentators claim that new appetites for cinematic humiliation and higher degrees of corporeal pain on TV are related to the rapid integration of pornography into the cultural mainstream. As a consequence, the similarities between torture and pornography are all too obvious. For example, both torture and pornography feature forms of carnality, privacy, confned spaces, dominant-submissive binaries, abused bodies, and awareness of cameras for surveillance and voyeurism within diegetic spaces (Neroni 2015). Alternately, Linda Williams in “Film Bodies: Genre, Gender and Excess” (2000) highlights how torture – read as horror – and pornography are linked in that they share the bodily pleasure of ecstasy. Even so, the typical American consumer’s new found love for pain, dehumanization, and degradation on screen in the form of torture porn, Aaron Michael Kerner adds in Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11 (2015), is likely due to their being confronted with not only “allegorical narratives but ones laden with afect” (39). Thus, the argument can be made that both scenes of torture and pornography are similar in that they both ofer forms of catharsis. Fundamentally then, Five Fingers draws from that similarity. The flm is paradoxically preoccupied with experiences of freedom and its control,

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something that can be found in torture and pornography. What’s critical for the U.S. political and military powers in the diegetic space of the flm is to ensure freedom through Ahmat’s ability to gather useful information from Martijn’s tortured body.8 It does not immediately register that the title of Five Fingers comes from the desire to get necessary information by mutilating Martijn’s body, or specifcally, his right hand.9 Martijn is a pianist from Holland who is worldly, open-minded, and middle-class. As an afable philanthropist, a refned artist, and a former fnancial professional, he is, for all intents and purposes, accomplished. Our attention as the audience is focused on his right hand, because it intimates his appeal and decency. At the same time, his status bespeaks a subtext of the supremacy of liberalism in the West that can be signifed in the sign that is his right hand. There is a fragmentation of shots of his right hand that the audience is presumed to identify with. Camera angles in a few early scenes leading up to his abduction are meant to sway the audience to associate freedom with his body. Martijn’s right hand is fair-skinned, youthful, dexterous, minimally hairy, and without blemishes. However, to his detriment, the fact that it is also unencumbered and attached to a liberal and neoliberal body primarily suggests that it is literally as well as metaphorically exposed. Further, Martijn’s right hand can be understood as an allusion to Western vulnerability and eventual loss in the global War on Terror. It is typical in the torture porn sub-genre that victims (as well as perpetrators) are not always innocent or guilty, but usually both. To the audience, Martijn does not appear to have anything to do with the War on Terror, but it later becomes more clear throughout the flm that what looks evident can be deceiving. According to Kerner (2015), “The boundary between good and malevolence is difcult to ascertain in these narratives” (49). As Martijn’s origin story suggests, he is far from any battlefeld, though in his situation, he is directly tied to the War on Terror, whether he knows it or not. The specifc use of the tortured body on screen is understandable if we allow ourselves to think through it in a Foucauldian flmic derivation of biopower.10 In her book, The Subject of Torture (2015), Hilary Neroni argues, “Representations of torture today reveal new formal patterns of violence and their engagement with and often challenge to contemporary ideologies of biopower” (21). In other words, contemporary visual representations of torture have created new ways to view the body as a repository of information. Martijn in Five Fingers is drugged, kidnapped, and held by Ahmat, because his tortured, alienable body possesses critical details. “The ideas about the body,” Neroni (2015) continues, “which are at the heart of the contemporary torture fantasy are especially animated by a sense of urgency, a belief that time is running out” (15). Basically, the type of control where tortured, physical bodies are subjugated, then made to behave in certain ways becomes necessary on screen after 9/11 to circulate notions of U.S. political and military powers working actively to prevent future attacks.

18 Mika’il A. Petin Ahmat and Five Fingers are situated amid this context. The necessity of torture on screen and in reality drives home the point that the safety and security of the lives of U.S. citizens depend on these extreme methods. U.S. political and military powers have a long history of authorizing “justifable” practices domestically, such as chattel slavery, the Trail of Tears, Japanese internment camps, and the killing of African American political subversives. In a lot of ways, Ahmat and Five Fingers dismiss those histories, because of greater concerns for answering two pressing questions of the present and future: Are U.S. political and military powers doing enough to provide safety for U.S. citizens, and when will they have gathered enough intelligence?

Freedom ain’t free: Ahmat as the torturer-hero To reiterate my earlier claim, Ahmat is a post-9/11 creation on screen, the torturer-hero. He is concurrently positioned in Five Fingers as the primary opponent to freedom through a terrorizing Muslimness and freedom’s unequivocal defender as a hard-core clandestine agent unconcerned with collaterality. Besides the flm’s tagline, “What price would you pay for freedom?,” the flm’s struggle revolves around Martijn’s privilege, impunity, and aspiration for physical freedom, while Ahmat’s role as sanctioned arbiter is to negate such liberties. So much of what is taking place in our social imaginary in terms of racial subjectivities plays out in U.S. popular culture. Again, Black Muslim men like Ahmat are represented in narrative flm and television series with new cultural meanings. What this means is that who they identify as and what they look like in the diegetic space are the reasons they pose the greatest security threats to the nation. This is the case even though, as bell hooks observes in We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (1990), “[W]hite and black people alike believe that racism no longer exists . . . the eagerness with which contemporary society does away with racism, replacing this recognition with evocations of pluralism and diversity that further mask reality, is a response to terror” (176). This quote is especially useful in better comprehending the images linked to how we read both Ahmat’s and Martijn’s races in relation to liberalism in Five Fingers. With Ahmat specifcally, I  rationalize his dual function as the torturerhero to mean that he is a stand-in for U.S. political and military powers willingly pursuing policies that maximize their survival. His dual identity provides good reason for U.S. cultural imperialism, transnational security, and military expansionism just when the United States ardently seeks to protect its reputation as the world’s lone supporter of liberation, modernization, and self-determination of peoples deemed as subjugated in other countries (Scholte 2005; Jarmakani 2008). The development of the torturer-hero is a new one after 9/11. Bonnie Mann describes the role in Sovereign Masculinity (2014) as “a new fgure

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of American pride” that takes shape from the “myth of torture in the social imaginary” (191). Clearly, Jack Bauer’s (Kiefer Sutherland) propensity for torture in Fox’s 24 (2001–2010, 2011) and how torture produces intelligence that leads to the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty (2013) are two recognizable examples (Mann 2014). Making the connection to the advent of torture porn, Kevin Wetmore insists in Post9/11 Horror in American Cinema (2012) that three identities emerge to create space for the torturer-hero to come into existence: “Americans as victims, Americans as heroic defenders of freedom, and Americans as torturers” (100). Additionally, in terms of a generic convention, Ahmat exemplifes the notion that in torture porn, evil, generally, does not exist, and perpetrators of torture are not wantonly killing their victims. More appropriately, they deal with complicated issues that involve ethics. To this point, Kerner (2015) attests that torture porn reveals “the more complex moral truths about the nature of violence, innocence, retribution, and the inversion of moral order that are hidden behind the ofcial narrative that the Bush administration and conservative pundits peddle” (53). In the larger ethical questions that Ahmat engages, his duality as a bad Muslim and a good clandestine agent is diferent from what we associate with Darwyn from Sleeper Cell and Samir from Traitor. All three characters typify Alsultany’s simplifed complex representational strategy where “positive Muslims characters” are employed to acknowledge TV producers’ and flmmakers’ sensitivity to the efects of stereotyping (Alsultany 2012). Darwyn, Samir, and Ahmat can be viewed as embodying varying degrees of patriotism. Contrarily, Ahmat as a torturer in particular fully embraces the untrustworthiness that the Samir and Darwyn wish to avert. He fully dons the disguise of radical fundamentalist in order to protect the national interests of the United States and its allies, similar to Samir and Darwyn. It seems that the message that gets communicated through the images of Ahmat, Darwyn, and Samir collectively is that in order for Muslims in the U.S. to prove they are patriotic fag-wavers, they should surveil their own communities, and voluntarily relinquish their civil liberties by divulging their deepest secrets if the U.S. security-state needs them to. Alternatively, Ahmat immerses himself in Orientalist stereotypes to extrajudicially interrogate his captive, surreptitiously infict the U.S. security-state’s sponsored pain to gather intelligence, and authorizes the elimination of the victim as to not leave a trail of evidence. For most of Five Fingers, Ahmat personifes the post-9/11 development of the Black jihadist who intends to terrify the First World from without or within. Karin Gwinn Wilkins states in Home/Land/Security (2009) that, historically, Hollywood presents villainous Arab, Middle-Eastern, and Muslim characters as dehumanized, non-White, raced with foreign accents, and distant from cultural centers in the United States, so it is harder for audiences to identify with them. Here, I  think of real-life individuals, such as Edward Archer, Tairod Nathan Webster Pugh, Hassan Edmonds, and Jonas

20 Mika’il A. Petin Edmonds, who were in police custody, but widely known for their interests in joining the monstrous ISIS several years ago. The parallels are simple. The aforementioned Black jihadists – and by extension, Ahmat’s invaluable religious fundamentalist persona – bear some resemblance to the centuries-old Orientalist trope of the Moor or “male Muslim monster” (Arjana 2015). Sophia Rose Arjana describes the characterization of the Muslim monster in Muslims in the Western Imagination (2015) as “hyper-masculine – aggressive, overly sexual, and violent,” that can be “characters that also function as tableaux of desire and fantasy” (11). This is not to say that Ahmat is a “male sexual predator” before he identifes himself as an agent. Rather, he fully embraces all of the associated derogatory attitudes and traits of a non-White, sadistic, terrifying, un-American, or non-European Muslim as part of his cover. What’s even more striking about Ahmat is how much he is made to emulate the late, abominable terrorist leader, Osama Bin Laden. In an early scene, Ahmat holds an AK-47 to shoot Gavin (Colm Meaney), Martijn’s British handler on the ground in Morocco. In terms of wardrobe, for the majority of the flm, Ahmat wears a white kuf and thobe. However, in the moment when he murders Gavin, astute viewers are momentarily reminded of a popularized, undated image of Bin Laden fring an AK-47 that surfaced in certain news media outlets and circulated within the emerging visual culture days after 9/11. The similarities between Ahmat and Bin Laden seem more convincing if we also take account of them both appearing to be piously calm, inclined toward premeditation, and able to manipulate their victims. Neither of them wants to expose their locations, though they also have some connection to Africa.11 What’s more, both men orchestrate their respective forms of terror from isolated spaces – Bin Laden in a dark, primordial, and far-fung cave, and Ahmat in a damp, dingy, and run-down warehouse – that seem retrograde, if not uninhabitable. Nevertheless, a message is made clear to viewers. The cultural formation of Ahmat as the Muslim monster is that he not only is eager to shed Western blood but also is absorbed in the tense relations between the rest of the world and Western civilization. This is not unlike the generic way extraterrestrial life, ’Merica rednecks, Appalachian hillbillies, and postapocalyptic zombies are represented in post-9/11 horror flms. According to Wetmore (2012), in the horror genre, “Terrorists and monstrous aliens and evil shadow creatures are confated and equated into an equivalent threat” (44). Five Fingers is not a horror fick, but it does depend on the horror genre’s current convention of diference. Just like in horror flms, the use of dissimilar bodies in juxtaposition to Whiteness is partially what scares us. There are no frightening fgures in Five Fingers like Jason from the Friday the 13th or Freddy Krueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street flm franchises. It’s just a callous Ahmat who acts as the synecdoche of real global northern fears held by some U.S. citizens and western Europeans of being imprisoned, tortured, or killed by creepy,

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swarthy Africans. The Somalis in Black Hawk Down (2001) and Captain Phillips (2013) come to mind. That metonymic quality is what makes Five Fingers so believable. Similarly, Ahmat’s mask of Muslim Africanness works because of the persistence of colonialist and global North ideas about race and corruption in Africa. Granted, as Sherman Jackson asserts in Islam and the Blackamerican (2005), the Black American experience in the United States is not identical to the Third World colonial experience for the colonized in Africa (cf. Marable and Aidi 2009).12 Still, it is the fused values of the “Dark Continent” and the notion of the “Black Muslim Scare” that Ahmat triggers.13 As the flm’s chief victimizer, Ahmat’s Blackness, Muslimness, manner of speech, style of dress, environs, aura of hyper-violence, and all-around otherness among additional traits make it impossible for the intended audience to identify with him. Everything about his assumed Black African Muslim identity motivates viewers not to connect with him, but more with his victim, Martijn, whom they might decide is culturally refned, seemingly harmless, and just easily more relatable. It is never meant to immediately register that Martijn is the real terrorist, because Orientalist and nationalist discourses racialize who are the perpetrators. In a sense, the contrasting racial meanings make it impossible for viewers to see each man any diferent. To draw from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1967), the juxtaposition of the two men is a “massive psycho-existential complex,” where “[Not] only must the black man be black, he must be black in relation to the white man . . . The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (110). The emotions we as the audience experience from Ahmat’s maltreatment of Martijn and its repulsiveness are slowly transformed into appreciation once we become embroiled in what must be done by the torturer to acquire the information from his abductee. Ahmat is not at all likable for the majority of the flm, because he is so unnerving. In contrast, once it is revealed that Martijn is actually a terrorist sympathizer looking for who he thinks is a retired chemist named “Hasan Fikri” to carry out a global terror attack – Martijn says, “A dozen 9/11s all over the world” – that revelation signals the moment that Ahmat’s methods are excusable as security-state-sponsored tactics. In a way, the flm performs a sleight of hand to mask American monstrosity until the very end. A means for Ahmat to hide his monstrosity throughout the flm is through his use of language. It is really how he keeps up his ruse until he is ready to uncover his true identity. He passes himself of as a Nigerian – possibly – and uses two diferent accents: one to disguise the fact that he is an American and the other to identify himself as an American. He does not speak a common Nigerian dialect, such as Hausa and Mande, though he says some common Muslim words in Arabic and speaks in English with distinct African intonations. His performance of an African-intoned speech has an impact on us. From the beginning of the flm until its climax, we do not imagine that Martijn is violent, because Ahmat’s monstrous otherness as

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a Black African Muslim easily frames his raced body as, in Fanon’s (1967) terms, “the symbol of Evil,” as the “torturer,” and as “Satan” incarnate (188–189). The other aspect of Ahmat’s duality – him being a hero – is also signaled through his use of language. In the flm’s denouement, Ahmat and one of his fellow accomplices Aicha (Gina Torres) convince Martijn to provide the names of some Dutch terror cell members to prove that he is not lying, and indeed, part of the network like them. They have been telling Martijn that they doubt his claim of being connected, and instead, think he is actually a CIA operative. That bit of information, in their logic, explains how he was able to steal one million U.S. dollars to fund his food assistance program for malnourished youth in the Rif mountains of Morocco without there being an international manhunt to arrest him. Aicha tells Martijn that they already possess the list of names for members in the Dutch cell, though Martijn’s name is not on it. Both Martijn and Ahmat agree to simultaneously write down the names of the cell members on separate sheets of notebook paper to prove the other is not lying. In this tense moment of the flm’s climax, they scribble names on sheets of paper then exchange them. The camera angle from over Martijn’s shoulder displays what he is holding in his hand: a half sheet of paper with the handwritten words, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,” on it. At the same time, there is a voice-over with Ahmat’s speech pattern gradually transitioning from an African-intoned English to intonations normally consistent with American English to demonstrate that he is one of the good guys and not a fundamentalist. Needless to say, the change in speech reveals that everything has been a charade. Ahmat tells a stunned and befuddled Martijn, “You have been most cooperative,” before we see Martijn’s captors (i.e., Ahmat, Aicha, and Dark Eyes) through his teary eyes. Ahmat and Aicha leave the open space of the warehouse, and Dark Eyes (Saïd Taghmaoui) fatally shoots Martijn.14

Conclusion The torturer can almost never be the hero. That penultimate scene of the fatal shot described earlier leaves two crucial questions unanswered: Is the U.S. security-state – namely the CIA – devoid of morality, and can it be that we in the United States are the real monsters? I am resolved to believe that Ahmat makes it hard to answer those questions – one of the reasons I see him as such an important representation of contemporary, post-9/11 Muslim identity. We as flmgoers and a nation have to assess what has greater value. The maintenance – and constant purveyance – of the liberalism of our democracy is our greatest achievement, but at what costs to the potential illiberalism of others? The U.S. covets its reputation within the international community as an unchallenged proponent of liberty and self-determination for peoples in other nations while it maintains the most advanced intelligence community and military force in the world. Correspondingly, just as the U.S. seeks to “modernize” the rest of the world through its ideas

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regarding global capitalism and democracy, Ahmat as a character stands in as a paradox: The U.S. is both the lead opponent and defender of liberalism. In actuality, international esteem for democratic values without exerting covert and overt force is a chimera. While it is hoped or wished for, it is, in fact, illusory or impossible to achieve. The United States was on a course of self-help by banning the use of interrogation techniques that resembled torture in 2009, because its political system was concerned about its own preservation. Kerner (2015) is correct about the difculty in cleanly making out the heroes from the villains precisely because, “it is not just the terrorists that frighten us, then, but ourselves, or at least those who are waging the War on Terror on our behalf” (24).

Notes 1 In her book, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, Alsultany argues that simplifed complex representations are the new normative way of presenting raciality in a “post-race era.” “These representations,” she suggests, “appear to challenge or complicate former stereotypes and contribute to a multicultural or post-racial illusion” (21). 2 See Phillip Lamarr Cunningham, “The Absence of Black Supervillains in Mainstream Comics” in Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and Robin R. Means Coleman’s Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present (2011). 3 See Jack Shaheen, The TV Arab (1984); Arab and Muslim Stereotyping in American Popular Culture (1997) and Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifes a People (2001). 4 See Alsultany’s Arab and Muslims in the Media (2012); Sasha Torres’ “Black (Counter) Terrorism” (2013); Melani McAlister’s “A Virtual Muslim Is Something to Be” (2010); and Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin’s Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation After 9/11 (2011). 5 Public disclosures that the U.S. military as well as some intelligence agencies engaged in inhumane treatment of prisoners ignited a national conversation over the morality of the U.S. committing human rights violations. Public pressure mounted against the U.S. government’s sanctioning of “enhanced interrogation techniques” of captured insurgents and enemy combatants when the U.S. Supreme Court declared such practices were unconstitutional. Disapproval was especially sharp when photos of the Abu Gharib prisoner abuse scandal were released by the Associated Press along with reports by Amnesty International in 2003. The male and female soldiers involved in the scandal were court-martialed, but claimed they were operating within U.S. military guidelines. I think what is more important regarding the photos of prisoner abuse is that we as U.S. citizens need to understand our collective culpability. 6 The United Nations Convention against Torture prohibits practices that cause severe pain or sufering. After 9/11, public opinion within the United States supported torture as an efective means, though there was limited evidence to confrm that it produced the intended results. Some maintained that the need for torture, whether stress positions, simulated sex acts, music torture, waterboarding, or sleep deprivation, supersedes concerns about its application (Demello 2013). 7 In the ascendance of torture porn, competing ideas about what qualifes as torture porn develop. A multitude of movies and TV shows contain scenes of unspeakable behavior, humiliation, and psychological trauma, but both Aaron

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Mika’il A. Petin Michael Kerner in Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11: Horror, Exploitation, and the Cinema of Sensation (2015) and Kevin Wetmore, Jr. in Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (2012) ofer specifc formulas for the sub-genre. For Kerner and Wetmore, the backstory leading up to the scenes of torture and psychological intimidation appear to be believable. There is an emphasis on narratives based in reality where a human agent is more recognizable than an abstract idea. Both acknowledge how the acts are witnessed through some form of surveillance. Although they diverge when it comes to the reason behind the torture. Wetmore insists that the reasons why the torture is happening are not fully clear, while for Kerner, the torture happens because U.S. citizens or the First Worlders are always victims. Also the perpetual victimhood of the First World sanctions the reversal of violence through unrestrained retribution. Whereas Wetmore declares that torture victims do not inevitably become torturers, Kerner puts forward that since 9/11, Americans have lost their connection to the moral high ground with their new capacity to commit torture upon prisoners of war, enemy combatants, and detainees. The Bush administration reached the conclusion that either by covert operatives infltrating terror networks, or by the most efcient method of relentlessly interrogating detained suspected terrorists, it needed better intelligence. Ofcials on behalf of the White House corresponded with attorneys, such as John Yoo, from the Department of Justice (DOJ) to verify the legality of practices the U.S. government intended to use to draw out information (Lewis 2005). Never mind that torture is widely considered to be damaging, unproductive, and demoralizing, plus illegal in the international community (e.g., prohibited by the Geneva Conventions (1949) and Additional Protocols (1977)). Yoho and the DOJ drafted the torture memos and responded to White House inquiries that detainees could be interrogated almost to the moment when death seems imminent (Lewis 2005). Human hands are instrumental for brain function and development. From an evolutionary standpoint, according to neurologist Frank R. Wilson in The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (1998), our hands are often overlooked as banal, though they have been essential for human beings learning how to speak, think, behave, hunt, eat, and basically, survive at every stage for many millennia. The right hand is socially dominant over the left hand throughout the majority of the world. It has long connoted a number of qualities across many cultures in recorded history, Wilson (1998) remarks, having been viewed as “divine, benign, lucky, clean, adroit, quick, strong” (148). Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower in The History of Sexuality (1978) demonstrates how the “docile body” was discovered to be an “object and target of power.” He theorizes biopower as the way bodies are defned and controlled by the political state and throughout society. “A body is docile,” Foucault (1978) ofers, “that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (136). According to Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004), Bin Laden funds acts of terror throughout northern Africa, and frst appears on the CIA’s radar while he is assembling a small army of jihadist warriors in Khartoum, Sudan. Jackson (2005) has written extensively about the mode, Black Orientalism, that pits Black conservatives and Afrocentrists against Black cosmopolitans, PanAfricanists, and African-descended Muslims. He also explains that in many ways the Black Americans share some similarities with the Black folk in the Third World, but in other ways, the two are drastically diferent. Jackson gives the example of European colonial masters establishing “French, British, and German

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schools and civic organizations to ‘civilize’ the best and brightest among their subjects” (165). Concurrently, Black Americans attended segregated schools, fought in segregated armies, and lived in predominantly Black neighborhoods. 13 Edward Curtis (2013) describes the “Black Muslim scare” as Black Muslim manhood embodied in Malcolm, the Nation of Islam (NOI), and Muhammad Ali posing “the greatest threat to the liberal promise of civil rights” in “The Black Muslim Scare of the Twentieth Century: The History of State Islamophobia and Its Post-9/11 Variations” (76). 14 After a jump-cut between the open space and the control room, Ahmat changes clothes from his kuf and thobe to a green single-breasted business suit and a black overcoat. His change in wardrobe conveys the male professional style that he is now civilized. He debriefs with his team and then congratulates everyone on a job well done. Gavin, who is neither dead nor British, approaches Ahmat, who asks him to return to the Internet to connect with other would-be jihadists. He steps outside the warehouse, and we learn that they are not in Africa but on the Hudson River across from New York City. The flm absolves the CIA of the practice of extraordinary rendition by placing the team in the United States the entire time. In a suave American accented English way, Ahmat asks Aicha if she would like to grab a drink with him, which further afrms the actuality of American invulnerability. The fnal scene of Five Fingers is a wide-angle shot of the Statue of Liberty. Set against the bright blue sky with the sounds of seagulls and soft jazz playing in the background, the icon of liberty punctuates the theme of the flm.

Bibliography Alsultany, Evelyn. 2012. Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11. New York: New York University Press. Arjana, Sophia Rose. 2015. Muslims in the Western Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Coll, Steve. 2004. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. New York: Penguin Press. Curtis IV, Edward E. 2013. “The Black Muslim Scare of the Twentieth Century: The History of State Islamophobia and Its Post-9/11 Variations.” In Islamophobia in America: The Anatomy of Intolerance, edited by Carl W. Ernst, 75–106. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Demello, Margo. 2013. Body Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge. Edelstein, David. 2006. “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn.” The New Yorker Magazine, 2006: n.p. Web. February 23, 2016. Fanon, Frantz with Charles Lam Markman, trans. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Jackson, Sherman. 2005. Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking toward the Third Resurrection. New York: Oxford University Press. Jarmakani, Amira. 2008. Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kerner, Aaron Michael. 2015. Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11: Horror, Exploitation, and the Cinema of Sensation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Lewis, Anthony. 2005. “Introduction.” In The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Gharib, edited by Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mann, Bonnie. 2014. Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror. New York: Oxford University Press. Marable, Manning and Hishaam D. Aidi, eds. 2009. Black Routes to Islam. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McAlister, Melani. 2010. “A Virtual Muslim Is Something to Be.” American Quarterly 62, no. 2 (June): 221–231. Morey, Peter and Amina Yaqin. 2011. Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation After 9/11. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Neroni, Hillary. 2015. The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis & Biopolitics in Television & Film. New York: Columbia University Press. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Scholte, Jan Aart. 2005. Globalization: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan. Shaheen, Jack G. 1984. The TV Arab. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Shaheen, Jack G. 1997. Arab and Muslim Stereotyping in American Popular Culture. Washington, DC: Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University. Shaheen, Jack G. 2001. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifes a People. New York: Olive Branch. Torres, Sasha. 2013. “Black (Counter) Terrorism.” American Quarterly 65, no. 1 (March): 171–176. Wetmore, Jr., Kevin. 2012. Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema. New York: Continuum Books. Wilkins, Karin Gwinn. 2009. Home/Land/Security: What We Learn about Arab Communities from Action-Adventure Films. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Williams, Linda. 2000. “Film Bodies: Genre, Gender and Excess.” In Film and Theory: An Anthology, edited by Robert Stam and Toby Miller. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Wilson, Frank R. 1998. The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. New York: Vintage Books.

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Muhammad as a synthesis of meditation and action A 1932 screenplay by Nikos Kazantzakis Panayiota Mini

In 1932, Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957), the Greek author known worldwide for his novels (e.g., Zorba the Greek 1946, The Last Temptation of Christ 1951), wrote a screenplay titled Mohammed. This text, written in French, was not Kazantzakis’s only attempt at screenwriting. Infuenced by the montage cinema of the Soviet Union, where he lived at intervals between 1925 and 1929, Kazantzakis frst wrote the screenplays Kokino mandili [Red Handkerchief], Saint Pacôme et Cie, and Lenin there in 1928. After putting aside this preoccupation for some time, he resumed it in 1931 in Gottesgab, Czechoslovakia, where he then resided, and by the end of 1932, in addition to Mohammed he had completed four more screenplays, Don Quixote, Buddha, A Solar Eclipse, and Decameron.1 Kazantzakis dearly wished to see these works on screen. In the Soviet Union, he and Panait Istrati (1884–1935), the French-Romanian author of Greek origins, with whom Kazantzakis collaborated in this endeavor, hoped to have the scripts flmed by the All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Administration (VUFKU).2 Then, in the early 1930s, Kazantzakis and on his behalf his friend Pantelis Prevelakis, a Greek author who was studying in Paris, approached foreign flmmakers and producers to shoot his works of the 1930s. Despite these eforts, none were shot. Still, Kazantzakis’s screenplays, most of which are available either in published form and/or in typed manuscripts, are important in understanding this author’s career. They reveal his indebtedness to major flm movements, including Soviet montage and French impressionism.3 They evince his desire to give his ideas concrete form through techniques he later developed in his epic poem The Odyssey (1938) and his novels.4 And, they show his infuence from neo-romantic theories, most prominently those by Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and also Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), and Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936). Among Kazantzakis’s screenplays, Mohammed bears special contemporary signifcance, given the ever-growing scholarly interest in the dialogue between cinema and religion5 and the depiction of Muslims on flm.6 Kazantzakis’s screenplay does include stereotypes of Arabs, in line both with his own perception of peoples and ethnicities and with prevailing Orientalist

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tropes of the 19th and 20th centuries. Stereotypes notwithstanding, Mohammed is a particularly interesting work, as it ofers us a highly positive depiction of Muhammad produced by a non-Muslim author in the frst half of the 20th century; an author, moreover, from Greece which has historically been considered unfriendly to the Ottomans and their religion. As this chapter shows, infuenced by anti-rationalist thinkers, Kazantzakis understood Muhammad as a great hero who sensed deeply inside him the existence of a single God and passionately fought for his ideas, putting his own wellbeing at risk. Kazantzakis’s Muhammad cares about the weak and the poor, and is indiferent to petty material goods or pragmatic politics. Moreover, Kazantzakis conceived Muhammad as the embodiment of divine intuition and constant fght for the creation of a just world, a visionary exemplifying a synthesis of meditation and action. As this preliminary discussion suggests, this screenplay is important for one more reason. Although never shot, it constitutes a rare case of an artist’s efort to portray Muhammad on flm, contributing thus to our knowledge of the ways in which artists and intellectuals have visualized the Muslim Prophet. The frst known initiative to depict Muhammad on screen dates to 1926, when a German flm company asked the Turkish playwright and flmmaker Wedad Orf (1900–1953) to make a flm about the Prophet.7 The flm would be fnanced by the Germans and the Turkish state and star the Egyptian actor Youssef Wahbi (1898–1982). Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Turkish Republic and the Istanbul council of ‘ulamas (the Islamic scholars of religious law) approved of this project, but when the plan became known the Sunni clerics of the Al-Azhar University of Cairo issued a fatwa, stipulating that Islam forbids a depiction of the Prophet on screen. King Fuad I of Egypt himself intervened to halt the project, which was indeed abandoned on the basis that the representations of living creatures “within the realm of the sacred were unacceptable.”8 A  similar project in Egypt sufered the same fate in 1930, when the Young Men’s Muslim Association (Society of Muslim Youths) protested to the Egyptian Prime Minister and the press against it.9 In his correspondence of 1931 and 1932 with Prevelakis and his companion and future wife, Eleni Samiou, Kazantzakis does not mention the earlier incidents when referring to his screenplay on Muhammad.10 It is likely, however, that he was familiar with them, since he closely followed the developments in world culture. Whatever the case was, Muhammad could not but be a suitable subject for Kazantzakis at a time when he wanted to establish an international career. In fact, he wanted to collaborate with wellknown European flmmakers for the implementation of Mohammed; either Walter Ruttmann (1887–1941), the famous German director of Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927), who lived in Paris at the time, or, as a second choice, the French director Jean Lods (1903–1974),11 a prominent member of the ciné-clubs movement and brother-in-law of Léon Moussinac (1890–1964) whom Kazantzakis had met in the Soviet Union on the occasion of the tenth jubilee of the 1917 Revolution, which they both attended.

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Kazantzakis’s plans started taking shape on February  21, 1932, when Prevelakis met Ruttmann in Paris and gave him Kazantzakis’s Mohammed and Don Quixote to read. According to Prevelakis, the meeting was timely; Ruttmann and the flm company for which he worked, Société Générale des Films, was in need of scripts, especially stories for Valerii Inkizhinov (1895–1973), the star of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s (1893–1953) montage classic Potomok Chingis-Khana (The Heir to Genghis Khan, aka Storm over Asia, 1928), who collaborated with the company at the time.12 Kazantzakis was delighted to learn that Inkizhinov might play Muhammad.13 As he wrote to Prevelakis, “The lead actor they have – the one in Tempête sur l’Asie – is an excellent Muhammad. It’s just that his nose needs to be changed. He is passionné, concentré, a perfect Asian. I  hope very much they’ll accept Muhammad.”14 In their second meeting a few days later, Ruttmann assured Prevelakis that he had read half of Mohammed, liked it a lot, and would soon contact him for further discussions.15 Prevelakis, however, found it impossible to see or contact Ruttmann again because Ruttmann left Paris,16 a development that left Kazantzakis worried as the German director took the screenplays with him.17 During March and April 1932, Prevelakis’s discussions and Kazantzakis’s hopes for the production of Mohammed (as well as Don Quixote) were directed to Lods, while help was also expected from the journalist Renaud de Jounevel, a friend of Kazantzakis and Prevelakis,18 again with no result. Kazantzakis’s interest in a flm about Muhammad can be partially explained by the international signifcance and popularity of its subject. Kazantzakis would most likely have never chosen this topic had it not been for two other factors: his life-long infuence from the historian and philosopher Carlyle, who had devoted one chapter of his On Heroes, HeroWorship and the Heroic in History (1841) on Muhammad, considering him an exemplary Hero-Prophet; and his passionate admiration for Eastern civilization.19 Kazantzakis’s attraction to the East embraced a wide spectrum of cultures and nations, ranging from Russia to the Middle East and the Far East.20 It went hand in hand with his deep disappointment with Western civilization and was reinforced by his conviction that he himself was an Easterner, as he was from Crete, an island with Arab and African origins in his view.21 For the Arab and Muslim world, in particular, he expressed his respect through various ways: travels to Arab communities, including Palestine, Lebanon, Bethlehem, Hebron, Jerusalem, Haifa, Egypt, and Mont Sinai; visits to Muslim monuments all over the world; and inspired descriptions and interpretations of the inner spirit of Muslim landmarks in his travel novels and personal correspondence.22 Convinced about his Arab origin, he once called himself “Mohammed-el-Cheitan-benKazan” in a photograph of his23 and expressed his high regard for Muslim qualities, with the following lines, “Europe has nothing to give us. My entire soul faces East, as does the Muslim when he prostrates himself and prays.”24

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A similar image of Muhammad praying in the desert opens Kazantzakis’s screenplay (8).25 The text is divided into 95 non-decoupaged sequences, covering in detail the Muslim Prophet’s life from his middle age to his death.26 In the screenplay’s frst sequences, while Muhammad silently prays in the desert, in the Kaaba of Mecca the people worship their pagan gods and the notables, led by the powerful leader of the Quraysh tribe Abu Sufyan, perform rituals only to start gambling and arguing immediately afterward. Kazantzakis’s next sequences create a contrast between the people of Mecca and Bedouin traders on the one hand, drinking and bargaining material goods and humans around the Well of Zamzam, and Muhammad on the other, undergoing the mi‘raj (ascension). Kazantzakis illustrates in detail Muhammad’s ascension to the sky on the winged horse, his meetings with Moses on Mount Sinai and Jesus on the Mount of Olives, and his arrival in Paradise, inside an enormous palace of which he sees the mosques of Jerusalem, Delhi, Agra, Cairo, and Córdoba.27 After this transcendental journey, Muhammad returns to his home in Mecca, where in a miraculous dream he sees the Archangel Gabriel ordering him to recite some words written on a sacred ribbon. Although illiterate, Muhammad does read the message, “La illah il Allah Mohammed in resoul Allah” [“There is no God but God, Muhammad is the Prophet of God”], causing his wife, Khadijah, to have immediate belief in this message. From that moment on, by overcoming his initial hesitation, Muhammad starts preaching the existence of one god, gradually attracting not only followers but also the ridicule, hatred, and violence of his opponents. Kazantzakis’s next scenes reconstruct Muhammad’s divine protection from Abu Sufyan’s forces, thanks to a spider and a pigeon, the migration to Medina, and the erection of a mosque and Muhammad’s house at the point where his camel stopped. There follow a conquest of a Meccan trade caravan, his marriage to Aisha, the victory over the Meccans at the battle of Badr, and the arrival of Muslim envoys in Byzantium, Persia, and Abyssinia. Then, as Muhammad grows older, Kazantzakis depicts the procession to Mecca, accompanied by a camel carrying the Quran, the bloodless conquest of Mecca, and the destruction of the idols of the Kaaba. At the screenplay’s end, Muhammad, having accomplished his mission, welcomes his death with the utmost dignity. After giving back to a Bedouin some money he had borrowed from him, making sure that he did not treat anyone badly, freeing his slaves, blessing his wives, and encouraging his followers to fght the infdel and love the poor, the Muslim Prophet sees Gabriel approaching with the winged horse. Muhammad twice cries “I’m coming!” and Abu Bakr’s words “Muhammad is dead, Allah is alive” (31) conclude the text.28 Throughout the screenplay, in parallel to this religious trajectory, Kazantzakis also depicts actual or invented stories of Muhammad’s personal life, including exchanges with Khadijah, Khadijah’s death, and private moments with Aisha. Kazantzakis borrowed the canvas of Muhammad’s biography from Washington Irving’s book titled Life of Mahomet (1850), which had been

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translated into Greek in 1930 as Muhammad: His Life and Work.29 From Irving’s book, Kazantzakis must also have conceived of the physical appearance of Muhammad. The screenplay describes him as a man of medium shape with a strong head, large chest, sharply hooked nose, large mouth, large but thin legs and hands, hair covering his neck, black beard, and wellshaped moustaches (12), reminding one of Irving’s description of him.30 Despite his reliance on Life of Mahomet, Kazantzakis characterized this book as “wretched.”31 To understand his judgment, we should take into account Irving’s attitude toward Muhammad. On the one hand, Irving, who was instrumental in the popular re-evaluation of Muhammad in the West,32 emphasized major positive qualities of his, including his dignity, sense of justice, indiference for material goods, simplicity in manners, and concern for the poor and the slaves. On the other hand, Irving presented the Muslim Prophet, particularly after the Hijra, as an ambitious leader and tactician, who resorted to crude violence, pragmatic compromises, and convenient marriages for political gains and pretended to receive divine revelations in order to pass some dubious methods of his. Moreover, for Irving Muhammad was a pious man who earnestly attacked idolatry but, nevertheless, naively and erroneously believed that he was the Prophet of the God. Kazantzakis retained the good qualities that Irving fnds in Muhammad, as this is evident in the screenplay’s closing scenes and other parts. For example, the Greek author presents Muhammad giving his dates to a hungry beggar and his cloak to a mother who has no shroud for her dead son (21), foreseeing a woman’s afterlife in Paradise because she helped a dying dog (23), and teaching his soldiers inner strength while sharing the spoils of the battle at Badr (25). Kazantzakis, though, greatly departed from Irving’s interpretation that ascribes political pragmatism and tactical maneuvers to Muhammad. He also revised or cut Irving’s passages that render Muhammad physically and emotionally weak. Kazantzakis, for example, presents Muhammad’s marriages not as political maneuvers but as a sign of his independence from women, a motif that characterizes most of this writer’s heroic fgures. Furthermore, while Irving shows Muhammad having “great difculty in governing his wives” or separating from Aisha for one month,33 Kazantzakis never presents the women having any power over him and once shows him appeasing Aisha’s jealousy of other women by leading her to his room. The scene in the screenplay stops here, but we can assume he is proving his fondness for her by making love (26). The most important diference between Irving and Kazantzakis concerns their understanding of Muhammad’s relationship with God. In the screenplay, Muhammad’s revelations do not serve any selfsh, opportunistic concerns. They are authentic, painful experiences, deriving from a pitiless, demanding God, similar to the divine power that assigns herculean missions to most of Kazantzakis’s heroes. For example, when Muhammad explains to Gabriel that he cannot read the words on the ribbon, the angel throws himself on Muhammad, grabs him, wraps the ribbon around his

32 Panayiota Mini neck, squeezes it to sufocate him, and commands him, “Read!” (13). When Mohammed hesitates to assume the role of the Prophet before his idolatrous kinship, Gabriel, holding his faming sword, emerges furious in Muhammad’s yard (13). Before Muhammad utters his message to the polytheists of the Kaaba, the angel looks at him with contempt and reproach (14). In these cases, Muhammad’s reactions include sweating, shiver, and fear. Kazantzakis’s Muhammad is not an ambitious pragmatist. He is an exceptional man, who feverishly intuits the existence of one god and undertakes the formidable mission to preach this message against the vast majority, including his kinship, and against his own well-being, since he himself was of the tribe of Quraysh. The flter through which Kazantzakis revised Irving cannot but be the views of Carlyle, whose On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History Kazantzakis owned having written notes in the margins.34 In his work, Carlyle underlined that one should not look into the faults but the uniqueness of Muhammad. He characterized “lies  .  .  . disgraceful to ourselves only” the views that Muhammad “was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood incarnate.” Muhammad, according to Carlyle, was “a man of truth and fdelity,” a wise and rounded-of personality, “silent when there was nothing to be said; but pertinent, wise, sincere, when he did speak; always throwing light on the matter. . . . A serious, sincere character; yet amiable, cordial, companionable, jocose even; . . . . A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning man!”35 Shaped through the tropes of Orientalism, Carlyle’s Muhammad also emerges as an “uncultured semi-barbarous Son of Nature,” a “wild man of the Desert,”36 who in the “bosom of the Wilderness . . . alone with Nature and his own Thoughts” had seen “into the kernel of the matter” and received “an earnest confused voice from the unknown Deep,” “the great Mystery of Existence.” This mystery was that idolatry is worthless, that there is one God who is great and also Islam, “that we must submit to God.”37 “The word of such a man,” Carlyle declared, “is a Voice direct from Nature’s own Heart” that left its rude, untutored, but also genuine mark on the Quran, the merit of which, Carlyle believed, is “sincerity.”38 This Hero-Prophet and this truth were worthy of the Arabs, whom Carlyle considered “a gifted noble people” of great qualities and admirable “religiosity.”39 This HeroProphet and truth ft also to the Arab landscape, which Carlyle described with words such as the following: Savage inaccessible rock-mountains, great trim deserts, alternating with beautiful strips of verdure: wherever water is, there is greenness, beauty; odoriferous balm-shrubs, date-trees, frankincense-trees. Consider that wide waste horizon of sand, empty, silent, like a sand-sea, dividing habitable place from habitable. You are all alone there, left alone with the Universe; by day a ferce sun blazing down on it with intolerable radiance; by night the great deep Heaven with its stars. Such a country is

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ft for a swift-handed, deep-hearted race of men. There is something most agile, active, and yet most meditative, enthusiastic in the Arab character.40 Regarding the accusations that Muhammad propagated his message by the sword, so much criticized by Irving, Carlyle wrote: The sword indeed: but where will you get your sword! Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one. In one man’s head alone, there it dwells as yet. One man alone of the whole world believes it; there is one man against all men. That he take a sword, and try to propagate with that, will do little for him. You must frst get your sword! On the whole, a thing will propagate itself as it can. . . . I care little about the sword: I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with any sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of.41 In Kazantzakis’s worldview, wars and revolutions were unavoidable, if not necessary, for life’s upward movement. Thus, similar to Carlyle Kazantzakis did not criticize Muhammad’s calls to sacred war; on the contrary, within the context of the screenplay, such calls are presented as appeals for heroic action, essential for spreading the truth. A typical Kazantzakis hero, Muhammad is shown fearlessly fghting at Badr and bursting into a wild dance upon the graves of his dead rivals (27). Moreover, Kazantzakis keeps silent about the battles and skirmishes, in which Muhammad was defeated, thus presenting him as an invincible hero, always moving ahead. Moreover, unlike Irving and similar to Carlyle, Kazantzakis presents Muhammad sincere, spontaneous, and inspired. Like Carlyle, he also gives emphasis on Muhammad’s destruction of the idols of the Kaaba, in a scene that also echoes Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer (1889). Carlyle’s Orientalist understanding of the Arab character and landscape has also infused the screenplay. In keeping with Carlyle’s stress on the unique qualities of the Arab land, which communicates its hidden message to Muhammad, Kazantzakis stages Muhammad’s prayer in mesmerizing oriental scenery. The desert, ripples of sand. The sun is rising; a lion slowly returns to his cave; herds of jackals, frightened, run away screaming; the lion stops for a moment, looks at the sun, roars and quietly continues his march. Very far away Mohammed lays his turban on the sand and kneels. Out of the background in the desert a caravan appears; the rider, on a little donkey, plays the fute and sings a monotonous song at the pace of the camels. (8)

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More than Carlyle, however, Kazantzakis’s screenplay substantiates, I believe, the ideas of Bergson, the philosopher who most profoundly infuenced Kazantzakis.42 Although in his last major work The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 1932), Bergson approaches Christian morality, his overall understanding of God and breakthrough theoretical notion, élan-vital, seem crucial in illuminating Kazantzakis’s Mohammed. For Bergson, God is no other than the élan vital, life’s upward creative impulse, grasped and understood by gifted persons through intuition, who then decisively afect their fellow people.43 Such is Kazantzakis’s Muhammad, who is over and over again depicted in a state of intuitional revelation. An inspired man, Muhammad undergoes the mi‘raj and witnesses Paradise before his own eyes. He keeps seeing the Archangel Gabriel, from the screenplay’s frst sequences until his death; has a mental picture of the dead Khadijah in Paradise; envisions the future of Arabia; and once incites a collective “Arab hallucination” in his followers (e.g., 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 27, and 29). According to Bergson, one of the basic characteristics of élan vital, which intuition grasps, is the so-called “duration,” the deepest part of our inner life, where past, present, and future merge in a moment of eternity, “the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.”44 Kazantzakis could identify such moments in Muhammad’s biography, and he incorporated them into the screenplay with pictorial richness. For the mi‘raj, he vividly illustrated Muhammad’s ties with the past, through his encounter with Moses and Jesus, and suggested Muhammad’s mental intrusion into the future, through his vision of future mosques all over the world. In the fnal analysis, the mi‘raj would not but constitute for Kazantzakis a perfect example of Bergsonian duration, where diferent temporal moments unite, annihilating the mathematically conceived notion of time. Moreover, in the screenplay, Muhammad is a consistent Bergsonian fgure, because by taking inspiration of Muhammad’s life Kazantzakis created a man who supplements spiritual activity with action. Kazantzakis’s Muhammad builds his home in Medina (as he actually did), creates objects with his hands, such as a swing for Aisha, enjoys nature’s oferings (grapes, dates, honey, milk) and women without becoming a slave to them, and fercely wages wars. At the same time, as a truly pious man, he preaches the existence of one God who is merciful and benevolent, when needed. For Kazantzakis, I believe, the Muslim Prophet himself incarnates the Bergsonian élan vital, as he constantly shifts from action to intuition and vice versa, a supreme synthesis of matter and spirit, of revolt against the old and prophesy for the new. To give visual form to this synthesis of action and spirit, Kazantzakis used some methods of the Soviet montage cinema that had fascinated him in Russia. When Muhammad imagines himself gathering an ever-growing number of fghters under his fag (27), one cannot but think of the relevant

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concluding scene of Storm over Asia. In addition, a ritualistic dance in the screenplay (22) alludes to a famous dance in this same flm, which also inspired a scene of Kazantzakis’s A Solar Eclipse.45 In Mohammed, these infuences – rather external – from Soviet cinema are incorporated into a work that primarily echoes the theories of French flm impressionism. At this point, we should bring in mind that the flm book that frst captivated Kazantzakis was Moussinac’s Birth of Cinema (Naissance du cinéma),46 “which synthesized the primary tenets of Impressionist flm theory.”47 In Moussinac’s book, which praises, among others, cinema’s capacity to give external forms to apparitions, poetic images, and the “states of the soul,”48 Kazantzakis obviously found the theoretical basis for illustrating his Bergsonian ideas. That Kazantzakis was attracted to Moussinac’s book, as a disciple of Bergson, is not a surprise. Moussinac himself does not mention Bergson, similar to most flmmakers of impressionism who did not refer directly to this philosopher, as they avoided linking their aesthetics with a particular theory.49 Still, some impressionist flmmakers did mention Bergson50 and flm scholarship has associated flm impressionism with Bergson’s ideas since the terms and worldview of this movement allude to notions of the French philosopher.51 As Kazantzakis’s screenplay survives in full, it gives us an idea of what a flm depicting Muhammad might look like had it been shot. Kazantzakis’s screenplay would most likely be an imaginative and appealing work, showing infuences from contemporary avant-garde flm movements. At the same time, it would be a personal, idiosyncratic portrayal of Muhammad. However positive, Kazantzakis’s Muhammad would frst and foremost be Kazantzakis’s (and of his flm collaborators), a creature of his worldview and imagination, as shaped through various texts, ideas, and trends in the early 20th century. As such, Kazantzakis’s Muhammad on screen could not have born the religious weight of the actual Muslim Prophet, to whom millions of people believe. In this sense, we may consider a rather fortunate outcome that this screenplay was never shot and that until today the only narrative flms on Muhammad’s life – Moustapha Akkad’s The Message (1976), Majid Majidi’s Muhammad: The Messenger of God (2015), and Richard Rich’s animated Muhammad: The Last Prophet (2002) – only suggest the presence of Muhammad without actually presenting him.

Notes 1 For a detailed transcription of this preoccupation in Kazantzakis’s career, based on information from his correspondence, see Georges Anemoyannis, “O Kazantzakis senariographos,” Diavazo 190 (April 27, 1988): 39–43; Georges Anemoyannis, “Kazantzaki Scénariste,” Le Regard crétois 3 (May 1991): 53–61. 2 Peter Bien, “Nikos Kazantzakis’s Novels on Film,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 18, no. 1 (May 2000): 162. Panayiota Mini, “A Red Handkerchief Made with Soviet Threads: Kazantzakis’s (and Istrati’s) Screenplay on the Greek Revolution of 1821,” Journal of Greek Media and Culture 2, no. 1 (2016): 52–53.

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3 Panayiota Mini, “Plathontas gia ton kinimatographo enan epanastati prophiti: To senario ‘Mouchametis’ (1932) tou N. Kazantzaki,” in O Kazantzakis ston 21o aiona, ed. Stamatis N. Philippidis (Iraklion: Crete University Press & School of Letters of the UoC, 2010), 271–290; Panayiota Mini, “ ‘Mia ekleipsi iliou’ (1932) tou Kazantzaki: Senario gia enan diethni diagonismo,” in Nikos Kazantzakis (Athens: Aikaterini Laskaridi Foundation, 2011), 159–176; Mini, “Red Handkerchief,” 49–65. In this chapter, I elaborate on ideas presented in Mini, “ ‘Mouchametis’.” The major points of Mini 2010, 2011, 2016 have been restated in Thanasis Agathos, O Nikos Kazantzakis ston kinimatographo (Athens: Gutenberg, 2017). 4 Timothy W. Taylor, “Kazantzakis and the Cinema,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 6 (1980): 163–168; Stamatis N. Philippidis, Topoi: Meletimata gia ton aphigimatiko logo epta neoellinon pezographon (Athens: Kastaniotis, 1997); Mini, “Red Handkerchief,” 61–62. 5 See, for instance, Costica Bradatan and Camil Ungureanu, Religion in Contemporary European Cinema: The Postsecular Constellation (New York: Routledge, 2014); David Shepherd, The Silents of Jesus in the Cinema (1897–1927) (New York: Routledge, 2016). 6 See, for instance, Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation After 9/11 (New York and London: New York University Press, 2012); Kristian Petersen, “Hollywood Muslims in Iraq,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 29, no. 2 (2017): 87–103. 7 Roy Armes, Dictionary of African Filmmakers (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 105. 8 Ella Shohat, “Sacred Word, Profane Image: Theologies of Adaptation,” in Cinema and Politics: Turkish Cinema and The New Europe, ed. Deniz Bayrakdar (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 17; see also Viola Shafk, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (Cairo and New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2003), 49. 9 Jacob M. Landau, Studies in the Arab Theater and Cinema (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958), 164; Freek L. Bakker, The Challenge of the Silver Screen: An Analysis of the Cinematic Portraits of Jesus, Rama, Buddha and Muhammad (Leiden and Boston: Brill Publication, 2009), 190. 10 Part of his correspondence has been published in Helen Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis: A  Biography Based on His Letters, trans. Amy Mims (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Co., 1983); Pantelis Prevelakis, Tetrakosia grammata tou Kazantzaki ston Prevelaki (Athens: Eleni Kazantzaki, 1984); Peter Bien, The Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). 11 Prevelakis, Grammata, 290. 12 Letter of Prevelakis to Kazantzakis, February  22, 1932. Prevelakis’s unpublished letters to Kazantzakis are held at the Nikos Kazantzakis Museum Foundation (at Myrtia, Iraklion, Crete), which I thank for giving me access to them. Prevelakis does not mention the name of the company. I conclude that he refers to Société Générale des Films since he explains that it is the production company of Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) and Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’ Arc (1928). 13 Gerasimos Zoras, “Ena ksehasmeno senario tou Kazantzaki gia ti zoi tou Moameth,” Istoria eikonographimeni 544 (October 2013): 103. 14 Bien, Selected Letters, 417. Kazantzakis had seen at least twice Storm over Asia in Russia (Bien, Selected Letters, 331). 15 Letter of Prevelakis to Kazantzakis, February 25, 1932. 16 Letter of Prevelakis to Kazantzakis, March 6, 1932.

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17 Prevelakis, Grammata, 319. 18 ibid., 265. 19 Georges Stassinakis, “Introduction aux relations de Nikos Kazantzaki avec le monde Arabo-Musulman,” Le Regard cretois 19 (July 1999): 19–24. 20 Kazantzakis’s literary production concerning the Middle East and the Far East has been documented in detail in Giorgos Kechagioglou, “Merikes paratiriseis kai skepseis me aphormi ti mesoasiatiki kai apoanatoliki grammateiaki diastasi ston N. Kazantzaki,” in O Kazantzakis ston 21o aiona, 107–144. 21 Vrasidas Karalis, O Nikos Kazantzakis kai to palimpsisto tis istorias (Athens: Kanakis, 1994), 94; Stassinakis, “Introduction,” 19–20. 22 Stassinakis, “Introduction.” 23 Prevelakis, Grammata, 472. 24 Bien, Selected Letters, 71. 25 The screenplay has been published in French: Nikos Kazantzaki, “Mohammed,” Le Regard cretois 15 (July 1997): 8–31. Throughout my chapter plain numbers in parenthesis indicate page numbers in this publication of Mohammed. 26 As Mohammed is not decoupaged, similar to all his 1932 screenplays, Kazantzakis sometimes characterizes it a “libretto,” most likely choosing the term that was used for detailed stories for the screen in the Soviet Union. 27 I present the plot in detail because Kazantzakis sometimes rearranges the chronology and changes the locations of the events of Muhammad’s life, or invents some incidents. 28 All translations from French and Greek sources are mine. 29 Prevelakis, Grammata, 280–281. 30 Washington Irving, Life of Mahomet (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1850), 192. 31 Prevelakis, Grammata, 296. 32 Albert Rolls, “Mahomet and His Successors,” in Muhammad in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia of the Prophet of God, Vol. 1: A-M, eds. C. Fitzpatric and A.H. Walker (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO Publications, 2014), 354–356; Alberto Saviello, “Between ‘Convivencia’ and ‘Reconquista’: The Prophet Muhammad as Arabian Knight in a Spanish Qurʾan Translation of 1872,” in The Image of the Prophet Between Ideal and Ideology, eds. Christiane Gruber and Avinoam Shalem (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2014), 335. 33 Irving, Mahomet, 123, 175. 34 Georgia Katsalaki (ed.), I vivliothiki tou Nikou Kazantzaki sto Istoriko Mouseio Kritis (Iraklion: Etairia Kritikon Istorikon Meleton, 1997), 103. 35 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911). The quotations derive from pp. 47, 54–55, 56, 57, 59, 68, 69. 36 ibid., 68, 64. 37 ibid., 47, 54–55, 57, 64. 38 ibid., 56, 69. 39 ibid., 49. 40 ibid., 49. 41 ibid., 62–63. Italics in the original. 42 Peter Bien, Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), passim. 43 Henri Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013), 30–51, 221–282. 44 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: The Modern Library, 1944), 7. 45 Mini, “ ‘Ekleipsi’,” 171–172. 46 Taylor, “Kazantzakis.”

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47 David Bordwell, French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory and Film Style (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 237. 48 Léon Moussinac, Naissance du cinéma (Paris: J. Povolozky & C’e, 1925), 24. 49 Bordwell, French Impressionist Cinema, 126. 50 Richard Abel, “The Contribution of the French Literary Avant-Garde to Film Theory and Criticism (1907–1924),” Cinema Journal 14, no. 3 (1975): 34; Bordwell, French Impressionist Cinema, 40, 113. 51 Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York: Routledge, 1989), chapter 3.

Bibliography Abel, Richard. 1975. “The Contribution of the French Literary Avant-Garde to Film Theory and Criticism (1907–1924).” Cinema Journal 14, no. 3: 18–40. Agathos, Thanasis. 2017. O Nikos Kazantzakis ston kinimatographo. Athens: Gutenberg. Alsultany, Evelyn. 2012. Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11. New York and London: New York University Press. Anemoyannis, Georges. 1988. “O Kazantzakis senariographos.” Diavazo 190 (April 27): 39–43. Anemoyannis, Georges. 1991. “Kazantzaki Scénariste.” Le Regard crétois 3 (May): 53–61. Armes, Roy. 2008. Dictionary of African Filmmakers. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Bakker, Freek L. 2009. The Challenge of the Silver Screen: An Analysis of the Cinematic Portraits of Jesus, Rama, Buddha and Muhammad. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Bergson, Henri. 1944. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York: The Modern Library. Bergson, Henri. 2013. Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bien, Peter. 1989. Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bien, Peter. 2000. “Nikos Kazantzakis’s Novels on Film.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 18, no. 1 (May): 161–169. Bien, Peter. 2012. The Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bordwell, David. 1980. French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory and Film Style. New York: Arno Press. Bradatan, Costica and Camil Ungureanu. 2014. Religion in Contemporary European Cinema: The Postsecular Constellation. New York: Routledge. Carlyle, Thomas. 1911. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Irving, Washington. 1850. Life of Mahomet. London: Henry G. Bohn. Karalis, Vrasidas. 1994. O Nikos Kazantzakis kai to palimpsisto tis istorias. Athens: Kanakis. Katsalaki, Georgia (ed.). 1997. I vivliothiki tou Nikou Kazantzaki sto Istoriko Mouseio Kritis. Iraklion: Etairia Kritikon Istorikon Meleton. Kazantzaki, Nikos. 1997. “Mohammed.” Le Regard cretois 15 (July): 8–31.

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Kazantzakis, Helen. 1983. Nikos Kazantzakis: A Biography Based on His Letters. Translated by Amy Mims. Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Co. Kechagioglou, Giorgos. 2010. “Merikes paratiriseis kai skepseis me aphormi ti mesoasiatiki kai apoanatoliki grammateiaki diastasi ston N. Kazantzaki.” In O Kazantzakis ston 21o aiona, edited by Stamatis N. Philippidis, 107–144. Iraklion: Crete University Press & School of Letters of the UoC. Landau, Jacob M. 1958. Studies in the Arab Theater and Cinema. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mini, Panayiota. 2010. “Plathontas gia ton kinimatographo enan epanastati prophiti: To senario ‘Mouchametis’ (1932) tou N. Kazantzaki.” In O Kazantzakis ston 21o aiona, edited by Stamatis N. Philippidis, 271–290. Iraklion: Crete University Press & School of Letters of the UoC. Mini, Panayiota. 2011. “ ‘Mia ekleipsi iliou’ (1932) tou Kazantzaki: Senario gia enan diethni diagonismo.” In Nikos Kazantzakis, 159–176. Athens: Aikaterini Laskaridi Foundation. Mini, Panayiota. 2016. “A Red Handkerchief Made with Soviet Threads: Kazantzakis’s (and Istrati’s) Screenplay on the Greek Revolution of 1821.” Journal of Greek Media and Culture 2, no. 1: 49–65. Moussinac, Léon. 1925. Naissance du cinéma. Paris: J. Povolozky & C’e. Petersen, Kristian. 2017. “Hollywood Muslims in Iraq.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 29, no. 2: 87–103. Philippidis, Stamatis N. 1997. Topoi: Meletimata gia ton aphigimatiko logo epta neoellinon pezographon. Athens: Kastaniotis. Prevelakis, Pantelis. 1932a. Letter to Kazantzakis. February 22, 1932. Nikos Kazantzakis Museum Foundation. Prevelakis, Pantelis. 1932b. Letter to Kazantzakis, February  25, 1932. Nikos Kazantzakis Museum Foundation. Prevelakis, Pantelis. 1932c. Letter to Kazantzakis. March 6, 1932. Nikos Kazantzakis Museum Foundation. Prevelakis, Pantelis. 1984. Tetrakosia grammata tou Kazantzaki ston Prevelaki. Athens: Eleni Kazantzaki. Rolls, Albert. 2014. “Mahomet and His Successors.” In Muhammad in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia of the Prophet of God, vol. 1: A-M, edited by C. Fitzpatric and A.H. Walker, 354–356. Santa Barbara, CA: ABCCLIO Publications. Saviello, Alberto. 2014. “Between ‘Convivencia’ and ‘Reconquista’: The Prophet Muhammad as Arabian Knight in a Spanish Qurʾan Translation of 1872.” In The Image of the Prophet Between Ideal and Ideology, edited by Christiane Gruber and Avinoam Shalem, 311–335. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. Shafk, Viola. 2003. Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity. Cairo and New York: American University in Cairo Press. Shepherd, David. 2016. The Silents of Jesus in the Cinema (1897–1927). New York: Routledge. Shohat, Ella. 2009. “Sacred Word, Profane Image: Theologies of Adaptation.” In Cinema and Politics: Turkish Cinema and The New Europe, edited by Deniz Bayrakdar, 2–37. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Stassinakis, Georges. 1999. “Introduction aux relations de Nikos Kazantzaki avec le monde Arabo-Musulman.” Le Regard cretois 19 (July): 19–24.

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Taylor, Timothy W. 1980. “Kazantzakis and the Cinema.” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 6: 157–168. Turim, Maureen. 1989. Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. New York: Routledge. Zoras, Gerasimos. 2013. “Ena ksehasmeno senario tou Kazantzaki gia ti zoi tou Moameth.” Istoria eikonographimeni 544 (October): 100–107.

4

Being a (Muslim) worker in the Egyptian flm industry Chihab El Khachab

Since the 1930s, Cairo has been the center of the most prolifc and commercially successful Arabic-language flm industry in the world. Yet the fact that this industry is based in the largest Muslim-majority country in the Arab world – and that most of the creative and technical workers in today’s industry have a Muslim background – has never elicited academic interest on its own. This disinterest is partly due to the scarcity of scholarship on the industry itself as opposed to its products. Counting publications by critics and academics in English, French, and Arabic, there are comparatively few studies on the history and political economy of Egyptian cinema (see, e.g., Sadoul 1966; Al-Ashari 1968; Al-Hadari 1989; Wassef 1995; Shafk 1998; Flibbert 2001; Armbrust 2004), let alone on its everyday working practices (El Khachab 2021). In this context, the lives of flm practitioners – including their religion – are sublimated by flm narratives analyzed in relation to wider political and ideological currents (see, e.g., Gordon 2002; Shafk 2007; Gugler 2011). When studies of Egyptian cinema mention religion, it is because of its representation on screen. Some studies have examined representations of religious minorities in Egyptian cinema, including Jews (Shafk 2007, 24–40; Shemer 2014; Starr 2015, 2017) and Coptic Christians (Shafk 2007, 41–52; Laachir 2011). Islam has attracted wider attention, which can be grouped in two broad streams. One examines how the “Islamic revival” has afected the norms of representation regarding female bodies, specifcally those of actresses and dancers (Shafk 2007, 198–238; Tartoussieh 2007; Nieuwkerk 2013). The other stream shows how political Islam is negatively represented in mainstream cinema under the impulse of anti-Islamist state policies during the Mubarak era (Armbrust 2002; Khatib 2006; Allagui and Najjar 2011; Gordon 2015). While paying little attention to the religiousness of practitioners other than actors and directors, both streams tend to give a partial image of Islam either as a set of visually encoded signifers (e.g., the hijab, the “Salaf” look) or as a doctrinal discourse, without examining everyday religious practices in flm production, circulation, and consumption. Given the scholarship’s bent toward on-screen representation, the emphasis on Islam’s visual and doctrinal aspects is unsurprising. Yet it obscures the

42 Chihab El Khachab role of everyday piety (or lack thereof) among practitioners and consumers alike. This chapter begins to remedy this gap, based on extensive feldwork in Cairo’s commercial flm industry between 2013 and 2015. I will start by describing how difuse Islamic norms govern the temporal organization of flmmaking, specifcally by punctuating the calendar of production and the everyday life of a flm set. Then, I describe the ethical dilemmas presented to some Muslim practitioners given that they work in an industry that is sometimes seen as being “immoral.” In conclusion, I refect on what is analytically gained by describing Egyptian flm practitioners as being “Muslim.”

The time of production The flmmaking season in Egypt is broadly organized around the Hijri calendar. This is not to say that the day-to-day unit of time reckoning is counted in Hijri months or days – all logistics are still coordinated according to Greenwich time and the Gregorian calendar – but signifcant dates of flm release coincide with major Islamic holidays: the Small Eid (eid el-ftr) at the end of Ramadan and the Great Eid (eid el-aḍḥa) some weeks later. In an industry that still thrives on domestic exhibition sales, these holidays represent an important fnancial opportunity. A great deal of the population takes time of simultaneously to engage in collective leisure activities with family and friends, including moviegoing. During both seasons, cinema journalists become attuned to the local box-ofce, as “holiday flms” (afām el-‘eid) compete to attract more moviegoers and, by extension, more revenue. “Holiday flms” do not constitute a specifc genre like “Christmas movies” in a Euro-American setting, but they are usually crafted and released with the expectation of attracting a massive audience on holidays. Given most producers’ imagined audience as a young, male, urban one, the most recent holiday flms have been predominantly light comedies and action adventure flms. Arguably, the coincidence between Islamic holidays and the flm season has no deep religious signifcance, because these holidays are just moments where moviegoing becomes more intensive among Egyptian audiences. This suggestion can be reinforced by reasoning that the flm release schedule does not mark any other religious holiday in any special way. The other major season is usually the beginning of summer break in national schools, when again releases coincide with a moment in which collective leisure activities are in demand. Sometimes, as was the case during my feldwork, the bounds between seasons are blurred when Ramadan falls in the middle of summer break, yet these clashing schedules are not invested with signifcance beyond the logistical difculty behind organizing a production schedule to release holiday flms on time. Unlike the difusely defned “summer break,” the Small and Great Eid set hard deadlines on flm releases. Indeed, a holiday flm must be released on the very day of the Eid if it is to reap maximal profts, which creates a time pressure on postproduction,

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shooting, all the way up to screenwriting. This pressure is most palpable in TV serial drama production, an industry with the same labor market and infrastructure as flmmaking in Cairo. TV serials are fnanced by satellite television channels. These channels, in turn, sell advertisements on primetime hours in the evening after iftar, when Muslim families are supposed to gather around their television sets to digest their copious meals and spend time with family. The time pressure to release the TV series on the frst days of Ramadan is such that some episodes are fnished mere hours before they are broadcast, while some productions continue shooting as they go along until the very last days in Ramadan. This kind of pressure accumulates toward the rear-end of production, but it is felt from the very beginning. “It’s very difcult to write [because of the] Ramadan season schedule,” complained the well-known screenwriter Mariam Naoum. “I get contracted in September-October . . . and I have two months to write a frst draft until January [when shooting begins]. . . . I barely have time to take a shower.” While the holiday flm season is more fexible, not least because shooting is more condensed (two to eight weeks as opposed to the months of TV serial drama shooting), it is similarly bound by Ramadan deadlines, with a similar pressure on each phase of production. In short, the flm season (el-mūsem or just el-sizon) is tied to a Hijri schedule, but this fact is seldom taken to have religious signifcance, both by religious and non-religious flm practitioners. What has more signifcance with regard to the time of production, however, is the everyday presence of Muslim prayer during the shoot. Muslim prayer is omnipresent in Cairo, the “city of a thousand minarets,” where the humdrum of loudspeakers calling believers to worship fve times a day pervades the contemporary urban soundscape. Given my own preconceptions, I had never thought about the relationship between the call to prayer (adān) and the life of a flm set beyond a working inconvenience, because dialogue recording must stop to avoid catching the call’s overwhelming sound into the flm’s fctional world. To some workers, the call to prayer must have faded into the background of urban noise as it did to my ears. To others, it was more meaningful. I had not given much attention to prayer until one time, while I was following a furry of activity by the production crew in Qot w-Far (The Cat and the Mouse, dir. Tamer Mohsen, 2015), I walked by an ofce where the production manager Mohammed Setohy was praying. I was surprised for a moment, because I had never seen anyone praying in the company’s ofces. I reasoned that this must happen often enough, just not in plain sight. Not being in the habit of praying myself, I had never felt the need to ask about where pious workers pray, although there is no reason to expect that they would not. Going through my feld notes, Friday prayer seems to have been a particularly important occasion. This is not to say that pious workers do not pray on other days, but that their practice became manifest whenever they worked on Fridays.

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“Whoever wants to pray can go pray!” This instruction was yelled out by the same Setohy while he announced the break on a shooting day in Décor (dir. Ahmad Abdalla, 2014). It was Friday, and the break happened to coincide with the prayer’s time. I later understood that Setohy was not just calling on his crew to pray but indicating that the break would be long enough to join the prayer at the local mosque. This has special signifcance because there is a widespread belief that Friday prayer provides additional blessings when carried out collectively, in a mosque, but the flmmaking schedule seldom matches prayer times in this manner. The assistant director who creates the overall shooting schedule and writes daily call sheets has several logistical concerns to juggle – including location changes, costume changes, actor availability – and adjusting to the prayer schedule is not high on their priority list. On an average shooting day, daily activities like eating, resting, or praying become subordinated to the imperative of executing the call sheet – crew members eat, rest, and pray on their own time. After Setohy made his announcement, some crew members started organizing to go out praying. “Do you want to come pray with us?” asked the clapper Abdelsalam Radwan. I said that I did not wish to go, and he politely did not insist. This question arose given the ambiguity of my religious afliation on set. The clapper would not ask his hierarchical superiors whether they would come out to pray, and he would certainly not ask women or Christians to come either. The question was legitimate in my case because I was a young Muslim male who did not have a clearly defned role on set, and whose religious afliation was therefore unclear. Likewise, while we were scouting some antique galleries in Ward Masmūm (Poisonous Roses, dir. Ahmad Fawzi Saleh, 2018), the scouting session was interrupted when the cameraman and the production workers decided to pray in a local mosque before they miss the time. The director, his assistant, and I ended up in a nearby café waiting for the crew. “Why don’t you pray?” asked the assistant director. Before I could answer, the director had jumped in virulently: “Why would he pray?” The assistant cowered a little and muttered a brief “I don’t know . . . Are you Christian?” I smiled back and uttered a brief no. Such direct questions about religious afliation are infrequent in the industry, but they hint at an implicit awareness of each worker’s religious practices. Although there is a sizeable Christian minority behind the scenes, mainly Coptic, the industry is dominated by workers with Muslim backgrounds. Yet religious divisions are usually not salient in everyday working practices. This is, in part, because many workers commit to an openly secular worldview, where religion becomes a private matter with no place in a work setting. This is also because the industry’s hierarchical division of labor – between artistic and technical teams, between team heads and assistants – is a more explicit principle of organization. In this context, religious diference is not a prominent principle of distinction as it might be beyond the flm industry in Egypt.

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The fact that Muslim prayer explicitly and intentionally occurs during breaks or outside working hours, and therefore becomes invisible to whoever does not pray, is both a consequence of the secular attitude of many practitioners on set and of the industry’s hierarchical workings. This was clear in the case of Friday prayers in Décor, where the groups that went out to the mosque would consist mostly of men on the technical crew: the clapper, the sound assistant, some production workers, some lighting technicians, and some prop assistants. These workers have little to no say over their own schedules, being guided in this matter by their team heads and the call sheet, while being aware that prayer is not considered sufciently important to warrant a scheduling derogation. Had a religious attitude been prevalent among hierarchical superiors like the director or the producer, it would have been reasonable to expect that prayer times would become more central to the day’s organization. A story relayed by a sound assistant gives a more concrete shape to this proposition. “The problem with the Egyptian flm industry is that it’s made upside-down (bel ma’lūb),” he suggested. He explained that instead of investing in good production value, then fnding the appropriate cast and crew, the cast in Egypt is selected before the rest of the production crew. This gives way to a lot of “ass-kissing” (ta‘rīs) to bigger stars. The Egyptian flm industry has always had a rigid star system (see Wassef 1995). This translates into overwhelming hierarchical respect for stars on set, whose every caprice must be accommodated accordingly. The sound assistant recalled once working in a TV series starring the aging yet iconic actress Nadia el-Gendi. The whole crew awaited the actress to appear on set, but she did not come out as expected. For hours, she went in and out of her lodge. Once, she said that she had to pray. She then packed and left for no apparent reason. The shooting day was cancelled. The sound assistant was fuming about the privilege accorded to the star, who stalled everyone’s workday at her own whim. He went so far as to question whether Nadia el-Gendi prays at all. Whether she does or not is insubstantial: what is clear is that her hierarchical position allowed her to take time of to engage in a personal activity, in a way that is not possible to other crew members. Friday prayers are not always endowed with religious signifcance on set. “Meeting after prayer” is a frequent way of marking early Friday afternoon in Cairo, whether the interlocutors intend on praying or not. And while a signifcant contingent of technical workers went to pray at the local mosque while we were shooting in Décor, the rest of the crew did not mark the occasion in any way. Preparations for the next shot went on as usual, and some grips stayed on location to setup a dolly shot. This is not to say that the workers who stayed on location were necessarily less religious – in fact, several would probably have preferred to join the prayer – but that working considerations take priority over non-working needs, including eating, resting, and even praying. These considerations, again, are mediated not just by a secular understanding of religion as a personal or private afair but also by

46 Chihab El Khachab an acute awareness of labor hierarchies, which is palpable among religious and non-religious workers alike.

Cinema and Islamic morals There is little talk in the Egyptian flm industry about the practice of prayer and its link to the everyday work of flm production. Moreover, none of my interlocutors ever refected on the flm season’s organization according to an Islamic calendar. What is regularly verbalized, however, are tensions between the practice of flmmaking and a moralizing Islamic discourse about the impropriety of cinema as a visual product and as a livelihood. Similar tensions have been highlighted elsewhere, specifcally in the case of repenting actresses, a phenomenon which attracts wide press attention since the 1980s in Egypt (see Nieuwkerk 2013). Some actresses who have had a signifcant career in the flm industry end up publicly donning a headscarf and repenting from their “sinful” activity. The press debate is usually set out in this contrast between the actress’ salacious life and her newfound piety, portraying actresses in terms of a virgin/whore binary, without examining the underlying assumptions behind this discourse – the assumption that flmmaking is immoral per se or that donning a headscarf is a moral activity per se. Such assumptions are most widely discussed in connection to actresses and their hyper-visible bodies, but they are in fact central to moral talk about the whole cinematic enterprise in Egypt. An extreme example was expressed cheekily by the director Ahmad Fawzi Saleh while interviewing an actor for a role in Poisonous Roses (2018). To see how the actor would react, Fawzi shook him by declaring that “art is religiously illicit” (ḥarām). The actor looked a little startled and muttered a brief “I don’t agree . . .” Fawzi asked him if he is Muslim, going against the tacit convention of avoiding any talk about religion overtly in a flmmaking context. “Yes, but I don’t practice much,” answered the actor, who added that he was still trying to become better at it. “It says in the Quran that art is illicit,” repeated Fawzi. The actor refused to believe it again, and he seemed a little uncomfortable, to which Fawzi answered by playing a verse from the Quran on his iPhone. “But there are, among men, those who purchase idle tales, without knowledge (or meaning), to mislead (men) from the Path of Allah and throw ridicule (on the Path): for such there will be a Humiliating Penalty” (The Holy Quran, Yusuf Ali translation, Luqman 6). The verse, he said, has been taken to mean that art is illicit by analogical reasoning (qiyās) in certain schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Fawzi’s performance was intended to gauge the actor’s response, since he most certainly did not believe his own provocation. Yet the discourse that he reproduced is widespread enough to have been preached, on Fawzi’s own admission, by a lecturer in cinematography at the High Cinema Institute, who stated in the classroom that “art is illicit” while pontifcating about God’s existence.

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While these examples might seem exceptional, I  have felt the efects of this moralizing talk in conversations with flm practitioners about how their families consider their job in the industry. Some practitioners reported no moral issue with their relatives after deciding to pursue a career in flmmaking. The line producer in Décor, Ahmed Farghalli, said that his family saw no problem with his career, but that they would have preferred him to become a doctor or an engineer. In Farghalli’s narrative, middle-class aspirations overshadowed moral reprobation. Thus, one should not overread moral motives into all disapproving comments about the flm industry. Yet such a moral motive is apparent in other workers’ stories. The production assistant Khaled “Labanita” Hussein, for instance, explained how his devout father disapproved of his work, some three years into his career. Meanwhile, his mother was starting to become more accepting ever since he had worked in a TV serial that she had seen and liked. The production manager Setohy had a similar story. His father initially did not agree with his decision to work in cinema, because he thought it was religiously illicit (ḥarām). Setohy eventually eased his disapproval by convincing him that he is just doing a managerial job. “I  still don’t feel right about it,” added Setohy in a refexive tone. Implicit in Setohy’s unease was a desire to distinguish between religiously licit and illicit aspects of flmmaking, which translated into the common idiom of respectability (eḥterām). A  managerial job like accounting or civil service is considered respectable by middle-class standards, because it is stable and comes from a legitimate source (e.g., a private company or the state). From the same perspective, cinema work is unrespectable, because it is unstable work and allows for gains from morally suspicious sources (e.g., producers associated with money laundering, drug trafcking, and promiscuous girls). Setohy did not directly challenge the latter characterization: hence, his “unease” with the job. Yet he established frm boundaries between his “respectable” (read morally appropriate) managerial work and the work he perceived as being “less respectable” (including acting). This language of respectability bears important consequences for the women who work in Egyptian flm production. Male workers dominate the industry except in certain positions such as actresses, stylists, and editors. Consequently, the few women who work behind the scenes – as directorial assistants, production assistants, or art directors – are faced not just with the burden of proving that they belong in a “masculine” line of work but also with constant suspicion about their moral respectability. This suspicion is cultivated by many male workers on set, regardless of religious afliation, but it becomes visible when moral attitudes come to prevail among hierarchical superiors. This point is well illustrated in a story relayed by the director Ahmad Fawzi Saleh, in a flm where he worked as an assistant to a director who later “repented” after years of working in the flm industry. In a scene where the main actress was about to go in the bathtub, the director saw the actress

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removing her clothes and immediately burst outside the bathroom yelling: “I beseech God almighty!” (astaghfar allahu-l-‘azīm). When used unsarcastically, this religious expression is meant to state one’s repentance from sinful acts, seeking God’s help to avoid being tempted by a woman’s body for instance. The director’s performance of pious indignance had the efect, in this case, of reinforcing the notion that the actress was somehow engaging in sinful behavior, even though she was just executing her scene. The assumption that the actress was to blame for her morally suspicious behavior was highlighted not just by the director’s pious stance but also by the rest of the crew, even though they did not act in an overtly religious way. When the assistant director had to fnish the bathtub scene while the director refused to see it, he deliberately shot it three times in Fawzi’s recollection to be able to watch the actress removing her clothes repeatedly. All males in attendance had “their mouths literally opened,” to the point where the actress lashed out at the crew when the scene was over. Fawzi’s narrative shows how a male gaze, whether overtly pious or not, transformed the actress’ body into an unrespectable sight. Seeing as the onus of respectability is unilaterally brought to bear on women’s bodies, without a refexive attitude toward male behavior as Fawzi had displayed in hindsight, female workers are compelled to invest extra care into maintaining their respectability on set. This explains why the actress would lash out at her overt sexualization by the crew. The gendered labor of respectability does not just fall on actresses as documented by Nieuwkerk (2013) but also on workers behind the scenes. The costume script supervisor in Décor, Mariam el-Bagoury, is an interesting example. Bagoury hails from a family with strong connections to the industry: her grandmother was a well-respected actress; her uncle is a well-known director. Yet when she decided to become a director – a career progressing upward from script supervisor to assistant director in Egypt – she was met with some resistance within the family about joining a “bad milieu” for young women. This resistance might have been borne out of personal experiences with the all-male industry as opposed to religious avoidance, but it indicates the perception that the industry is morally fraught and imposes extra work on female practitioners to prove their respectability. This notion of respectability is not prevalent for purely religious reasons, because it has specifc gendered and classed connotations as well. However, it is widespread enough among flm practitioners to require a conscious response on their part, especially among hierarchically subordinate workers.

Filmmaking and piety Throughout this chapter, I have highlighted elements in Egyptian flm production that can be associated with Islamic belief and practice. Whether in a moralizing discourse about cinematic production or the organization of a production schedule, the presence of Islam in the flm industry is difcult

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to discuss unambiguously without considering additional factors infecting it – for instance, a prevalent secular attitude, hierarchical labor relations, gendered and classed notions of respectability. While it is possible to distinguish between the attitudes of workers who display diferent degrees of piety, it is difcult to attribute their flmmaking practice to a purely orthodox understanding of Islam, if such an understanding is analytically possible. There has been an ongoing debate in the anthropology of Islam about whether Islamic piety is systematically displayed in individuated projects of ethical self-fashioning (see, e.g., Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006) or whether pious practice is constantly intruded upon by competing “profane” agendas (see Schielke 2009). The case of flmmaking would seem to support the latter proposition, although both positions would seem to have validity depending on which groups are concerned, at what times in their working day, and in which spaces. I have little evidence concerning flm practitioners’ lives beyond the work setting. It is beyond my scope to discuss whether some workers are more deeply engaged in a specifcally Islamic style of ethical self-fashioning than others. What is clear is that using the adjective “Muslim” to describe certain aspects of flm production says little on its own about beliefs and practices in the flm industry, even among pious workers. A pedestrian example of this contrast came up while talking to a pious production worker in Décor, while we were shooting on a cold night in the Egyptian Media Production City (EMPC). The worker had decided to rest a little to the side, after what looked like an exhausting workday for him. “I just want to go out and have a drink,” he muttered. For a moment, I thought that I had misunderstood, or perhaps he meant going out to drink tea or cofee, but the conversation soon veered to his past drinking experiences, including a nighttime shoot in a previous project where the whole production team had a sip of cognac to be able to bear the cold. This anecdote says little about this worker’s faith or Islam’s presence on set, but it is a reminder that an orthodox reading of Islamic doctrine cannot be unambiguously superimposed onto the living practice of Egyptian flm practitioners. So what can be gained by talking about practitioners as being “Muslim”? One important gain is an increased awareness of their social diversity. Egyptian makers of flm are not just automatons who work in the same way as flm practitioners elsewhere, but they are the products of a specifc sociotechnical context where certain Islamic beliefs and practices are widespread. Thinking about practitioners as emerging from wider historical circumstances is a central tenet in existing ethnographic works on commercial flm production (see, e.g., Ganti 2012; Hoek 2014; Pandian 2015; Meyer 2015; Martin 2016). Such ethnographies situate religious beliefs and practices on set as part of a broader narrative about the industry’s work. In Bollywood, Ganti (2012) describes how flm projects are launched with a puja ceremony on auspicious dates to confront the wider economic uncertainty of an unpredictable

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flmmaking market. In Ghana, Meyer (2015) describes how Pentecostal flmmakers and audiences use the cinematic medium to reveal and act against occult forces. In Hong Kong, Martin (2016) mentions how ghosts haunt the imaginary of flmmakers who are bent on chasing them to control the physical dangers and uncertainties of the flmmaking process. Such beliefs and practices shape each industry’s everyday work in ways that do not recur across the world, which in turn highlights the interest of Islamic beliefs and practices within the Egyptian flm industry’s secular and hierarchical division of labor. Another important gain in describing workers as “Muslim” is to highlight the diversity of beliefs and practices underlying the very concept of “Islam.” This has become a moot point since Talal Asad’s widely cited “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam” (1986), but it is important to reiterate the extent to which labels like “Islam” or “Muslim” can fexibly accommodate diferent beliefs and practices, whether among pious or not so pious individuals. The weight attributed to doctrine among flm practitioners depends on their own sense of what Islam is, whether the analyst can identify some aspects of their work as being “Islamic” or not. This point is perhaps most interestingly expressed in linguistic attitudes in everyday Cairo. God/Allah features extensively in expressions used by religious and non-religious workers alike, yet the weight attributed to the word’s religiousness will vary according to the worker’s attitude. When the line producer Ahmed Farghalli tells a crew member to “leave it to God” (khalliha ‘ala Allah) to sort out unpredictable trafc conditions on a logistically difcult shooting day, his relaxed tone expresses nothing of the religious gravitas that the notion would have in another context. Likewise, when the production manager Setohy praises his production team as being the best in Egypt “with God’s grace” (befaḍl-ellah), his tone expresses a gratitude that cannot be simply written of as a secular metaphor. Unpacking what “Islam” means to diferent flm practitioners, whether openly religious or not, whether the analyst and the practitioner even agree on what constitutes Islamic belief and practice or not, lends a diferent insight into the connection between cinema and Islam in this sense.

References Al-Ashari, Mohammed. 1968. “Iqtisadiyāt Sinā‘at al-Sinima f Misr: Dirāsa Muqārana [The Economics of the Film Industry in Egypt: A Comparative Study].” Ph.D. Thesis, Faculty of Law, Cairo University. Al-Hadari, Ahmad. 1989. Tarīkh al-Sinima f Misr: Al-Juz’ al-Awwal min bidayat 1896 ila ākher 1930 [The History of Cinema in Egypt: First Part from the Beginnings of 1896 to the Late 1930s]. Cairo: Nadi al-Sinima bil-Qahira. Allagui, Ilhem and Abeer Najjar. 2011. “Framing Political Islam in Popular Egyptian Cinema.” Middle East Journal of Culture & Communication 4, no. 2: 203–224. Armbrust, Walter. 2002. “Islamists in Egyptian Cinema.” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3: 922–931.

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Armbrust, Walter. 2004. “Egyptian Cinema On Stage and Of.” In Of Stage/On Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture, edited by Andrew Shyrock. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Asad, Talal. 1986. “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.” Occasional Paper Series, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Washington, DC: Georgetown University. El Khachab, Chihab. 2021. Making Film in Egypt: How Labor, Technology and Mediation Shape the Industry. Cairo and New York: American University in Cairo Press. Flibbert, Andrew. 2001. “Commerce in Culture: Institutions, Markets, and Competition in the World Film Trade.” Ph.D. Thesis, Columbia University. Ganti, Tejaswini. 2012. Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Gordon, Joel. 2002. Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser’s Egypt. Chicago, IL: Middle East Documentation Centre. Gordon, Joel. 2015. “Piety, Youth, and Egyptian Cinema: Still Seeking Islamic Space.” In Islamism and Cultural Expression in the Arab World, edited by Abir Hamdar and Lindsey Moore. London: Routledge. Gugler, Josef, ed. 2011. Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Hoek, Lotte. 2014. Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh. New York: Columbia University Press. Khatib, Lina. 2006. “Nationalism and Otherness: The Representation of Islamic Fundamentalism in Egyptian Cinema.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 9, no. 1: 63–80. Laachir, Karima. 2011. “Sectarian Strife and National Unity.” Egyptian Films: A Case Study of Hassan and Morqos’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 31, no. 1: 217–226. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Martin, Sylvia J. 2016. Haunted: An Ethnography of the Hollywood and Hong Kong Media Industries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meyer, Birgit. 2015. Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Nieuwkerk, Karin van. 2013. Performing Piety: Singers and Actors in Egypt’s Islamic Revival. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Pandian, Anand. 2015. Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sadoul, Georges, ed. 1966. Les Cinémas des pays arabes. Beyrouth: Centre Interarabe du Cinéma et de la Télévision. Schielke, Samuli. 2009. “Being Good in Ramadan: Ambivalence, Fragmentation, and the Moral Self in the Lives of Young Egyptians.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute: S24-S40. Shafk, Viola. 1998. Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Shafk, Viola. 2007. Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class and Nation. Cairo and New York: American University in Cairo Press.

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Shemer, Yaron. 2014. “From Chahine’s ‘al-Iskandariyya . . . leh’ to ‘Salata baladi’ and ‘‘An Yahud Misr’: Rethinking Egyptian Jews’ Cosmopolitanism, Belonging, and Nostalgia in Cinema.” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 7: 351–375. Starr, Deborah A. 2015. “In Bed Together: Coexistence in Togo Mizrahi’s Alexandria Films.” In Post-Ottoman Coexistence: Sharing Space in the Shadow of Confict, edited by Rebecca Bryant. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Starr, Deborah A. 2017. “Chalom and ‘Abdu Get Married: Jewishness and Egyptianness in the Films of Togo Mizrahi.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 107, no. 2: 209–230. Tartoussieh, Karim. 2007. “Pious Stardom: Cinema and Islamic Revival in Egypt.” The Arab Studies Journal 15, no. 1: 30–43. Wassef, Magda, ed. 1995. Égypte: 100 ans de cinéma. Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe/Éditions Plume.

Part II

New communities

5

Puerto Rican Muslims in post-9/11 documentaries Authenticity, cultural identity, and communal belonging Yamil Avivi

In his chapter, “American Muslims; 1965 to the Present,” Zain Abdullah explains that “African American, Latino and other Muslims . . . have popularized Islam in locales across the country, although they rarely receive adequate media attention. The lack of exposure for converts is obviously related to the stereotyping of Muslims as Arabs.”1 It also refects the history of media texts that present incomplete or shortsighted images of Latino Muslims as prison converts, “bizarre” brainwashed followers, or potential radical terrorists.2 Here, I examine flms about being a Latino/Puerto Rican Muslim that generate complex understandings about Latino Muslim males. In light of Abdullah’s words earlier, this chapter examines post-9/11 flm representations in Jennifer Maytorena Taylor’s New Muslim Cool (2009) and Yoni Brook’s and Musa Syeed’s A Son’s Sacrifce (2007), rare flms that have centered real-life portrayals – for non-Muslim and U.S. mainstream viewers – of two U.S.-born Latino Muslim males of Puerto Rican descent, Imran Uddin and Hamza Perez. While Imran is raised as a Muslim, Hamza converts at the age of 21. These two flms together not only challenge the stereotype of Muslims as Arabs but also illustrate how Latino/Puerto Rican Muslim males negotiate mixed ethnic and (inter)cultural identities in their everyday lives. In New Muslim Cool, Hamza is a U.S.-born and urban-raised Puerto Rican Muslim convert who lived a life of delinquency, drug dealing, and crime but seeks a new life after converting to Islam. In Latino and Muslim in America: Race, Religion, and the Making of a New Minority, Harold Morales writes, “New Muslim Cool focuses on Hamza Perez’s intersecting identities as a Latino and Muslim, as a father and husband, as a brother and son, and as a morally conscious individual and law abiding citizen.”3 New Muslim Cool, therefore, walks the viewer into Hamza’s life as the son of Puerto Rican parents, an anti-drug community mentor, and prison counselor who marries Rafah Daughtry, a second-generation African American Muslim. An ambitious and recorded Puerto Rican Muslim hip hop artist, Morales adds, “Those who are introduced to Hamza Perez via New Muslim Cool learn much more about his family life and social service work than

56 Yamil Avivi they do about his militant hip hop.”4 Rafah and Hamza move to Pittsburg with their children (from previous marriages) and other Muslims to found a mosque there. As Chan-Malik explains, Hamza is emblematic of “. . . the realities of Islam in urban post-9/11 America that [have] begun to be more fully explored in American flm and cinema.”5 One signifcant occurrence in this flm, for example, is the raiding of the Pittsburg mosque, which resonates with the profling of new Muslim converts as potential radical terrorists. During that scene, Hamza explains that the police warned him that he is being watched with suspicion. Later, the viewer fnds out that the FBI investigated him and took away his security clearance as a prison counselor due to anti-American sentiments expressed in his Muslim-inspired hip hop music, which the flm does not portray necessarily as “militant.” Therefore, the production as a whole, according to Morales, is “more widely consumable,” or safe viewing for a mainstream American audience; it does not sell militant ideas but incorporates Hamza’s experience as a U.S. Latino after 9/11. Further, according to Kelly J. Baker, “it’s hard to really not like Hamza,” overall “[t]he flm provides the visual evidence of the prejudice, discrimination, and Islamophobia that Hamza and [his brother] Suliman faced . . . and the power of fear mongering and political maneuvering to harm the lives of those unfortunate enough to be targets [in urban post-9/11 America].”6 New Muslim Cool, in efect, ofers a racially diverse, interconnected and everyday lived perspective of living in Islam as a Latino convert. According to Chan-Malik, the flm would be a production that “is representative of Muslim Americans of all races, ethnicities, and national origins . . . articulat[ing] and defning their identities as Americans [post 9/11] . . . and commonality within their communities but also recount[ing] their experiences as a community under suspicion.”7 Similarly, Baker, who used New Muslim Cool (2019) as a tool in her classroom, writes that the movie challenges the perception that Muslims are only Arab by “introducing” Latinx Muslim converts as “one of the fastest growing segments of the Muslim community.”8 Chan-Malik further describes this urban post-9/11 America as tied to an “urban cultural milieu of hip hop and spoken word” deeply connected to the plight, urban culture, and interconnectivity of people of color, including African Americans, Puerto Ricans, other Latino Muslims, and non-Muslims often living in the same neighborhoods.9 In one scene, Hamza, speaking in Spanish, shares his Islam-inspired hip hop lyrics with neighborhood gang members near the mosque in Pittsburg. Toward the second half of the flm, Hamza helps organize an interfaith Muslim and Jewish poetry project that includes hip hop and spoken word to promote interfaith dialogue and connectivity. At the same time, Baker also writes how the movie eases the confation with Islam and terrorism by ofering a complex life of Hamza’s every day survival, “. . . as a Muslim, rapper, father, husband, brother, and son as well as the difculties [and prejudices] he faces because of his religious faith.”10

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In A Son’s Sacrifce, Imran is the son of a Puerto Rican Christian mother and Bangladeshi Muslim father. He lives in New York City, where he was born and raised. Imran comes of age and resides in a tight-knit urban and conservative South Asian Muslim ethnic enclave that is outside “. . . inner cities where mostly African American coverts and other minorities lived.”11 A Son’s Sacrifce ofers a life story about a second-generation Latino/Puerto Rican and South Asian/Bangladeshi Muslim whose ethnic and cultural makeup as a mixed racial subject within the immigrant Muslim community is highly uncommon and therefore on the margins. In centering his life story, A Son’s Sacrifce creates visibility for such uncommon intermarriages between traditional immigrant Muslims and non-Muslims of diferent races and ethnicities. Yet among Muslims, the probability of intermarriages between Latino/a converts and Arab, Desi, and South Asian Muslims, while infrequent, are occurring more and more with the rise of post-9/11 Latino Muslim conversion. Abdullah writes, “American Muslims (referring also to U.S. immigrant Muslims) have rarely shared a life across these boundaries and have only reluctantly started to marry outside of their ethnic or racial communities.”12 The storyline for the flm is Imran’s challenge in successfully taking over his father’s (Riaz Uddin) halal business, which he must manage while gaining respect among the “conservative” or “old school” tristate Arab, Desi, South Asian Muslim community/clientele for the feast of Qurbani. During the Qurbani feast, “Muslims are commanded to slaughter a goat, lamb or bull to honor the Koranic story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifce his son for God.”13 Even while Imran has the college business skills and work experience (in advertising) to take his father’s immigrant business to the next level, he deeply struggles with belonging among the Muslims in his community due to being of Puerto Rican descent and not speaking Arabic. Most of his father’s community does not perceive him as a “real” Muslim, which could make him inadequate for his father’s halal business if in the end he cannot achieve respect and full membership from within the community. As his father explains in one instance in the flm, “I built [my business] from nothing and my son could destroy [it] in one minute.” This chapter brings to light these two signifcant representations of Latino Muslim males and puts them into conversation to consider how these protagonists overall challenge static concepts of U.S. race, ethnicity, and culture despite conservative dominant ideologies that still infuence the production in certain scenes. One important similarity between Hamza and Imran is that they are both U.S.-born and of Puerto Rican origin. I address, in particular, the similarities and diferences in how Hamza and Imran express their Puerto Rican subjectivity as well as their sense of cultural maintenance in their everyday lives as U.S.-born children in their surrounding communities. I argue that the depiction/centering of Imran’s and Hamza’s subjectivity as Muslim subjects overall challenges and expands discourses and representations of Muslims and Latinos/xs.14 Specifcally, I  compare and contrast how these flm narratives package each protagonist’s life experiences with

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those of their mothers as bearers of cultural identity, and their everyday dealings with authenticity and interculturality that enlighten their audiences about how they navigate their Latino/Puerto Rican and Muslim identities. In the frst section of this chapter, I examine the cultural maintenance of identity through the specifc ways in which their mothers and fathers shape Hamza and Imran. In the second, I analyze how the producers of these flms portray Hamza and Imran around questions of (in)authenticity. In the third, I examine the role of intercultural marriage in shaping Hamza’s and Imran’s proximity to specifc ethnic groups or minorities.

Mother as the bearer of Latino cultural identity In the two flms, both mothers of the protagonists are Puerto Rican and Christian. In this section, I make comparisons regarding how the protagonists’ mothers articulate their own Puerto Rican identity and whether or not their mother’s cultural identity is instructive for these men (or not) as they articulate or preserve their own Latino cultural identity. The weight of the mother’s cultural identity in each flm, whether strong (Hamza’s case) or weak (Imran’s case), gives the viewer a sense of how the protagonists articulate their Puerto Rican identity in their everyday lives. Imran’s parents met in New York City and married despite being from diferent religious faiths and communities, his mother Natividad is a Christian and his father a Muslim. Hamza explains, “Having a father that is Bangladeshi Muslim and a mother that’s Puerto Rican wasn’t exactly easy.” His comment alludes to how navigating these two contrasting identities could mean forfeiting one for the other. Hamza’s mother, Gladys Perez, is portrayed without a husband. We also do not know the whereabouts of Hamza’s father. The viewer can assume that the mother is Catholic and married accordingly given that one of Hamza’s aunts, Aurora Ritter, states, “We are all Catholic here.” In Imran’s case, there is only a brief scene in which he and his mother engage with their Puerto Rican identity; however, in this flm, it is virtually an act of symbolic ethnicity or dehistoricized cultural tradition with little everyday meaning and value. Imran and his mother share a moment making pasteles, traditional Puerto Rican tamales. Imran fondly recognizes this dish as a cultural Puerto Rican family pastime. He is sitting on the kitchen table beside a pile of homemade pasteles that are waiting to be cooked while listening and talking to his mother. While preparing the pasteles, she is also singing a humorous chant in Spanish about eating them “caliente” (hot) or else you’ll get a stomachache. In the scene, we see that Imran’s mother translates the chant not only for the English-only speaking viewer but possibly also for Imran, suggesting his limited ability to speak, write, and understand Spanish. It is undoubtedly an intimate exchange, involving food and laughter, unlike the pressure and stress Imran faces with his father and his father’s halal business. Imran is lively during this moment and

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pronounces “pasteles” in what could be assumed to be his limited Puerto Rican Spanish. The production does not leave room for Imran and his mother to have a sustained discussion in Spanish, which could have provided more information regarding Imran’s Puerto Rican (linguistic) identity. Hamza, on the other hand, is shown speaking in Spanish with other family members or Spanish speaking Latinos/Puerto Ricans, suggesting an ability to build Hispanophone family and social ties. Despite this limitation, Imran may still identify as Puerto Rican/Latino, as we see in the next section. Riaz is also sitting in the kitchen; he does not add anything about the pasteles, leaving behind a rigid boundary between the Puerto Rican/Christian and Bangladeshi/Muslim ethnic identity markers of their home. In this way, the production sustains static ethnic boundaries that do not illustrate how Puerto Rican and Bangladeshi culture are mixed in Imran’s everyday life. These portrayed boundaries resonate with Imran’s remark that growing up with two difering cultural identities was not “exactly easy” as he navigated his life with his parents’ intermarriage. Further, Imran’s father’s cultural identity and legacy (his halal business) is privileged and centered in the flm and refects the couple’s decision that Imran’s cultural and religious outlook be Muslim foremost. Throughout the entire flm, the mother is not given the agency to articulate anything deeply about the signifcance and presence of her Puerto Rican identity in her marriage and the passing on of that cultural identity to Imran. In the rest of the flm, Imran’s mother is silent and literally looks on while Imran’s Muslim identity evolves and he assumes his father’s halal business. She is portrayed primarily doing household chores like cooking and laundry. In contrast, Hamza’s mother has a pronounced matriarchal presence throughout New Muslim Cool that is deeply symbolic of his Puerto Rican and Christian identity. Unlike Imran’s mother, Gladys often expresses both the cultural diference and hesitation involved in Hamza’s decision to convert to Islam from his traditional Christian upbringing as the son of Puerto Rican parents. Imran’s mother is portrayed in a dominant patriarchal marriage in which Riaz deeply infuences Imran’s cultural identity. For example, Riaz explains, “You have to show your child, who you are, where you are from, and what is your obligation to Almighty Allah.” Imran’s mother is not given the foor to make a substantial comment about her cultural identity and the impact to her son. Gladys, on the other hand, is the matriarch among her family and frequently expresses concern or a sense of foreignness regarding Hamza’s decision to convert to Islam. Gladys’ central vocalized presence throughout the flm, representing her and her family and her/their Puerto Rican/Latino culture and religion, is a deep indicator that Hamza and his Muslim family will not lose ties with those cultural roots. These attitudes about maintaining their Christian/Catholic Puerto Rican upbringing are similar to those of other Latino or Latin American Muslim converts in work by Martinez Vazquez (2010) and Sandra Cuevas (2015). For example, Cuevas’s empirical study on female Maya Muslims in Chiapas,

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Mexico speaks to how their “ethnic identities are redefned in relation to Islam . . . [which] . . . does not undermine their ethnic identities . . . it is possible to be both Muslim and Maya at the same time.”15 With Imran, we do not see any engagement with other Puerto Rican family members or friends. Thus, it is not clear just how rooted he might be in his mother’s Puerto Rican identity, which could further weaken with the present dominant patriarchal role his father plays in his life and the legacy of his father’s business.

In/authenticity Both protagonists face questions of authenticity from diferent communities, including the Latina/o, Puerto Rican, and Muslim communities. They face the burden of being “not quite,” or in an “in between” or liminal positioning within these communities. In light of this, I compare how both of these men handle their struggle with authenticity while living as Latino and Muslim subjects. In the case of Hamza, I show that even while he is in a similar liminal positioning to Imran, Hamza takes a more eased and individualized positioning by owning and authoring his mixed Puerto Rican and Muslim identity without the pressure of proving his authenticity. Early in the flm, for example, Hamza and his brother discuss unashamedly in a kitchen scene their lack of linguistic profciency or speaking of “Puertoronics” with broken English, Spanish, and Arabic that ultimately is a bold statement about their inauthenticity as Latino Muslim coverts and liminal positioning among three cultures. On the other hand, as explored below, Imran faces a great sense of alienation, feeling like he does not truly belong within the South Asian Muslim-majority mosque where he worships with his father or among the community at large. In the documentary, Imran’s life and quest for authenticity are portrayed as deeply rooted with his father’s Bangladeshi and Muslim identity; yet, he also articulates his sense of identifcation as Puerto Rican and his resentment of his father’s community for not being accepting of his mixed ethnic identity. Imran articulates that his authenticity is questioned when he says, “When I go to the mosque, I defnitely get looked at diferently.” Imran faces a great sense of alienation, feeling like he does not truly belong within the South Asian Muslim-majority mosque and community. Further he explains, “The Bangladeshi community, they’re thinking that Riaz’s son can’t be Muslim, he’s half Puerto Rican. Puerto Rican people aren’t Muslim.” His statement challenges the standing dominant discourses of simplifed racial, ethnic, and religious categories among South Asian, Desi, and Arab Muslims. At the same time, Imran represents Latino/x Muslims in a way that is currently sidelined in post-9/11 Latina/o convert discourses as the son of an uncommon interracial and interfaith marriage. Unlike Hamza’s eased outlook regarding his mixed ethnicity, which I  examine in the second half of this section, Imran articulates an acute mestiza consciousness or hybrid awareness for being of Puerto Rican and Bangladeshi Muslim origin, dealing with

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liminality and feeling as not belonging amidst the patriarchy of his father’s Arab, Desi, and South Asian Muslim peers/clients. Some work on Latinas converting to Islam is also relevant to understanding Latino Muslim men, Imran and Hamza. In their compelling chapter, “Double-Edged Marginality and Agency: Latina Conversion to Islam,” Yesenia King and Michael P. Perez point out that Latina Muslims ofer a contemporary example of women at the border, or “at the edge of patriarchal and colonial hegemony,”16 and draw from Gloria Anzaldua’s borderland theory, including her concept of “mestiza consciousness,” which Elena Aviles refers to as “. . . a path [between borders] of hybridization of thought.”17 King and Perez posit that these women live “.  .  . at the margins of U.S. dominant society, Latina/o communities, and Arab-and South Asian-dominant Muslim collectivities . . . that create alternative identities,” invoking mestiza consciousness in them.18 Homi Bhabha describes such subjects living in a third space in which they articulate their hybrid, transnational, and intersectional experiences amidst what Kaplan and Grewal term “scattered hegemony” or “. . . multiple systems of power intersect and come to bear on social actors.”19 That is, in the case of Latino/a Muslims, they navigate the “multiple systems of power” among global, nationalist, and ethnic contexts. These alternative identities not only add new meanings to Latinidad but are also transcultural identities that challenge dominant notions of Latinidad. While the authors above are writing specifcally about Latina women, mestiza consciousness could also be applied to men’s experiences, including Imran’s and Hamza’s, and how their male subjectivity and sexuality are impacted by patriarchal domination of multiple communities. Imran says, “Why do [South Asian Muslims] look at me [my mixed Bangladeshi and Puerto Rican heritage] as being diferent? What’s the objection? What’s wrong? Why is it strange to them?” The use of “diferent,” “objection,” “wrong,” and “strange” describes Imran’s sense of inauthenticity in the Muslim community’s heteropatriarchy, which is tied to his maleness and sexuality being questioned or unwelcomed for not being “Muslim enough.” Importantly, among his Muslim community, his inauthentic status marks him frst as an undesirable candidate to be a husband and son-in-law within the Bangladeshi patriarchy, which therefore queers him with an unfamiliar gender and sexuality as a heterosexual male fgure of Puerto Rican origin. In an article, written about eight years after the release of the documentary and passing of Imran’s father, Mallory Moench writes that he is perceived as “unconventional candidate” because “his mother is Puerto Rican, he doesn’t speak his father’s native language, and he married a woman of Norwegian descent.”20 His questions are challenges to this South Asian patriarchy viewing his Puerto Rican identity as diferent, undesirable, and ultimately queered by defending his mixed cultural identity and expanding – from his lived subjectivity – simplifed notions of what counts as an authentic Muslim.

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However, the overall failure to genuinely center Imran’s sense of belonging among the Puerto Rican community indicates the production’s amnesia regarding his Puerto Rican identity. In another moment Imran explains, “It pushed me away from that community for a while.” “It” in this sentence is synonymous with “their rejection of me being Puerto Rican.” Further, Imran clearly establishes here an actual occasion when he left (“pushed me away . . . for a while”) that community. Imran does not specify the timing or length of his departure from that community or where he went. Did he seek belonging with the Puerto Rican community? Did he consider converting to Christianity? These kinds of questions are left unanswered in Imran’s journey of authenticity centered within the Arab, Desi, and South Asian Muslim community. Instead, the documentary spends time on Imran’s American consumer identity, highlighted by his hobby of collecting Star Wars and Lord of the Rings action fgures now that he can aford it, because as a child his parents did not have the money to buy them for him. He says, “I felt this urge to complete my childhood as an adult since we didn’t have the money to buy all that stuf when I was a kid. So I buy it now.” However, this development in A Son’s Sacrifce resonates with the documentary’s emphasis on Imran’s South Asian Muslim identity, which according to Abdullah, points to economic and social mobility achievement that moves these immigrants and their children away from urban Latino and African American Muslims and non-Muslims.21 In other words, the focus on Imran’s consumer identity also suggests how the production is infuenced by conservative white supremacist ideologies and avoids portraying Imran’s possible deep cultural and political relationality with less-privileged urban Puerto Ricans and African American Muslims and non-Muslims and their (potentially oppositional) grassroots activism, organizing and community empowerment through hip hop and spoken word literary and cultural production.22 Ultimately, the production focuses on the mobilized college educated Imran as one who can relate and assimilate to mainstream consumerism and having virtually no ties to lesser privileged urban Latinos and African Americans unlike the way Hamza and his brother have them. Toward the second half of the flm, the storyline celebrates Imran achieving belonging among his father’s Muslim community. In one symbolic, lifechanging moment, Imran had to slaughter lambs on a day when the butcher grew ill and could no longer continue. When Imran assumes and efciently performs the role of slaughterer, Riaz says on the screen, “My son to slaughter [the lamb]. I’m shocked. Inside of me I was crying. The Muslim brothers and sisters, they trusted him.” Riaz’s reaction indicates that this moment is symbolic of Imran achieving respect among his father’s Muslim community and clientele. By the end of the flm, the viewer sees his relationship with the community change as slaughtering multiple lambs ensures his insider status. We see screen images of a client taking a picture of Imran and engaging with other community fathers, husbands, and children as a dependable

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Muslim and halal business owner. In a voiceover, Imran’s voice is heard saying, “The ones who gave me funny looks and what not and now all of a sudden they’re depending upon me; they’re coming to me now.” No longer perceived as “not Muslim enough,” Imran wins not only membership but also leadership and even successfully defends his queered sexuality among the Muslim community/clientele, which now re-centers the community’s heteropatriarchy that had sidelined his Puerto Rican subjectivity. Meonch’s article raises years later how mosque leaders heavily value Imran’s leadership as crucial to the survival of the local community after his father’s death despite being an “unconventional candidate.”23 The chapter suggests this Muslim leadership leaning less conservatively than how the flm portrays it. Yet his mestiza consciousness of his lived Puerto Rican subjectivity still remains foreign and at the margins among the patriarchy of Arab, Desi, and South Asian Muslim men. While Imran voices the pressures of being inauthentic in the flm yet defends his Puerto Rican identity, Hamza’s sense of inauthenticity is much less stressful (if stressful at all) as a Puerto Rican, Muslim, and American male. Hamza and his brother Sulieman explain in one scene in a lighthearted gesture, “We don’t speak English well, Spanish or Arabic . . . welcome to Puertoronics [or Puerto Rican Ebonics, referring to diferent hybrid languages and their nonstandard grammars].” Like Hamza, Imran is also fuent neither in Spanish nor in Arabic, which further casts both of them as inauthentic in dominant Arab speaking immigrant Muslim and Hispanophone communities. Hamza faces a particular battle that U.S. Latinos face in a Hispanophobic culture. According to Morales, all Latinas/os, despite being U.S.-born, are “subjected to stereotypes of Latinos as undesired immigrants or foreigners [or with cultural or diasporic excess to white or Judeo Christian American mainstream culture and citizenship].”24 A Harlem Muslim radio host, Imam Talib, in New Muslim Cool lists for Hamza in a live interview all the markers that make him culturally undesirable together as a racially brown hybrid subject within the U.S.: “You’re Muslim, You’re American, You’re Puerto Rican, you’re from the hood, you’re an artist, you’re a rapper [with potential radical ideologies] . . . sounds like America’s worst nightmare.” In contrast, Imran’s downplayed (and forgotten) Puerto Rican/Latino identity in this flm, his education and professional career in advertising among whites (shown in the opening of the flm) along with his consumer American mainstream identity (collecting Star Wars and Lord of the Rings action fgures as explored earlier), actually makes him more relatable to white mainstream American identity and less undesirable than marked Latinos like Hamza, who is trying to (im)prove himself as a good citizen after a life of delinquency.25 Yet Hamza uses his music to articulate his Puerto Rican, Muslim, and American identities in ways that, according to Ramadan-Santiago, suggests an unapologetic and determined “creative work of self-making” through music and culture that “. . . reexamin[es] and reconstruct[s] what it means

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to be Puerto Rican and Muslim” despite achieving authenticity or not.26 Further, according to Ramadan-Santiago, Hamza is part of a global umma hip hop phenomena that not only imagines their self-made identities outside state boxes but also, “. . . creates a [translocal] identity and therefore a community for themselves within which this identity fts.”27 For example, in a segment where Hamza and his brother as the “Mujahideen Team” are going to perform before an NYC/Harlem crowd, Hamza and Suleiman describe themselves as “matcheteros” or “machete handlers,” which invokes a diasporic dimension as Puerto Ricans and translocal subjects. Hamza acknowledges the macheteros’ “fnely crafted art” of a struggling and laboring class in the unequal socio-economic hemispheric and global system of white Judeo-Christian imperial power and racial profling in which U.S. Muslims fnd themselves. The brothers go on stage with faming machetes and sing, “We don’t care about no Patriot Act! We don’t care about surveillance! We don’t care about no FBI agents in the crowd, this is for y’all!” Morales further alludes to an interconnectivity the Mujahideen Team have with their audience by saying, “The camera cuts to several Muslims, diverse in many ways [mostly black and brown subjects], but . . . all nod their heads in agreement with Hamza’s pronouncements.”28 In efect, New Muslim Cool portrays Hamza as a Latino Muslim who, while in an in-between positioning relative to diferent communities, is fnding belonging, connectivity or making space for himself in diferent black and brown communities translocally and globally from his self-lived experience and perspective.

Interculturality through marriage Imran is not married nor is there any discussion about when he plans to get married. However, in A Son’s Sacrifce, Imran is destined to marry a South Asian/Bangladeshi female Muslim when three developments are considered. First, the flm’s peak arrives when Imran has no other choice but to slaughter the rest of the lambs, which insures membership for him within the community of South Asian, Desi, and Arab Muslims. Now that Imran has gained that authenticity he has yearned for, marrying someone outside his immigrant Muslim community could risk reversing the acceptance he has gained even though intermarriages between South Asian, Desi, Arab Muslims, and Latino Muslims are more possible with the emergence of Latinas converting to Islam since 9/11. Secondly, Riaz’s central role as parental fgure in this flm and his passing on of his business to his son suggest the great infuence he will have over Imran’s selection of a spouse in an endogamous marriage. Third, as previously explored in this chapter, Imran’s mother plays a secondary role to his father, and as a cultural bearer, that is deeply symbolic of her yielding to Imran’s Muslim and Bangladeshi cultural identity. In efect, Imran’s overall limited portrayal as intercultural both in the past and present suggests that he will marry a woman within his father’s

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ethnic community (not his mother’s) and not likely a Latina Muslim or nonMuslim. This strong possibility that Imran will marry within his Muslim community and particularly someone his father prefers is comparable to the fndings in Karen Isaksen Leonard’s study Making Ethnic Choices: California Punjabi Mexicans (1992) regarding how sons of Punjabi Muslim fathers and Mexican-American mothers often dutifully married Punjabi Muslim women even abroad to please their fathers and receive full inheritance of land, businesses, and other forms of material wealth.29 In contrast to Imran’s experience, Hamza’s marriage to Rafah in New Muslim Cool portrays an exogamous marriage and intercultural family and social life between Puerto Ricans and African Americans. In a segment before Hamza is going to get married, he is getting his haircut with a young African American barber. Hamza is giving the barber details about his wedding, frst saying that it will be “a clash of civilizations,30 Latinos meeting blacks at the wedding.” Using “clash of civilizations,” Hamza explains that intercultural exchanges between Latinos and African Americans are not always culturally or racially settling. However, Hamza, who came of age in urban demographic areas with a Latino and African American majority, envisions his own wedding as an intercultural celebration. Hamza proceeds to describe an intercultural exchange between African Americans and Latinos through food in which the “Latinos will eat what the blacks bring (fried chicken and macaroni and cheese) and the blacks will eat what the Latinos bring (rice and beans).” While Hamza’s suggestion about the exchange of food between blacks and Latinos is slightly superfcial, his mother, Gladys, is portrayed as more refective and anxious about her family’s experience with Rafah. For example, once inside the mosque on the day of the wedding and wearing what looks to be a hijab, Gladys is portrayed uneasy, looking slightly unsettled or confused about the religious procession. Not long after, Gladys says, “[Rafah] is like a nice girl. My family is kind of hard to accept people so it’s going to be a little bit, you know (nervous laugh). There’s a lot of stuf I  don’t understand. I  hope that we get along.” While Gladys afrms the challenge that she and her Catholic Puerto Rican family are facing in fully “accepting” the interracial and interfaith dynamic that Hamza has brought them, she suggests moving forward with “hope.” The interfaith and interracial dynamic of Hamza’s and Rafah’s marriage portrayed in this flm involves diferent family members of Hamza’s that strengthen the family’s intercultural outlook. Both Hamza and Rafah had children from previous marriages and now with their union, their children will enter and face their own intercultural experience especially with the arrival of their sibling (Hamza’s and Rafah’s son). In scenes that follow, the viewer watches Rafah and Hamza visiting Hamza’s family in two instances. In the frst, it is evident that Hamza’s family is not comfortable with Hamza’s new faith and African American wife. Looks of bewilderment, silence from most of the family members and staring at Rafah are shown. However,

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in the second instance, when Rafah is just days away from giving birth, Hamza’s grandmother, Gladys Mercedes Colon, directly addresses Rafah and says, “I want you to have the baby now.” Unlike in the frst scene in which only Gladys spoke to her, the grandmother’s warm address to Rafah in this second instance is instructional to the other family members, forging love and acceptance for this interracial and Muslim union and newborn. Gladys’s and Hamza’s grandmother’s acceptance and hope strengthens Hamza’s and Rafah’s intercultural dynamic with their children. However, this does not always go smoothly, especially when Islamic traditions are neither understood nor appreciated by the Catholic family. For example, one scene illustrates Gladys reacting when her granddaughter Mayla she raised from Hamza’s frst marriage wears a hijab. Gladys asks rather bluntly with a nervous giggle, “Mayla, you look funny with that thing on! I have never seen her with a hijab.” Undoubtedly, this is a moment of cultural tension; Gladys articulates her slight discomfort seeing her granddaughter wearing a hijab. Hamza tells his mother, “She likes it. She wants to wear it everyday.” The daughter’s decision to wear the hijab shows how well she is adjusting to living with her biological father and stepmother in her new Muslim upbringing. In another scene, all the children are together with Hamza and Rafah, who are asking them what name should be given to their sibling. In a voiceover Rafah suggests that their new mixed ethnic newborn sibling will unite them and help to forge an interethnic and intercultural bond between them as African American and Latino Muslim children.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have examined the ways that the representations of Imran’s and Hamza’s Latino Muslim experiences and subjectivity are amplifying dominant notions of male Latinidad through Latino/Puerto Rican Muslim male subjectivity. As documentaries, these productions ofer representations that complicate sensationalist mainstream discourses of Latino Muslim identity found in post-9/11 coverage of Latino Muslim conversion. Imran, who is of Bangladeshi Muslim and Puerto Rican descent, is not even among the Latino Muslims who are identifed in current discourses because of their parents’ uncommon intermarriage, yet he represents a male with this hybrid identity. In contrast, Hamza, a convert of full Puerto Rican descent, fts the long-standing prototype of the urban Latino who becomes Muslim. Comparing the stories of these two Latino Muslims opens a multiplicity of possibilities about such men’s lives and experiences that represent lived experiences of U.S. Latino Muslims whose numbers continue to grow and complicate male Latinidad and articulate their mestiza consciousness by breaking racial, ethnic, and social boundaries. The discussion in this chapter should remind producers for future representations of Latino Muslims to take their time and tell the whole story and not only part of it by considering and valuing the entire family history, cultural subjectivity, and social

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connectivity of such men as multiethnic individuals. If in case such future flm narratives only tell part of the story, this discussion reminds viewers to critically question what family, cultural, and social details the portrayals may have been left out and (ideologically) why.

Notes 1 Zain Abdullah, “American Muslim in the Contemporary World,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Islam, eds. Juliane Hammer and Omid Saf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 76. 2 Ana Ramos-Zayas, “Delinquent Citizenship, National Performances: Racialization, Surveillance and the Politics of Worthiness in Puerto Rican Chicago,” in Latinos and Citizenship: The Dilemma of Belonging, ed. Suzanne Oboler (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006); Harold Morales, Latino and Muslim in America: Race, Religion, and the Making of a New Minority (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Hjamil A. Martinez-Vasquez, Latina/o Y Musulmán: The Construction of Latina/o Identity Among Latina/o Muslims in the United States (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2010). 3 Morales, Latino and Muslim in America, 147. 4 ibid., 148. 5 Sylvia Chan-Malik, “Cultural and Literary Production of Muslim America,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Islam, eds. Juliane Hammer and Omid Saf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 294. 6 Kelly J. Baker, “ ‘New Muslim Cool’ as Teaching Tool,” Sacred Matters Magazine, September 8, 2016, https://sacredmattersmagazine.com/new-muslim-coolas-teaching-tool/. 7 Chan-Malik, “Cultural and Literary Production of Muslim America,” 293–294. 8 Baker, “ ‘New Muslim Cool’ as Teaching Tool.” 9 Chan-Malik, “Cultural and Literary Production of Muslim America,” 294–295. 10 Baker, “ ‘New Muslim Cool’ as Teaching Tool.” 11 Abdullah, “American Muslim in the Contemporary World,” 72–73. 12 ibid., 72. 13 Independent Lens, “A Son’s Sacrifce.” n.d., www.pbs.org/independentlens/sonssacrifce/flm.html. Accessed 1 June 2020. 14 “Latino” refers to male heterosexual subjectivity for this essay; “Latinx” represents subjectivities that fall outside conventional understandings of being Latino or Latina. In the case of Hamza and Imran, the fact that their hybrid and mixed ethnic subjectivities as Latino Muslim subjects fall outside dominant understandings of a Christian/Catholic Latino, Latinx represents a cultural excess to those dominant understandings. Secondly, Latinx also represents queered genders and sexualities. Specifcally in Imran’s case, I  explore how his maleness is queered given his in-between positioning within diferent communities as a Bangladeshi/ Puerto Rican Muslim. 15 Sandra Cañas Cuevas, “The Politics of Conversion to Islam in Southern Mexico,” in Islam in the Americas, ed. Aisha Khan (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), 166. 16 Yesenia King and Michael P. Perez, “Double-Edged Marginality and Agency: Latina Conversion to Islam,” in Crescent Over Another Horizon: Islam in Latin America, The Caribbean, and Latino USA, eds. Maria del Mar Logroña, Paulo G. Pinto, and John Tofk Karam (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2015), 308. 17 Elena Aviles, “Reading Latinx and LGBTQ+ Perspectives: Maya Christina Gonzalez and Equity Minded Models at Play,” The Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe 33, no. 4 (2017): 41.

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18 King and Perez, “Double-Edged Marginality and Agency,” 308–309. 19 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and Maylei Blackwell, “Lideres Campesinas: Nepantla Strategies and Grassroots Organizing at the Intersection of Gender and Globalization,” Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 35, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 15. 20 Mallory Moench, “Madani Halal: After the Founder’s Death,” Voices of NY, February  23, 2017, http://voicesofny.org/2017/02/madani-halal-preservingtradition-after-founders-death. 21 Abdullah, “American Muslim in the Contemporary World,” 72–73. 22 Chan-Malik, “Cultural and Literary Production of Muslim America,” 294–295. 23 Moench, “Madani Halal.” 24 Morales, Latino and Muslim in America, 138. 25 ibid. 26 Omar Ramadan-Santiago, “Insha’Allah/Ojalá: Yes Yes Y’all: Puerto Ricans (Re) examining and (Re)imagining Their Identities Through Islam and Hip Hop,” in Islam and the Americas, ed. Aisha Khan (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), 115–138, 117. 27 ibid., 121. 28 Morales, Latino and Muslim in America, 140. 29 Karen Isaksen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California Punjabi Mexicans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). 30 This use of “clash of civilizations” is not the same as Samuel Huntington’s defnition. See Chapter 5 in Morales, Latino and Muslim in America.

Works cited Abdullah, Zain. 2013. “American Muslim in the Contemporary World.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Islam, edited by Juliane Hammer and Omid Saf, 65–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Avilés, Elena. 2017. “Reading Latinx and LGBTQ+ Perspectives: Maya Christina Gonzalez and Equity Minded Models at Play.” The Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe 33, no. 4: 34–44. Baker, Kelly J. 2016. “ ‘New Muslim Cool’ as Teaching Tool.” Sacred Matters Magazine, September  8, 2016. https://sacredmattersmagazine.com/new-muslimcool-as-teaching-tool/. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Blackwell, Maylei. 2010. “Lideres Campesinas: Nepantla Strategies and Grassroots Organizing at the Intersection of Gender and Globalization.” Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 35, no. 1 (Spring): 14–47. Chan-Malik, Sylvia. 2013. “Cultural and Literary Production of Muslim America.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Islam, edited by Juliane Hammer and Omid Saf, 279–298. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cuevas, Sandra Cañas. 2015. “The Politics of Conversion to Islam in Southern Mexico.” In Islam in the Americas, edited by Aisha Khan, 163–185. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Independent Lens. n.d. “A  Son’s Sacrifce.” www.pbs.org/independentlens/sons sacrifce/flm.html. Accessed 1 June 2020. Kaplan, Caren and Inderpal Grewal, eds. 1994. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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King, Yesenia and Michael P. Perez. 2015. “Double-Edged Marginality and Agency: Latina Conversion to Islam.” In Crescent Over Another Horizon: Islam in Latin America, The Caribbean, and Latino USA, edited by Maria del Mar Logroña, Paulo G. Pinto, and John Tofk Karam, 304–324. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Leonard, Karen Isaksen. 1992. Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Martinez-Vazquez, Hjamil A. 2010. Latina/o Y Musulmán: The Construction of Latina/o Identity Among Latina/o Muslims in the United States. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. Moench, Mallory. 2017. “Madani Halal: After the Founder’s Death.” Voices of NY, February  23, 2017. http://voicesofny.org/2017/02/madani-halal-preservingtradition-after-founders-death/. Morales, Harold. 2018. Latino and Muslim in America: Race, Religion, and the Making of a New Minority. New York: Oxford University Press. Ramadan-Santiago, Omar. 2015. “Insha’Allah/Ojalá: Yes Yes Y’all: Puerto Ricans (Re)examining and (Re)imagining Their Identities Through Islam and Hip Hop.” In Islam and the Americas, edited by Aisha Khan, 115–138. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Ramos-Zayas, Ana Y. 2006. “Delinquent Citizenship, National Performances: Racialization, Surveillance and the Politics of Worthiness in Puerto Rican Chicago.” In Latinos and Citizenship: The Dilemma of Belonging, edited by Suzanne Oboler, 275–300. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

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Performing identities Intersections of Muslim sexuality, gender, and race in Touch of Pink and Shades of Ray Aman Agah

This chapter examines the intersections of sexuality, gender, and race of Muslim men as portrayed in the flms Shades of Ray (Jafar Mahmood, 2008) and Touch of Pink (Ian Iqbal Rashid, 2004). Both flms create space for narratives counter to common themes of Muslim representation as part of a progression toward inclusivity and more diverse explorations of Muslim identities. I argue that Western ideologies of sexuality and gender can be applied to these narratives and are also at times limiting in their understanding of sexualities of religions and races outside of white Christianity. Using queer theory texts, primarily Butler’s discussions of performance in terms of gender and sexuality, as a means to analyze these two flms I examine how the main characters’ identities as Muslim men place them in the position of queering space; how queer theory can be used to understand the importance these flms play in redefning Muslim sexuality in mainstream media, while also critiquing certain aspects of the flms, including casting choices and the ways in which genre both shapes and limits the structures of identity. Queer theorist Lee Edelman argues that “queerness can never defne an identity; it can only ever disturb one,” meaning that while many of the characters in the flms may not identify as queer in terms of their sexuality, it is their “Otherness” as Muslims and non-white/non-dominant people that places them in the position of queer.1 The main characters in Shades of Ray and Touch of Pink, Rayhan (Zachary Levi) and Alim (Jimi Mistry), respectively, queer space, broadly as Muslim men, and more specifcally in terms of other identities each occupies, and both characters use performance as a mode of survival in their Muslim and non-Muslim communities. This idea is further supported by Alberto Fernandez Carbajal’s analysis of Touch of Pink, stating that the flm “queers the generally heteronormative mainstream genre of the Hollywood romantic comedy, appropriating, and playing with, its techniques, while focusing on an under-represented community.”2 Touch of Pink follows gay Pakistani Ismaili Muslim Alim as he navigates the intersections of his sexuality, race, and religion as they weave in his relationships with his boyfriend Giles (Kris Holden-Ried) and his mother Nuru (Suleka Mathew). Shades of Ray follows mixed race heterosexual Rayhan, who

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similarly struggles to fnd balance between his multiple identities and relationships with his girlfriend Noel (Bonnie Somerville) and Pakistani Muslim father Javaid (Brian George). Genre is critical in analysis because it helps viewers understand what to expect. As romantic comedies, viewers can anticipate a happy ending, caricatures, stereotypes, action “for laughs,” and some drama scattered in. Comedy is signifcant in creating space for performance with the intention of garnering laughter, though can easily fall into parody. Butler’s framing of parody is useful in understanding the complexities of representation in both flms and my arguments against casting in Shades of Ray: Parody requires a certain ability to identify, approximate, and draw near; it engages an intimacy with the position it appropriates that troubles the voice, the bearing, the performativity of the subject such that the audience or the reader does not quite know where it is you stand, whether you have gone over to the other side, whether you remain on your side, whether you can rehearse that other without falling prey to it in the midst of the performance.3 As stated earlier, comedy relies partially on parody and caricatures to help advance plot; where this becomes problematic is that caricatures can reinforce stereotypes and, as Butler indicates, cross over into parody that results in laughing at as opposed to laughing with. Parody is defned as performing or creating an exaggeration with the intention of producing humor. Ultimately, because the genre comes with the expectation of parody, one can assume that these caricatures are written without malicious intent, however, given the complication of lack of representation and already existing stereotypes, one is left to wonder what is parody and what is authentic. The characters in these flms create a space of familiarity for South Asian and Muslim viewers “in the know,” but perhaps also afrm existing stereotypes for viewers outside these communities. The romance classifcation of the flms can be tied to the characters’ identities as well. In Touch of Pink Alim summons the imagined spirit of Cary Grant (Kyle MacLachlan), who serves partially as a source of humor, as well as romantic guide. Grant had a well-received career in slapstick and screwball comedies, as well as romances. Alongside Doris Day, he starred in the romantic comedy That Touch of Mink (Delbert Mann, 1962), which is directly referenced in the title, and serves as another reminder of performing heteronormativity, and the importance that genre plays in Alim’s life. While humor is performed by supporting characters, Rayhan and Alim tend to be more serious and focused on their romantic lives. Rayhan is especially romantic, which means he is in some sense written against type. The expectation generally set in Hollywood, as evidenced in countless flms and TV series, is for Muslim men to be devoid of emotions, particularly romance. The only way Rayhan is overbearing is through gestures of

72 Aman Agah romance. Touch of Pink, keeping with a romance genre expectation, there is a montage sequence showing budding love between characters, only in this case, it plays out between Nuru and Giles, as he escorts her around London. The scene is complete with a shopping trip that gets Nuru in a suit Giles compares to an Audrey Hepburn look. The comparison to Hepburn is a reminder that in order for brownness/queerness to be appreciated, it must be in some way aligned with whiteness/normativity, and another example of classical Hollywood ofering meaning and value in this story. Alim’s relationship with romance is more personal, and revealed in his love for classic romance flms and guidance of Cary Grant. Alim’s romance plays out in large gestures – surprising Nuru at her home and kissing Giles in front of his entire community, for example.

Shades of pink: performing multiple identities Written and directed by Jafar Mahmood, Shades of Ray follows Rayhan, an aspiring actor in Los Angeles, who is half Pakistani and half European American.4 Within the frst ten minutes of the flm, Rayhan is seen auditioning to the camera. His name and brownness questioned by the casting agents, and presumably the viewer. In Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler, referencing and agreeing with scholar bell hooks, asserts that “within this culture the ethnographic conceit of a neutral gaze will always be a white gaze, an unmarked white gaze, one which passes its own perspective of as the omniscient, one which presumes upon and enacts its own perspective as if it were no perspective at all,” therefore, the director cannot help but create space within a white gaze, and the viewer cannot help but position themselves there as well.5 This is further complicated by casting Zachary Levi in the title role. Although Rayhan is perhaps not intended to be positioned as making fun, there is a challenge in separating Levi’s whiteness and position in a dominant group from his portrayal of a man who is in a space of queerness/Otherness. Upon confrmation that Rayhan is South Asian, the agents ask him to do an “Indian” accent. The camera moves between Rayhan and the agents as they correct Rayhan’s impression. The camera serves as the eyes of the viewer, watching as Rayhan becomes increasingly demeaned. Rayhan is not just auditioning for a role in a fctional flm, but auditioning to tell his own story to the viewer, to explain himself, ultimately to perform. Butler states that: If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a diferent sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.6 Rayhan is in a cycle of repetition in terms of both gender and racial identities. These repetitions vary depending on his audience, as well as his feelings

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toward himself. With Noel, Rayhan feels compelled to perform gentle masculinity, which can be tied to his racial identity, as he struggles to work against the assumption of domineering Muslim man. Rayhan is not interested in performing as a brown man, while simultaneously aware that his appearance pushes him into specifc boxes. An example of Rayhan’s inability to perform his own identity is found in an overly used gag: Rayhan is unable to handle the level of spice in Pakistani food, ironically served to him by a white woman. Keeping Butler’s idea of performance, and its ability to change, in mind, throughout the course of the flm Rayhan does move through a sort of evolution of who he is, who he believes he is expected to be, and how he perceives himself. Javaid eventually convinces Rayhan to meet another mixed person, a girl named Sana (Sarah Shahi) and Rayhan’s point of view suddenly shifts. Rayhan is surprised to meet another half Pakistani person, someone who understands his struggles with identity and what it means to feel out of place. Touch of Pink, written and directed by Ian Iqbal Rashid, revolves around love and familial relationships. Kugle states that “Muslim families are often widespread and close-knit . . . [and] often extend seamlessly into the wider Muslim community,” a point that is particularly relevant in Touch of Pink, as Nuru fnds herself performing for a small family unit and a broader community.7 Like Rayhan, Alim struggles with his Pakistani and Muslim identities, and also in terms of his romantic life, his sexuality, and how he will be received by his origin community. Alim is forced to confront his issues when Nuru unexpectedly visits. Alim knows that coming out will mean an inability to fulfll the expectations of not just his mother, but the community as well (Butler, 2004). Like Rayhan, Alim is caught in multiple layers of performance, sometimes conscious, sometimes not.8 Cary Grant plays an important role in guiding Alim on his journey. Unlike Shades of Ray, which opens with the camera on Rayhan, Touch of Pink opens with Grant as narrator, essentially giving ownership of the story to a dead white man. While Grant is part of Alim’s own imagination, that is not at frst clear, and the tone is set by Grant, indicating that Alim aligns his sexuality and identity with a gay white male icon and whiteness overall. Scholar Momin Rahman’s states that “gay Muslims represent an intersectional location [and] . . . challenge[s] the positioning of Western and Eastern cultures as mutually exclusive and oppositional,” meaning that gay Muslims represent a reminder that Western and Eastern sexualities, genders, and other identities are not necessarily as adversarial as assumed.9 Toward the end of Touch of Pink, it is revealed that Nuru’s cousin Dolly (Veena Sood) knows her son Khaled (Raoul Bhaneja) and Alim are both gay, but takes no issue with Khaled’s sexuality because he is fulflling his cultural and religious duties by marrying a woman and providing for his parents. There are multiple layers to unpack here, and in terms of this particular argument, the key is that Dolly does not see Khaled’s sexuality as counter to his Muslimness or Pakistaniness, in fact, like many Christian and Westerners, Dolly

74 Aman Agah is essentially stating that as long as he does not act on it, or keeps it hidden, there is no issue. She may as well employ the often used line, “hate the sin, love the sinner.” Additionally, Dolly has gendered performative expectations of her son – that he is just a boy acting on sexual impulse, and ultimately, Khaled performs his masculine expectations: he marries a woman and provides for his family. As Butler iterates in multiple pieces, heterosexuality, binary genders, and whiteness are viewed as established norms, what many are striving to achieve and perform, the counter to what Edelman emphasizes as queer. These normalized understandings of race, sexuality, and gender can often intertwine, even in queered spaces. As Rahman states “queer theory can help us to think about these issues of researching intersectionality precisely because it is focused on the uncertainties of identity categories.”10 Western queer theory is helpful in analysis of these flms, because the flms were produced in the West, by men raised in Western countries. This is not to dismiss the reality that to be non-white and non-Christian in these spaces, is to be queer, as Rusi Siraj and Asifa Jaspal point out, “these models . . . fail to consider other aspects of identity, as well as the ways in which gender, race, ethnicity, class and religion may intersect with sexuality.”11 The primary tension between Alim and Giles is Alim’s inability to come out to his mom, and Giles’ inability to see the complexities Alim faces. Giles’ identity and place of privilege prevent him from fully understanding Alim’s struggles, or as Carbajal describes it, the “western expectations of Muslims’ need to ‘come out’ and thus join modernity.”12 Alim’s character is further queered by the fact that he is a minority, within a minority. There are multiple references to Alim being Ismaili, a Shi’a Muslim minority; likely an indication that Alim’s family immigrated to Canada as refugees.13 Similarly, Rayhan faces his own coming out, frst to his dad about Noel, later to Noel about Sana. These examples only scratch the surface of how Alim and Rayhan’s identity categories intersect, create uncertainty in themselves and their surrounding communities, and how the two create multiple sometimes oppositional performances in order to establish, maintain, and protect their identities. Judith Butler’s idea that “race and gender ought not to be treated as simple analogies” can easily be applied to both flms.14 Alim’s life is built around multi-layered and complex performances. Alim seems to think that performing gender and sexuality involves a certain level of decorum and slyness, hence the imagining of Cary Grant, whose primary purpose it seems is to keep Alim’s sexuality closeted from his mother and brownness closeted from Giles. Giles declares that Alim is a coconut, “brown on the outside and white on the inside,” as if Giles’ whiteness is in a position to dictate how Alim performs brownness. Alim accuses Giles of his own performative behavior, calling Giles out for thinking he’s superior for being into “spice.” Given the flm’s genre, these exchanges are not critically analyzed and resolved superfcially.

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Rayhan’s performances are multi-layered as well, and similarly take on a form of breaking the fourth wall, in that his character is an actor, it is his literal job to perform. Much of Rayhan’s performance revolves around race. The overall story is framed around, and propelled by casting calls, as if performance is what moves Rayhan’s story, and refecting transitions and growth. By the end of the flm, Rayhan has more fully embraced his mixed identity, creating a character he thinks the casting agents/viewers want. Gender performance is also a part of Rayhan’s identity, as he is motivated by heteronormative gender roles. Amplifying his dedication to performance, Rayhan uses a flm set to propose to Noel. Noel’s failure to embrace the scene is in essence a rejection of Rayhan’s entire life performance. Sana, on the other hand, is a more willing participant in Rayhan’s world, though like Rayhan is introduced to him out of familial obligation. And perhaps this obligation is in part why Sana can comprehend Rayhan’s performances. Ultimately, for Alim and Rayhan, it is when they strive to abandon performance which negates or diminishes portions of their identities, and embrace the broader spectrum of who and what they encompass, that they each fnd happiness. Once Rayhan accepts his identity as a mixed race man, and his attraction to this piece of himself as he sees and knows it, and as it is refected back to him in the eyes of those who see and know him, such as Sana, he is able to fnd love and success in his work. Alim’s acceptance of himself as a gay Muslim man, coming out to his mom, and living openly with Giles allows him to abandon Grant and heteronormativity. In the fashion of queer theory, and specifcally Butler, one can assume that performance will shift for both men, taking on new meanings, performing Muslim, South Asian, queer, and whatever other identities they occupy. As Butler argues, performance, whether in terms of gender, sexuality, or race, is “instituted through a stylized repetition of acts,” and while Alim and Rayhan occupy a genre that ends on a happy note, their stories are presumably not over.15 Perhaps, they will fnd themselves repeating new performances of who they believe themselves to be. Another way of highlighting performance of race and religion, specifcally within their genre, is in using the parents who represent more stereotypical ideas of Islam and brownness as counters to the less foreign children, and in many respects serve as the most obvious examples of parody. Parody is a tactic used heavily in terms of Javaid and Nuru, who are often positioned as sources of laughter for other characters and viewers, and also as caricatures of parents, specifcally Muslim and South Asian parents. Alim’s mostly serious demeanor is contrasted by gags at the expense of his mother’s “foreignness” and age. Viewers are positioned to question whether Mathew’s portrayal of Nuru is a parody of a mother, a Pakistani mother, a Muslim mother, or all three. Ultimately, Nuru is written as a more complex character, indicating that her creation is not intended simply for laughter. That said, she is not free from complication. While Javaid seems mostly written for laughs, he too has moments of growth, helping catalyze Rayhan forward,

76 Aman Agah ultimately making amends with Rayhan and Rayhan’s mother Janet (Kathy Baker). Finally, considering the fnal scene is Rayhan doing a well-received impression of Javaid in a casting session, the flm reiterates Javaid’s status as a mere caricature, to be parodied, to be used for self-discovery, for performance, perhaps for an opportunity to exploit Rayhan’s own identity. Butler states that “the body is always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention. In other words, the body is a historical situation, as Beauvoir has claimed, and is a manner of doing, dramatizing, and reproducing a historical situation.”16 Rayhan and Alim are two bodies living out history in their genre, in the expectations of the viewer, and simultaneously living out expectations of their immediate and larger communities, as well as those of outsiders they encounter. What does it mean when these two men disrupt the histories of their bodies, of who they are meant to be? If the expectation of romantic comedy is along the lines of boy meets girl, in essence the flms are themselves a performance of a known genre. As Western made flms, both Shades of Ray and Touch of Pink queer the expectations of genre via their leads. Arguments have recently emerged in terms of Master of None (2015–2017), The Big Sick (Michael Showalter, 2017), and other love stories of Muslim men that pair the man with a white woman while simultaneously relying on negative tropes of brown women.17 With these criticisms in mind, Shades of Ray defes this, not only by having Rayhan end up with another brown person but also by actively leaving a white woman, and writing Sana as a strong woman. This triumph of pairing Rayhan with another brown person is somewhat lost considering Rayhan’s portrayal by a white man and the reality that Sana ultimately occupies that manic pixie dream girl space of propelling Rayhan’s narrative, existing for his self-discovery, a piece in the patchwork of Rayhan’s life performance. As Butler states, “there are cruel and fatal social constraints on denaturalization,” and if what is considered to be natural is whiteness and patriarchy, then Rayhan’s movement away from the whiteness of Noel to the brownness of Sana is only momentarily a celebration lost to the constraints of Levi’s whiteness and Sana’s existence as catalyst.18 One must ask how Alim also maintains naturalization while also defying the expectations of his genre? How is the fnal relationship of Alim with Giles a renaturalization of his identities? How do Rayhan and Alim perform whiteness as ways of maintaining naturalized states, and do the flms require performances of whiteness in order to reach broader audiences and help create space for the brownness, Muslimness, queerness they strive to present? In examining these flms, it is important to note that in-depth analysis of Islam and Muslim sexuality is not part of either narrative, a fact that can be easily explained through genre. Sexuality in Islam is not necessarily dictated by the same Western Christian ideals of sex for the purpose of conception. For example, a hadith, a reported saying of Muhammad (PBUH), states, “Do not begin intercourse until she experiences desire like the desire you

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experience, lest you fulfll your desires before she does,” meaning that sex is strictly not only for procreation but also for pleasure.19 Mahmood and Rashid play into Western stereotypes and instead of ofering an exploration of Muslim and Pakistani sexuality, both created characters who play into the assumptions already there. While there are no physical acts of sex portrayed in either flm, performing sexuality is at the core of the stories. Rayhan and Alim’s race and religion are tied directly into that sexuality. When Noel catches Rayhan after having kissed Sana she accuses him of making out with a “brown bitch.” Rayhan quickly asserts that Noel’s issue is not so much that he kissed someone else, but someone brown. So much of Rayhan’s sexuality is dictated by whiteness – he knows his mother will approve of his relationships, he has only sought the love and comfort of white women, and he is in direct contrast to Javaid. Rayhan’s performance of sexuality and romance, as well as whiteness, of the anti-foreigner, his opposition to Javaid, serves as a clear rejection of who he is afraid of becoming. It is only in meeting Sana, a distinct match in her bi-racial identity, that Rayhan can embrace a new performance of self: a sort of merging of his identities, a recognition that his Western and Eastern selves do not have to exist in opposition. Like Rayhan, Alim does not engage in any actual sex scenes, keeping these flms in the genre of romantic comedy, where sex is relegated to kissing and dialogue, to the idea of wholesomeness. The most aggressive sexual encounter in both flms comes from Khaled kissing Alim and forcing Alim’s hand on his crotch, insisting they have an afair. It is the unwanted, the almost violent approach of Khaled that separates the two men, and positions Khaled into performing the stereotype of Muslim man – as aggressor. As cousin to Alim, Khaled’s actions are perhaps even more abhorrent to viewers on the outside who may not be familiar with the fact that for South Asian Muslims, religiously and culturally, cousins can have sexual relationships. Alim relies on whiteness and Western culture to navigate his relationship and life. Grant ofers Alim the Western perspective on sexuality, on decorum, keeping things tightly in line, and keeping Alim in the closet. The fear being that to exit the closet would result in condemnation, isolation, and abandonment. But maybe part of that fear is a fear of liberation, not just from the closet but also from the confnes of repressed Western sexuality. It is in removing Grant from his mind and narrative that Alim is able to fully embrace his sexuality. Once Alim is out, and knows Nuru loves him unconditionally, he is able to let go of Grant. Like Rayhan, Alim steps away from performing whiteness and heteronormativity and embraces his brownness and queerness. The addition of Khaled creates a space for viewers in the know, part of the community, a moment of recognition of self. It is of course important to note that what makes Touch of Pink relevant is that not only is Muslim sexuality explored but also Mistry portrays a queer character, a sort of Muslim unicorn according to Western ideas and stereotypes, and his queerness

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is emphasized once more through Khaled. To assume that queerness is nonexistent in Muslim cultures is to buy into the narrative Western culture has imposed that Muslims lack any identity aside from terrorist (Rai and Puar, 2002). Kugle examines various Muslim scholars’ interpretations of samesex relations dating back centuries, proving that multiple sexualities have long existed in the Muslim world. “Same-sex sexuality is not something imposed on the Islamic world through colonial domination. Rather, these Islamic thinkers were responding to same-sex attraction and intimacies . . . that existed in their own societies.”20 Rahman states that “dominant identity categories are, in actuality, ontologically incomplete and achieve their (incomplete) coherence only through the exclusion of ‘others’ ” (953). So assuming that queerness and Muslimness cannot intertwine is a form not just of exclusion but of maintaining dominant status. Shades of Ray at times plays into queerness as the butt of jokes, particularly in terms of how Rayhan and his best friend Sal (Fran Kranz) communicate. As Butler notes, “policing gender is sometimes used as a way of securing heterosexuality,” and in a sort of reversed Bechdel Test, the majority of Rayhan and Sal’s conversations are about women, with emphasis placed on their heterosexuality.21 Their heterosexuality is emphasized further in an encounter with a gay shop clerk, whose performance can certainly be read as parodic. One thing Shades of Ray does ofer, albeit small, is that Muslim women are also sexual – Sana is assertive in her sexuality, she knows what she wants and is self-assured, and unlike Rayhan, Sana is not presented as performing whiteness, rather as a reminder to embrace performance of self. One question that persists in these flms is the idea of model minorities, and how Rayhan and Alim play into expectations as Southeast Asian men. How would they be received, for example, if they were aggressive in their sexuality? If they were bold and daring and hypersexual? What if they were more of a Don Draper sort of character? Or a cool Steve McQueen like lead? And would stories about Arab or North African Muslims play out in the same way? A recent episode of American Gods (2017) featured an explicit gay sex scene between two Muslim men, and the series The Bold Type (2017) featured a queer hijab wearing Muslim woman and a Black woman falling love. Maybe fnally the idea has shifted from trying to fght Islamophobia with kindness and model minority stories and instead with visions of Muslims as funny, sexual, conficted religiously and culturally, as diverse as anyone else on screen. While, to many viewers, Touch of Pink and Shades of Ray may seem simple and perhaps even rudimentary, they do have a place in the narratives of Muslims, in the move to create more wellrounded and diverse characters. On the surface, Touch of Pink and Shades of Ray are simple romantic comedies that follow the expectations of their genre – there is love, there is confict, ultimately there is resolution. What makes these flms noteworthy is the multi-layered analyses they provide in terms of expectations and performance around gender, sexuality, race, and all identity categories. While

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both flms are in many ways dated and problematic, they have helped create space for divergent representations of Muslim sexualities and gender, and hold their own space in terms of redefning genre expectations.

Notes 1 Lee Edelman, No Future (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 17. 2 Emphasis in original. Alberto Fernandez Carbajal, “Negotiating Queerness in the Ismaili Diaspora in the Films of Ian Iqbal Rashid,” in Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology, ed. Kristian Petersen (Cambridge, MA: ILEX Foundation & Harvard University Press, 2020). 3 Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural,” Social Text 15, nos. 3-4 (Winter 1997): 266. 4 While Rayhan goes by Ray, referencing his alignment with his whiteness, for the purpose of this chapter I will refer to Rayhan by his full non-anglicized name. 5 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993, 2011), 94. 6 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 520. 7 Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, Living Out Islam: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims (New York: New York University Press), 11. 8 It is worth noting here that Touch of Pink is not the frst flm to tell the story of a gay Pakistani Muslim man and white Englishman, as My Beautiful Launderette (Stephen Frears, 1985), starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke in the main roles, was released twenty years prior. 9 Momin Rahman, “Queer as Intersectionality: Theorizing Gay Muslim Identities,” Sociology 44, no. 5 (2010): 944. 10 ibid., 951–952. 11 Rusi Jaspal and Asifa Siraj, “Perceptions of ‘Coming Out’ Among British Muslim Gay Men,” Psychology & Sexuality 2, no. 3 (2011): 185. 12 Carbajal, “Negotiating Queerness.” 13 Arif Jamal, “Linking Migration and Education Across Generations: Ismailis in Vancouver.” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Simon Fraser University, 2006), 1. 14 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism  & the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990, 1999), XVI. 15 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 519. 16 ibid., 521. 17 Amil Niazi, “ ‘The Big Sick’ Is Great, and It’s Also Stereotypical Toward Brown Women,” Vice, July 7, 2017, www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmvmp3/the-big-sickis-great-and-its-also-stereotypical-toward-brown-women. Accessed 13 December 2017; and Aditi Natasha Kini, “I’m Tired of Watching Brown Men Fall in Love with White Woman Onscreen,” The Muse, July 6, 2017, https://themuse.jezebel. com/i-m-tired-of-watching-brown-men-fall-in-love-with-white-1796522590. 18 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 91. 19 Ibn Qudama, al-Mughni 8:136. Cited on Wardah Abbas, “A  Woman’s Right to Orgasm: Feminism in the Bedroom & Sexual Liberation Through Islam Not Despite It,” Amaliah, March 8, 2019, www.amaliah.com/post/51477/womansright-orgasm-feminism-bedroom-muslim-womans-right-to-sex-marriage-whatdoes-islam-say-about-sex. 20 Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, “Strange Bedfellows: Qur’an Interpretation Regarding Same-Sex Female Intercourse,” Theology & Sexuality 22, nos. 1–2 (2016): 22. 21 Butler, Gender Trouble, XII. The Bechdel Test, named after Alison Bechdel, is a test of movies asking if there are at least two female characters who talk to each other about more than a man or men.

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Works cited Abbas, Wardah. 2019. “A Woman’s Right to Orgasm: Feminism in the Bedroom & Sexual Liberation Through Islam Not Despite It.” Amaliah, March 8, 2019. www. amaliah.com/post/51477/womans-right-orgasm-feminism-bedroom-muslimwomans-right-to-sex-marriage-what-does-islam-say-about-sex. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4: 519–531. Butler, Judith. 1990, 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism & the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993, 2011. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1997. “Merely Cultural.” Social Text 15, nos. 3-4 (Winter): 265–278. Butler, Judith. 2004. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In The Judith Butler Reader, edited by Sara Salih, 119–137. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Carbajal, Alberto Fernandez. 2020. “Negotiating Queerness in the Ismaili Diaspora in the Films of Ian Iqbal Rashid.” In Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology, edited by Kristian Petersen. Cambridge, MA: ILEX Foundation & Harvard University Press. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jamal, Arif. 2006. “Linking Migration and Education Across Generations: Ismailis in Vancouver.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Simon Fraser University. Jaspal, Rusi and Asifa Siraj. 2011. “Perceptions of ‘Coming Out’ Among British Muslim Gay Men.” Psychology & Sexuality 2, no. 3: 183–197. Kini, Aditi Natasha. 2017. “I’m Tired of Watching Brown Men Fall in Love with White Woman Onscreen.” The Muse, July  6, 2017. https://themuse.jezebel. com/i-m-tired-of-watching-brown-men-fall-in-love-with-white-1796522590. Kugle, Scott Siraj al-Haqq. 2014. Living Out Islam: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims. New York: New York University Press. Kugle, Scott Siraj al-Haqq. 2016. “Strange Bedfellows: Qur’an Interpretation Regarding Same-Sex Female Intercourse.” Theology & Sexuality 22, nos. 1–2: 9–24. Niazi, Amil. 2017. “ ‘The Bick Sick’ Is Great, and It’s Also Stereotypical Toward Brown Women.” Vice, July  7, 2017. www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmvmp3/thebig-sick-is-great-and-its-also-stereotypical-toward-brown-women. Accessed 13 December 2017. Rahman, Momin. 2010. “Queer as Intersectionality: Theorizing Gay Muslim Identities.” Sociology 44, no. 5: 944–961. Rai, Amit and Jasbir K. Puar. 2002. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text 20, no. 3: 117–148.

Part III

New perspectives

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“Oh, what if we call him Allah?” ambiguous orientalism in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Crusades David Blanke

Cecil B. DeMille, Hollywood’s master of historical spectacle and faith-based melodrama, viewed himself as something of an amateur historian. Signifcantly, while DeMille fxated on the historical authenticity of his props, settings, and costumes, it was the director’s admission to the doubts within his characters and the contextual, subjective reading of his audience that give his work an unexpectedly modern sensibility.1 Indeed, DeMille would likely have appreciated Paul M. Cobb’s book, The Race for Paradise, as a compelling counter-narrative to the European-centered story of the Crusades. Cobb reveals Saladin, for example, as the protean holy warrior revered by Muslims who was also embraced by Christians for the ideals of nationhood, modernity, and virile masculinity that they could attach to his name. “In both the Middle East and the West,” Cobb writes, Saladin “remains admired, a symbol of statesmanship and chivalry.”2 To the Depression-era DeMille, the Crusades’ ambiguous goals coupled with Saladin’s historical plasticity challenged the boastful assumptions of Euro-American cultural superiority. His flm The Crusades not only explores the faith, doubts, and violence which spurred the tragic centuries-long confict but also rejects the very notion that Christendom then, or in 1935, truly understood themselves or their enemy. At frst glance, DeMille’s 1935 flm The Crusades portrays Muslims, in general, and Saladin, in particular, through the familiar orientalist perspective that characterizes much of American commercial culture. In its opening scene, depicting the “Saracens of Asia” laying claim to Jerusalem in 1187, a series of didactic tableaux establishes the conventional “clash of civilizations.” In succession, DeMille portrays the toppling of a massive cross (presumably over the Church of the Holy Sepulcher), a bonfre fueled by an excited Muslim mob pitching sacred Christian texts and images into the blaze, and a group of young Christian women reciting the Lord’s prayer as they are sold into slavery. A leering auctioneer sanctions the sexual exploitation to come, as well as the violence that produced it, ofering patrons: “May Allah give you joy.” The plot then pivots to the flm’s central drama – pitting Islamic ascendency against Christian indiference – as Saladin (Ian Keith) frst appears.

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Preceded by a host of heralds and mounted guards, the mob falls prostrate as the warlord confronts a brave Christian hermit (C. Aubry Smith), who gives voice to the audience’s outrage and predicts the holy wars to come. Saladin dismisses the man’s threats and challenges him to return to Europe to “tell your Christian kings what you have seen: your women as slaves, your knights trampled under our horses, your Gospels cast into the fames, the power of your cross broken forever.” The hermit prophesizes that Christian fury will “break like a wave” across the region. After a subtle reverseangle underwater shot of waves cresting, DeMille shifts to a montage of the hermit preaching throughout Christendom and a title card informing the  audience that his eforts kindled a “deathless fame  .  .  . in the hearts of the people.” Seemingly, all of the hallmarks of orientalism are maintained in The Crusades. Aside from Saladin and a few of his retainers, Muslim characters are portrayed as the discursive other; dehumanized objects used merely as plotting devices. The historical presentism of Medievalism shares screen time with what Nicholas Haydock later termed a “Saracen doxology” that casts the Ummah as adherents to an absolutist and autocratic faith, clinging to traditional, often backward practices, and trapped by divisive, petty grievances between clans over local resources and prestige.3 Its resonance with the classical Hollywood western – a genre that DeMille uses in six of his next seven pictures – including dusty towns, frontier justice, and the anachronisms of premodern culture provide the director with accessible commercial tropes. Not unlike these later works, here the director continues his well-known cinematic exploration of faith, a theme that had dominated his work for the past decade. Yet if this were the sum contribution made by The Crusades to the tragic dialectic of modern Islam-Christian relations, one could be forgiven for overlooking DeMille’s ofering as little more than the confrmation bias of conventional cultural bigotry. As Haydock continues, what remains notable about cinematic orientalism is not its existence but rather “the sheer, blinding force of [its] recurrence itself, everywhere intimated: from satire that mocks repetition to tragedy which fnds it ennobling.”4 Set to this existential purpose – where the past literally defnes the West by its opposition to the “savagery” of the other – even modern works, like Ridley Scott’s The Kingdom of Heaven (2005), quickly become ensnared by the cinematic “analogies that teach the medieval past by rendering it relevant to travesties that stir echoes of which their creators are only dimly aware.”5 Serving as little more than a re-purposed western, in Scott’s flm the reluctant crusader, Balian de Ibelin (Orlando Bloom), travels to the frontier to reanimate his faith in community and civilization. In the process he and at least some Muslims display a resigned awareness, bordering on fatalism, of the absurdity of the “clash of civilization” motif. In a fnal scene, as Balian cedes Jerusalem to Saladin (Ghassan Massoud), the great Ayyubid sultan admits to the futility of their bloody struggle. Echoing Balian’s earlier speech to the beleaguered Christian

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defenders – where he admits to the paradox that “no one has claim” to God’s favor yet “all have claim” – when asked what the city is really worth to Islam Saladin responds wearily, “nothing, everything.” But context matters. Just as The Kingdom of Heaven must be set against the prevailing public opinion following the September  11, 2001, terrorist attacks and run-up to the Iraq War, so too does DeMille’s work need to be read from the perspective of the economically devastated, insecure, and largely isolationist America of 1935. Moreover, DeMille’s own cinematic preachment was decidedly non-denominational and openly ambivalent to the rival claims made by Christians and Muslims. The director admitted that Europeans operated from “motives ranging from the purest faith to the blackest treachery and greed.” DeMille’s Saracens “were not, as the propaganda at the time would have it, infdel dogs, but highly civilized and chivalrous foemen . . . a cultivated people, and their great leader, Saladin, as perfect and gently a knight as any in Christendom.”6 Reading The Crusades within the context of its times, its director, and through the lens of contemporary scholarship, one is forced to reject the notion that orientalism developed without opposition or qualifcation. Sadly, the true nature of the historical crusades are too often shrouded in denominational bias, presentism, and cultural chauvinism. Following a series of both perceived and actual violence perpetrated against Christian pilgrims near Jerusalem, in 1095 Pope Urban II issued a call for the faithful (or just sinners seeking absolution) to reconquer a city they lost in 638. The First, or People’s Crusade proved a disaster. In subsequent campaigns, the commitment of considerable military force succeeded in wresting control of the region from the divided Seljuk Turks. A century later, re-unifed by Egyptian and Syrian forces under Saladin (in actuality, Salāh al-Dīn or the “righteousness of the religion”) Islam retook Jerusalem prompting a third crusade (1189–1192). Led by Richard I (“the Lionheart”) of England, Frederick Barbarossa, king of Germany and the head of the Holy Roman Empire (who died en route, in 1190), and Philip Augustus of France, the “King’s Crusade” stands today as the dramatic high point of Christendom’s holy wars. It was here that Richard retook Acre, in 1191, and negotiated a truce with Saladin, one year later, that restored rights to Christians who made pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulcher. The four subsequent crusades all lack the unifying force of these earlier wars, and Christian leaders generally lost interest in the movement (as a test of their cultural superiority) only after the Turks conquered Constantinople (1453) and the Spanish Reconquista (1492) re-oriented Europe toward the New World. Through such a retelling, it is easier to see how the themes of the “Crusades” soon shifted to those of the “Wild Wild West.”7 Taken as a whole, but using the Third Crusade for narrative cohesion, scholars today posit two broad conclusions about the historical signifcance of the crusades. The frst is that by externalizing a common cultural enemy, the nebulous notion of medieval “Christendom” crystalized into

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the self-aware concept of “Europe.” Ironically, the rapid secularization of European society soon became a hallmark of their civilization. God may ofer eternal salvation but it was the state that was tasked with defending human rights in the here and now. A second historical consequence of the crusades involved the sociocultural normalization of male violence. As before, the irony of legitimizing a society frst unifed by the teachings of the “Prince of Peace” though violence informs scholars’ explorations of the cultural signifying practices that followed. For both the crusading warriors and later cinematographers, however, the idea of “taking the cross” against infdels to absolve sin is unique neither to Christians nor to the Middle Ages. By redirecting violence beyond their borders (and led by men often denied economic opportunity at home by primogeniture), the crusades not only legitimized “Christian militarism” – gaining a functional role among the faithful by ofering violence as an act of devotional love – but also soothed any moral concerns over the rise of European colonialism in the centuries to come.8 Using these historical foundations, scholars then proposed three discursive meanings of the crusades. The frst involves the presentist symbolism of “holy war” as a dominant dialectic in Euro-American foreign afairs. Heard most recently in the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric following 9/11, but also employed in the Reconquista and colonization, during the Napoleonic era, and sundry counter-revolutionary movements throughout the late20th century, such “Medievalism” looks to examples of past devotional sacrifce as a model that justifes moral absolutism, violence, and an uncompromising subservience to unity. Recently, writers such as Bernard Lewis, Francis Fukuyama, and Samuel P. Harrington again defne the relationship between Islam and Christianity as a “clash of civilizations” that, in the words of Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells holds “the essence of Islam as a religion is antipathetic to the fundamental core values of the West.”9 Subsequent calls for cultural “cleansings,” intended to remove the threat of non-conformity, litter the history of modern Euro-American culture and persist to this day. Building upon this, and led by Edward Said’s pioneering work in 1978, scholars have shown how the crusades abetted European Christians in projecting a host of (often ironically hypocritical) character traits upon the Islamic other. While extensive, these rationalizations mirrored those ascribed to Native Americans; namely, that their culture was immature, economically inefcient, cruelly violent, and self-justifed by a primitive past that made the West’s destined conquest so manifest. Temporary setbacks – inficted either by Saladin or by Sitting Bull – were merely the result of cheating, doubledealing cultural traitors, cowardly guerilla campaigns, or other “unmanly” behaviors on the part of the uncivilized other. As with the “clash of civilizations” trope, here the heroes of the crusades emerge as romantic idealists; men wholly committed to notions of chivalry and untroubled by any ambiguity or doubt over faith, race, gender, personal property, or sexuality.

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Finally, in recent decades (and corresponding to the postcolonial period that followed the Second World War) the crusades are often presented as a cautionary tale over the pitfalls of cultural chauvinism. On display in Scott’s The Kingdom of Heaven, and more pervasively in contemporary Westerns and science fction, this anti-imperialist stance often simply reverses the moral bearing of Christians and Muslims. Rather than glorifying the consensual “truths” of Christendom, the crusades lay bare their hollowness and hypocrisy.10 While today many incorrectly assume that the historical lessons drawn from the crusades and their infuence over Euro-American cultural forms remain static, their cultural expression were always linked to the context of the times. Nowhere was this truer than in American motion pictures of the 1930s, one of the most anxious decades of the 20th century. As the Great Depression raged, flm revenues fell precipitously, from $730  million in 1930 to $480 million three years later. Fox and Paramount entered receivership, Warner Brothers liquidated its most valuable assets to stay afoat, and RKO went bankrupt.11 The economic devastation and unresolved tensions arising from the First World War destabilized both the political and economic structures of Europe and the United States, leading to widespread doubt over the legitimacy of traditional practices. Many blamed those who once advocated for war while others looked to external confict to retain their hold over power. The result was a period in American commercial flm that questioned orthodoxy and championed the idea of rapid dialectical change. “Fall and rebirth,” Lary May writes, served as “one of the most pervasive themes of the Depression era,” that ofered the cultural space to re-examine traditional power relations.12 Similarly, while most assume DeMille’s status was as an unchallenged insider to the studio system, in fact, by the 1930s the famed director found himself in similar economic straights and as disillusioned as the general populace.13 His quest for independence from the studio system failed in 1928, he was unceremoniously fred by MGM four years later, and only succeeded in reviving his career through the remarkable box ofce performance of The Sign of the Cross (1932), an Edwardian passion play about Nero’s persecution of early Christians, which did more to highlight the depravity of modern consumerism than sooth patrons with assurances of eternal salvation. In a 1931 Variety interview, a far more marginalized DeMille claimed that “the public has been milked” by big business, including his own industry, “and are growing tired of it . . . there is something rotten at the core of our system.”14 A year later, he warned The New York American (using Sign’s dramatic construction to explain his political perspective on current events) of the “close analogy between conditions today in the United States and the Roman Empire prior to the fall.”15 Then and now, the “multitudes [were] oppressed by distressing laws, overtaxed and ruled by a chosen few. Unless America returns to the pure ideals of our legendary forebears, it will pass into oblivion as Rome did.”16

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In addition to appreciating these economic and personal factors in the conception and production of The Crusades, the director’s views on faith also bear consideration. From a contemporary perspective DeMille’s faith flms appear wholly conventional. But while a devout believer in God and regular reader of the Bible, he rejected the dominant Christian orthodoxy, detested clerical pedantry, and designed his flms to present salvation as a matter of personal choice, not regional character. He once mulled over a project that dramatized a celestial meeting between Moses, Buddha, Mohammed, and Jesus and argued, barely two months before he passed in 1959, that “God knows very little about religion. . . . His church [resides] in the body [of] each individual.”17 DeMille recognized the intellectual challenges posed by modernity to faith, embraced science and positively portrayed Darwin’s theory of evolution in the plot of Adam’s Rib (1923), and voiced his respect for agnostics and atheists who by their honesty, he reasoned, were “probably closer to [God] than the so-called believer.” The 1923 version of The Ten Commandments, for example, is remembered for its Biblical prologue, yet the flm was dominated by a modern tale of two brothers and the ways that their contemporary lifestyles either preserved or rejected Mosaic Law. The infexibility of their ultra-orthodox Christian mother drove one son to his debauchery and sealed her own doom. In later years, DeMille famously invited not only Christian clerics to the set of King of Kings (1927) but also Muslim Imams, Jews, Hindus, Christian Scientists, and the Salvation Army. The director displayed a framed poem, “Te Deum” by H. Romaine, above his ofce desk to the day he died, which read in part: One Great God looked down and smiled, And counted each his loving child; For Muslim, Christian, Brahmin, Jew Had reached Him through the Gods they knew.18 By the 1930s, his ecumenism and the rise of radical political thought throughout the U.S. and Europe left DeMille riven with anxiety. In both The Sign of the Cross (1932) and This Day and Age (1933), he sharpened his attack on orthodoxy. The Christian martyrs were not “pious fools who asked” for their persecution, he corrected one critic. Rather, they were an ideological minority who challenged the status quo. They “might in fact be called the Communists of that day” for “they stood for the changes which the Romans did not understand so Rome insisted that they be stamped out. Who knows, perhaps the Communists of today will be placed on a similar pedestal two thousand years from now?”19 These considerations – of the U.S., the flm industry, and DeMille as a man of faith – provide the context in which The Crusades was proposed, produced, and released. Production began on January 30, 1935, with the full backing of Paramount Pictures. Hoping to recapture the box ofce magic DeMille recently showed with his historical spectacles, including

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Sign and Cleopatra (1934), Emmanuel Cohen granted the director an initial production budget of $1 million and then regular (if grudgingly approved) increases that brought the total, when production wrapped 18 days behind the schedule on April 16, to $1.376 million.20 As was his habit, DeMille spent most of his budget before flming began. Harold Lamb anchored a talented writing team, which included Waldemar Young and Dudley Nichols, who merged tales from his own popular crusade fction – such as Durandal (1931) – with more traditional works, such as Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman. The melodrama has aged poorly, but skilled actors – like Ian Keith, Henry Wilcoxon, Loretta Young, and Joseph Schildkraut – gave solid performances. His expanded budget also unleashed DeMille’s skills with spectacle and his “cast of thousands.” Gordon Jennings and Victor Milner handled the flm’s massive sets, designed by Hans Drier and Roland Anderson, and helped DeMille manage the six assistant directors hired to coordinate over 600 extras. The look they achieved – using sweeping crane shots to display village life or the massive trebuchet and battle along the city walls at Acre, later quoted by Sergei Eisenstein in Alexander Nevsky (1938) – established the visual patterns used by successive generations of flmmakers. Like most historical dramas, the plot of The Crusades unfolds in three acts: exposition (establishing the main characters and their historical circumstances), complication (launching the dramatic tension), and resolution (producing closure and a pleasurable narrative experience for the audience). The basic confict between Christians and Muslims remained in the foreground, but DeMille understood that his patrons cared little for the deeper religious struggle (which was not part of their daily lives) and instead featured the personal motivations of his three main characters: Richard, Saladin, and Berengaria. “The only way that people would believe today that [the crusaders] would give up their lives for a piece of wood,” the director told his Paramount executives in pre-production, “is to put in a personal story to hold them.”21 After the opening scene – showing the abuse of Christians, desecration of their icons, and the fat, almost stereotypical depiction of Saladin – the Hermit vows to awaken the religious passions of Europe and the flm proceeds to reveal how these motivations were driven by each character’s “personal story.” Leaving Saladin as the brutal other and stereotypical villain, the frst quarter of the flm explores three main perspectives. The frst is Richard (Wilcoxon), depicted as an overgrown boy who prefers the simple action of battlefeld to the complex politics of Late Medieval monarchy. He starts a fstfght with his favorite blacksmith, named Hercules, then takes the pledge to crusade rather than face the obligations of an arranged marriage to Alice, a relation of the French king. That DeMille elides any hint of Richard’s homosexuality as the cause of these behaviors further underscores his linkage of male maturation and spiritual awakening. The director previously dramatized Nero’s homosexuality, in Sign, so his refusal here to explore this

90 David Blanke question also suggests just how central Richard’s hetero orientation is to his character’s development. Berengaria of Navarre (Young), like Saladin, is also introduced as something of a stock character. So little is known of the historical woman that DeMille had free reign in his depiction; most moviegoers, he quipped to his bosses, “thought Berengaria was a steamship until we started the picture.”22 This allowed the director to present her frst as a passive innocent, then a principled if powerless foil to Richard’s male hedonism, and fnally a potential heretic and peacemaker struggling to choose between either the king of Islam or Christendom. Her hastily arranged marriage – which ensures the crusaders are fully supplied by Navarre – and lack of consummation (Richard sends his sword and a troubadour to represent him at the nuptials) places this developing relationship at the heart of Richard’s conversion narrative. Finally, the opening passages reveal the hypocritical religious passions that fuel many of the political schemes motivating the European monarchs. Most notable is Conrad of Montferrat (Schildkraut), whose fortunes are tied to his cousin Alice’s (played by DeMille’s own daughter, Katherine) marriage to Richard and who later schemes to assassinate the “Lion King” to prevent his formal union with Navarre. While a traditional melodramatic ploy, the subtext of European politics is poorly dramatized and actually detracts from the main characters’ moral dilemma. As historian Robert Birchard concludes, “the venal motivations of the kings through much of the flm’s running time make them all rather unsympathetic and tend to undercut Richard’s last-reel conversion.”23 With the principals assembled, DeMille turns to spectacle as a way to disrupt this traditional narrative. His depictions of the assembly of the European host and the battle of Acre are both visual masterworks. DeMille possessed a rare skill when flming large crowds – often depicting complex emotions through the subtlest of visual clues – yet knew that “the little squire saying good-bye to his old mother” and “the young boy bidding his sweetheart good-bye” were essential to convey the religious passion that compelled commoners to leave while preventing his modern audience from concluding that the crusades were only a contrivance by elites where “the kings were only thinking of [adding] another province.”24 DeMille later claimed that his visual mode of storytelling “saved the technique of silent pictures” in the 1930s. While an overstatement, it remains true that the famed director relied far more heavily upon his imagery and event spectacle than dialogue and traditional plotting. Only upon the Europeans’ arrival to the Holy Land does DeMille then complicate the picture by his subtle portrayal of Saladin. In contrast to the stock villain of the opening scene, whose atrocities, the director explained, “make the audience feel the Crusade . . . make them want to get up and fght,” Saladin’s frst contact with the invaders reveals an intelligent, chivalrous Muslim far more honorable than his Christian rivals.25 Borrowing

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from Scott’s The Talisman, the flm revisits the familiar story of how the sultan contrasts Richard’s blunt sword work with his own more cultured, yet equally deadly, use of a rapier. Saladin’s refuses to participate in Montferrat’s clandestine schemes and carries this sense of probity into the many battle scenes to come. These surprising wrinkles to Saladin’s character also reveal Berengaria’s true essence, further facilitating Richard’s conversion. When the sultan fears being poisoned by drinking a ceremonial toast ofered by Richard, the queen valiantly drinks from Saladin’s cup to prove their good will. Indeed, Saladin’s obvious interest in Berengaria’s character – rather than her curves – compels Richard to do the same. After the sack of Acre, Berengaria is hit by an arrow and taken by the feeing Saracen king to Jerusalem to get proper medical attention. This “abduction” reveals to Richard the profound love he unwittingly held for his wife and drives the flm to its resolution. Signifcantly, it is Richard, the hero of the picture, who must achieve this sense of spiritual self-awareness for the audience. Searching for Berengaria, the king fnds his old smithy, Hercules, dying on the battlefeld. Revealing his own doubts, as well as a growing sense of responsibility for the brave men he led to their death on the battlefeld, Richard bemoans to the heavens, “if You are there, receive this old man’s soul.” Eventually locating his spouse in the lavish tent of his rival – although Berengaria has been faithful to her marriage vows – the two men appear willing to allow the pretext of a cultural holy war to prevent them from stopping the carnage. It is Berengaria who leads them to enlightenment. Negotiating between the doctrinal diferences of both faiths, she pleads, much as DeMille believed, Oh, what if we call him Allah or God, shall men fght because they travel diferent roads to him? There’s only one God. His cross is buried deep into our hearts. It’s here, and we must carry it wherever we go. Oh, don’t you see Richard, there’s only one way. Peace. Make peace between Christian and Saracen. Seeing a willing compromise through the even-tempered Saladin, Richard breaks his sword, ends his sack of Jerusalem, and brokers a deal that allows pilgrims safe passage to the Sepulcher. The closing scenes show Richard and Berengaria re-united, supplicants before the shrine (where he leaves the remnants of his sword), and the cross raised again above the structure, symbolic compensation for the one toppled two hours earlier. Evaluating The Crusades for its historical accuracy is a hopeless exercise. As one critic wrote, the picture was recognized immediately as “historically worthless, didactically treacherous, [and] artistically absurd” yet, just as certainly, “none of these defects impairs its entertainment value.”26 It remains useful to explore the flm through the analytical flters ascribed to the Muslim-Christian contact discussed earlier in this chapter. Most notably, the flm rejects the idea that the crusades unifed Europe. If anything, the

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work suggests that an ecumenical faith in God ofers a much more authentic, broader, and ancient unity of mankind too often obscured by petty regional or cultural idiosyncrasies. Montferrat’s assassination plot (foiled by Saladin) hints that the secular machinations of the state are mere distractions, yet these trials ofer individual men and women the ability to explore the depths of their commitment to God’s will. In a similar vein, DeMille’s work depicts the culture of male violence that lies at the heart of the war as directionless, self-defeating, and, as in the case of Hercules, cruelly destructive. Here, the crusades are turned by the sensibilities of women – not the carnage of men – into a constructive force that drives meaning inward upon the individual, not externally to defne a common Christian culture. In a similar fashion, while scholars often ascribe precise interpretive meanings to the crusades, DeMille’s flm presents a far more ambiguous and contextual translation. The elements of an inevitable “clash of civilizations,” for example, are clearly present in the picture’s opening scenes yet the surety of this position is relentlessly undermined as we see Richard’s gradual maturation, Saracen’s steady moderation, and Berengaria’s moral reasoning. The context of the times certainly infuenced this unique posture. Unlike 1917, when DeMille’s historical epic Joan the Woman demanded that England (and by extension the U.S.) fght in the First World War, as the ghost of Joan d’Arc demands, to “expiate thy sin against me,” here the slaughter tempers human passions enough so that the wise can actually see God’s will. DeMille’s pronounced use of the cross imagery in The Crusades underscores his belief that sufering is universal and instrumental to the actualization of faith. In addition to opening and closing the flm with a cross, the director quotes numerous passages from his earlier hit, The Sign of the Cross, where believers in both flms willfully endure hardships as a means to achieve enlightenment. The lead male characters of both works are only converted into believers (although, typical of DeMille’s own views, not into denominational zealots) through the threatened loss of their newly discovered partners. While some suggest DeMille’s preachment refected a newfound pacifsm, swirling throughout the 1930s, his other works of this period (including Sign and This Day and Age) reveal a profound ambivalence toward cultural nationalism in lieu of this more intensely personal search for meaning. The same holds true when describing The Crusades as an act of orientalism or an othering of Islam. On the one hand, the strongest qualities of the flm are its visual spectacle and these, taken as a whole, are nothing if not orientalist. The battle scenes clearly pit “heroic” Christians against the duplicitous Muslim “occupiers.” The flm’s depictions of atrocities happen largely in its exposition as a means to establish the raison d’etre of the crusades. Christian crowds appear reasoned, consensual, and motivated by faith whereas the Saracens are shown as unruly mobs incited by the Qur’an to justify their lust. Nuanced expressions of Christian faith – from the ascetic passions of the Hermit to the invested formality of the French

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king – are contrasted to rare, often quixotic references to Islam (Saladin refuses to drink alcohol), closing of the possibility of dramatic conversion to all but the Crusaders. But the closer inspection that DeMille applies to Christianity serves to accentuate the widespread doubts of the invaders not their cultural superiority. As in the more recent The Kingdom of Heaven, both Saladin and the Christian hero (Richard/Balian) are improved and uplifted, not tainted by their contact with the other. Both undergo conversion experiences and while DeMille’s melodrama remains focused on the love story between Richard and Berengaria, Saladin’s willingness to allow her to leave with his rival serves as the sultan’s own personal cross; sufering for the greater good of humanity. DeMille’s pride in refusing to dehumanize Saladin lasted until the end of his life. In his autobiography, he reveled in telling the story of his frst meeting with Egyptian president Gamal Nasser, in 1952, as his production team sought permission to flm on location for The Ten Commandments (1956). He was granted the rare privilege – during a period of growing antagonism between Pan-Arabs and their former colonial overseers in Europe – because, as one of Nasser’s aides remarked, “Mr. DeMille, we grew up on your flm The Crusades, and we saw how [well] you treated us and our religion. Our country is your country.”27 Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, The Crusades displays, in 1935, much of the same sense of guilt over American and European cultural and economic imperialism that was later aired after World War II. Berengaria’s soliloquy in Saladin’s tent speaks directly to this cultural relativism. It tracks almost directly to Balian, in The Kingdom of Heaven, as he addresses the Christian faithful defending Jerusalem. Like Berengaria, 70 years earlier, he asks, “What is Jerusalem? Your holy places lie over the Jewish temple that the Romans pulled down. The Muslim places of worship lie over yours. Which is more holy? The wall? The mosque? The sepulcher? Who has claim? No one has claim. All have claim!” While it is doubtful that most viewers, in 1935, teased out the nuance of Berengaria’s ecumenicism, the flm’s dramatic resolution left little doubt that the bloodshed only ended after the crusaders admitted the absurdity of their own cultural paranoia. Perhaps, these ambiguities help explain the flm’s poor performance at the box ofce. While popular, the picture failed to recoup its expenses until it was re-released in 1950. DeMille’s own production delays and the massive overhead charged to the flm (one of only a handful of working sets on Paramount’s beleaguered soundstage, in 1935) bloated the negative cost and made it even harder for the flm to turn a proft. After another sweeping change of studio managers and the public’s growing resistance to unorthodox depictions of religiosity, DeMille pivoted. Beginning in 1936 and lasting until his fnal picture, the director abandoned his experiments in cinematic faith for a more formal defense of the dominant consensus refected in the studio system. While this shift was also greatly infuenced by the context of his times, The Crusades remains an important yet poorly appreciated expression of Islam through the eyes of an American flmmaker. Scott’s

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fawed 2005 flm suggests just how difcult it remains for a modern commercial flmmaker to dramatize a people and faith that they often understand only though opposition. DeMille’s older picture makes a stronger case, preferring a posture of ambiguity (even indeterminacy) that defers to the more vital and universal expressions of faith produced by individual, not collective conversion ordeals.

Notes 1 For DeMille’s historical sensibilities, see David Blanke, Cecil B. DeMille, Classical Hollywood, and Modern American Mass Culture, 1910–1960 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 129–163. 2 Paul M. Cobb, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3. 3 Nicholas Haydock “ ‘The Unseen Cross upon the Breast’: Medievalism, Orientalism, and Discontent,” in Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes, eds. Nicholas Haydock and E.L. Risden (Jeferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2008), 19–20. 4 Haydock, “ ‘The Unseen Cross Upon the Breast’,” 21. 5 Ibid. See also Cobb, The Race for Paradise, 5. 6 Donald Hayne, ed., The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille (Englewood Clifs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1959), 344–345. 7 John Aberth, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film (New York: Routledge, 2003), 63–75. For a full accounting of the crusades and their historical resonance, see Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); and Jonathan Riley-Smith, “The Crusades as an Act of Love,” in The Crusades: Blackwell Essential Readings in History, ed. Thomas F. Madden (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 31–50. 8 For European unifcation, see Tomaž Mastnak, “Europe and the Muslims,” in The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy, eds. Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 205–248; RileySmith, The Crusades. For “taking the cross,” see Haydock, “ ‘The Unseen Cross upon the Breast’,” 24–25; Riley-Smith, “The Crusades as an Act of Love.” 9 Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells, “Introduction: Constructing the Muslim Enemy,” in The New Crusades, 2–47. 10 Adam Knobler, “Holy Wars, Empires, and the Portability of the Past: The Modern Uses of Medieval Crusades,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 2 (April 2006): 293–325. 11 Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of the American Movies (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 195–214. 12 Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 79. 13 For a full explanation of DeMille’s shifting career, its contextual origin, and the contrast between his early and late phases see Blanke, Cecil B. DeMille, Classical Hollywood, and Modern American Mass Culture, 165–209. 14 DeMille quoted in Phil A. Koury, Yes, Mr. DeMille (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959), 132. 15 DeMille quoted in Charles Higham, Cecil B. DeMille (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 216. 16 For “multitudes” see The Cecil B. DeMille Archives, MSS 1400, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University [hereafter, BYU], Box  506, Folder 13.

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17 For 1924 ecumenical picture, see BYU, Box 250, Folder 13. DeMille quoted in Scott Eyman, Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 495–496. 18 For multi-faith prayer readings on the set of his flms, Gabe Essoe and Raymond Lee, DeMille: The Man and His Pictures (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1970), 114. For his doubts toward organize religion, see Jesse L. Lasky, Jr., Whatever Happened to Hollywood? (New York: Funk & Wagnals, 1973), 300; Koury, Yes, Mr. DeMille, 54; Katherine Orrison, Written in Stone: Making Cecil B. DeMille’s Epic, the Ten Commandments (New York: Vestal Press, 1999), 37, 175. For his views on Darwin, see BYU, Box 262, Folder 1. For poem, see Margaret Herrick Library, Henry S. Noerdlinger Collection, Folder 22. 19 For “communists of today,” see BYU, Box 506, Folder 13. 20 For a brief yet incisive overview of the flm’s production, see Robert S. Birchard, Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 283–292. 21 ibid., 285. 22 ibid., 284. 23 ibid., 287. 24 Eyman, Empire of Dreams, 318; Birchard, Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood, 286. 25 Birchard, Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood, 285. 26 Eyman, Empire of Dreams, 318. 27 ibid., 444.

8

Mystics in the movies Sufsm in global cinema Emily Jane O’Dell

Sufsm appears in flms from around the world in places as diverse as Tajikistan, Senegal, Kazakhstan, Iran, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Sudan, Pakistan, and Turkey. Analyzing the history of representations of Sufsm in global cinema reveals the various ways in which it serves as a cinematic signifer, and elucidates the structural frameworks and socio-political contexts of these portrayals. The conceit of a spiritual journey in these flms ofers an “alternative” modality through which (neo/post) colonial, patriarchal, religious, and political discourses are questioned and transcended. By focusing on characters who live on the margins, be they disabled, diasporic minorities, poor, or rebellious women, these flms address cultural issues and social tensions through the guise of a spiritual transformation. At the same time, Sufsm provides flmmakers with a poetic frame through which they can explore ontological and existential questions within a tradition that lends itself to visual representation through its musical, ritualistic, and meditative practices and mystical aesthetics. Sufsm in global cinema grants characters on the margins a transgressive and transcendent escape from the pressures of patriarchy, the alienation of modernity, and the violence of imperialism, while it is simultaneously framed by flmmakers as an alternative to terrorism and a challenge to negative portrayals of Islam in the west. Themes of exile, displacement, and migration that course through these flms employ Sufsm as a vehicle through which identity can be re-claimed, spirituality embodied, and community belonging enacted.

Defning Sufsm in flm Sufism is notoriously difcult to defne. There are many diferent defnitions, manifestations, and interpretations of Sufsm; thus, cinematic portrayals of Sufsm in global cinema are by no means uniform and are culturally specifc. In generalizing terms, Sufsm can be understood within the context of this chapter to refer to the mystical dimension of Islam, specifcally the esoteric and ritualistic practices which are intended to purify the heart of all negative qualities and draw a believer closer to the divine through all-consuming love and ecstasy. The Suf path is framed as a renunciation of the ego and

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the temptations of the material world in favor of the world of the heart – the invisible and experiential realm where nurturing and embodying love of God, who is referred to in Suf poetry as “the Beloved,” is the sole objective. The flms in this chapter point to the diversity of Suf practices around the globe and demonstrate a variety of culturally and historically specifc representations of Sufsm in cinematic imaginations. Sufs have been depicted in flm in a number of contradictory ways – as emblems of progress and regression, orthodoxy and heresy, piety and corruption. Sufsm has been employed in flm to subvert dominant media narratives on Islam (Bab’Aziz), carve out new representations of empowered female spirituality (Door to the Sky), and manufacture “modern” models for masculinity and nationhood (The Nine Holy Men). Sufs are presented as enlightened guides, blind seers, caring healers, virtuous saints, social justice warriors, moralizing missionaries, and national heroes. They serve as symbols of anti-colonialism, model masculinity, feminist empowerment, and nationhood. However, they are also critiqued as deceptive charlatans (Hideous Kinky) and misguided mystics (The Nine Holy Men). Notably, several flms with Suf protagonists carve out cinematic space for disability, by centering characters who sufer from disabilities (“seers” with visual impairments) or provide hands-on help to people with disabilities in need of charity and guidance (Door to the Sky and Marriage of Zein). In addition, women in both dramatic flms and documentaries about Sufsm occupy central positions, serving as spiritual guides and healers. In Door to the Sky and Exiles, it is female Suf guides who initiate seekers onto the Suf path, ushering them from feelings of displacement and alienation into new forms of being and belonging. Suf narratives in general tend to focus on seekers who are on the margins – women, people with disabilities, migrants, and displaced (bicultural) postcolonial subjects. The reoccurring theme of marginality in these narratives uses the transcendent trope of Sufsm to represent various homecomings – to the soul, to the body, to culture, and to territory. In several instances, these homecomings are achieved through the healing tonic of dhikr. From the perspective of corporeal phenomenology, dhikr in cinema is portrayed as a deeply sensory experience that allows “westerners” (whether British spiritual seekers or Arabs living in France) to disconnect from their personal trauma and alienation in the “west” and (re)connect to an embodied and emotive state of being – surrendering to corporeal and experiential realms. Dhikr serves as a liminal portal of literal and fgurative conversion from west to east; present to past, and mind to body. In flms that have probed the diasporic imaginary, it is Arab directors who have lived outside of the Maghreb, who have put a spotlight on Sufsm and used it to chart alternative postcolonial geographies. Suf portrayals are shaped by the politics of the day. For instance, the Suf backgrounds of several historical fgures have been downplayed in biopics and semi-biographical flms due to reductive Orientalist portrayals of

98 Emily Jane O’Dell Islam in the “west” (The Mahdi in Khartoum) and the rise of Islamic movements hostile to Sufsm in the “east” (Omar Mukhtar in Lion of the Desert). Likewise, Wali Songo flms from Indonesia have downplayed the mystical orientation of Javanese mystics, which they frame as secondary to their role as “dakhwah warriors” spreading Sunni Islam, to avoid charges of heresy from “fundamentalist” inclined viewers. Sufsm is also employed as a political corrective; for instance, a number of post-9/11 flms have employed Sufsm to challenge negative portrayals of Islam in the “west” by focusing on its perceived tradition of tolerance1 (Bab’Aziz) and reverse decades of dervishes being portrayed negatively in flm in the “east” (Takva: A Man’s Fear of God). Thus, the deployment of Sufsm in flm is intimately tied to the politics of the day.

Sufsm & disability: blindness as a symbol of spiritual (In)sight Several Persian language flms with Suf themes, such as The Willow Tree (Bid-e Majnoon) and Bab’Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated his Soul (Bab‘Aziz, le prince qui contemplait son ame), feature a blind protagonist whose spiritual journey privileges the “insight” of faith in the spiritual realm over the ease of “sight” in the material realm. In these flms, visual impairments function as a metaphor for the ability to see with the heart into the unseen realm of divine love through spiritual insight, faith, and devotion. These disabled protagonists are confgured as spiritual wayfarers whose lack of outer vision grants them greater expertise in the arts, such as in teaching poetry and playing music, and greater capacity for spiritual insight and transformation.2 The Willow Tree, a 2005 Iranian flm directed by Majid Majidi, is a Sufinspired parable that follows the journey of Youssef, a blind professor of Rumi poetry, after he recovers the vision he lost as a child. Youssef begins the flm completely blind, but outwardly satisfed with his life and the doting care of his loving wife and daughter. But before he embarks to France for the operation to restore his sight, Youssef writes a note to God which he places between the pages of the Mathnawi, the poetic masterpiece of the medieval Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi: “I’m the one you deprived of the beauties of the world and who never complained. Instead of light and brightness, I lived in darkness and gloom and I didn’t protest. I found happiness and peace in this small paradise . . . I beg of you to show me more compassion.” Eventually, with his vision successfully restored, Youssef moves from a world marked by darkness but steeped in piety and humility to a world of sight saturated with beauty but also temptation and disappointment. When the bandages are removed from Youssef’s eyes following his corneal transplants, he marvels at the natural world and the faces of his loved ones. However, his eye is also caught by Pari, his uncle’s beautiful sister-inlaw, who becomes an object of his desire; he listens with lust to her phone

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message asking for his help on her dissertation on mystical Persian poets. Whereas his heart was once drawn to Suf poetry for its mystical messages of divine love, his connection to these poems transforms into an expression of carnal desire. He becomes disinterested in his wife who leaves him, and he loses interest in teaching. When he fails to stop a boy on the subway from stealing a wallet, he comes face-to-face with his own moral impotence. Youssef unexpectedly loses his sight again, seemingly as a punishment for his abuse of the gift of sight. Imprisoned in his failure to have transformed for the better, he is fnally able to “see” his own selfshness and disconnection from God.3 Bab’Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated his Soul, a 2005 flm by Tunisian writer and director Nacer Khemir, follows the journey of a blind dervish named Bab’Aziz and his granddaughter Ishtar as they wander the desert in search of large Suf gathering that takes place every 30  years.4 Like in the other two flms of Khemir’s Desert Trilogy (Wanderers of the Desert (El-haimoune) and The Dove’s Lost Necklace (Le Collier perdu de la colombe), the desert dunes in Bab’Aziz symbolize the “valleys that the mystic passes through as he matures in his search for truth, and it is also an existential metaphor for the transitory nature of life and the imminent presence of death: the fnal return to dust” (Papan-Martin, 52).5 The character Bab’Aziz is framed as an exemplary model of Suf adab, or spiritual conduct; his lack of “vision” or focus on the material world endows him with the potential for greater spiritual insight. Bab’Aziz is an audiovisual tapestry of Suf cultural heritage from around the world, teeming with allusions to Persian, Arab, Turkish, Indian, African, and Mongol history and culture. The flm itself was a transnational and multicultural endeavor, having been produced by French, Iranian, and Tunisian companies, flmed on location in Tunisia and Iran,6 and scored with Persian, Indian, and Bengali-inspired melodies and songs, such as “Zikr” and “I Made the Lamp” by Armand Amar. As for the nonlinear structure of the flm, Khemir notes: “Now, concerning the structure of this movie, I think it helps the spectator to forget about his own ego and to put it aside in order to open up to the reality of the world. It borrows the structure of the visions usually narrated by dervishes, and the structure of their spiraling and whirling dances.”7 The screenplay is a palimpsest of verses from the Qur’an, and Suf poems by Rumi, Attar, Ibn Arabi, and Ibn Farid. The flm also tells the story of a handsome young prince who leaves his royal lifestyle behind to admire his refection in the water. The theme of spiritual in(sight) is explicit in the screenplay: “The prince contemplated his soul so much that he left the visible world for the invisible one.” Khemir has stated that the idea of the “Prince” character came to him “from a beautiful plate that was painted in Iran in the 12th century” in Kashan that shows a prince looking into water with the inscription: “The prince who contemplated his own soul”8 – a rather unique example of material cultural heritage inspiring cinematic narrative.

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The enigmatic dialogue of the flm, delivered in Persian and Arabic, is circular and cryptic; language, like sight, becomes revealed as an inadequate modality for understanding and articulating the spiritual realm. Since the flm frames the “heart” as the prime organ for seeing the unseen realm and expressing its beauty, Bab’Aziz says to his granddaughter: “look with the eyes of your heart.” Traveling on the Suf path is an experiential endeavor that requires spiritual intuition, keen discernment, and divine guidance; there is no one right way to progress on the path toward the divine. When the granddaughter protests that they are going a diferent path than the others, he responds: “Everyone has his own way,” and later shares a cherished saying among Sufs. “There are as many paths to God as there are souls on earth.” The path to the gathering and by extension to God cannot be “seen” with the eyes, but must be felt with the heart and searched for through faith and grace. Bab’Aziz is as much a political flm as a spiritual one. In Khemir’s words, it is a “highly political flm, and deliberately so,”9 since he made the flm to dispel negative stereotypes in the west about Islam in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in the belief that “Sufsm stands against all forms of fanaticism.”10 The opening image of Bab’Aziz emerging from under the rubble of sandswept ruins is a visual representation of Khemir’s desire to emerge from the wreckage of the 9/11 attacks with a narrative of Islam focused on love and tolerance. Thus, the red-haired dervish character who considers his job of sweeping the mosque, an act of devotion to the “Beloved,” may be seen as an avatar of the director himself who expressly tried to “wipe Islam’s face clean” with this flm “by showing an open, tolerant and friendly Islamic culture, full of love and wisdom.”11 According to Khemir, “dervishes free Islam of certain dogmatic interpretations, just like this auburn dervish in the movie, who is attracted by the minaret, and tries to clear the ‘dust’ of it with a broom.”12 Thus, the flm is confgured as a corrective – a political attempt to challenge the dominant narrative in the west about Islam by employing Suf themes. It is also an intentional rebuke of “fundamentalism” – a challenge to those who would claim that Sufsm is separate from Islam or heretical. In his interviews, Khemir positions Sufsm as the antithesis of fundamentalism. According to his defnition of Sufsm, Sufsm is the “Islam of the mystics,” the “tenderness of Islam,” and the “pulsating heart of Islam.”13 Khemir sees Sufsm as the essence of Islam itself, noting: “Far from being a marginal phenomenon, it is the esoteric dimension of the Islamic message.”14 In his view, cinema is a prime vehicle through which negative images of Islam in the west can be challenged, and the diversity and history of Islamic practices in the east can be reclaimed.

Reverting hearts & trancing bodies: gender and ritual in Postcolonial North Africa and Occupied Iraq Films such as Hideous Kinky (UK), Door to the Sky (Bab Al-Sama Maftouh) (Morocco), and Exiles (Exils) (France/Algeria), all feature female

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protagonists who journey from Europe to North Africa and become introduced to the Suf path. In these flms with exile, migration, and alienation at their core, it is female Suf guides and friends who welcome these women onto the Suf path. In Hideous Kinky,15 a 1998 flm directed by Gillies MacKinnon, Kate Winslet plays Julia, a young British mother who moves to Morocco in the 1970s with her two young children after splitting with their father to fnd “another world” where there is “a kind of pure joy, a blissful emptiness and no pain.” Julia’s quest for spiritual enlightenment in Morocco replicates the Orientalist narrative of “ ‘fnding’ yourself in the Arab world” (Long, 213). Though her motivations for exploring Sufsm can be considered essentializing and Orientalist, the flm fnds clever ways to subvert and highlight her misguided misconceptions, “New Age” naiveté, and cultural ignorance. Julia is introduced to Sufsm through her European revert friend Eva, who has reconfgured her entire life to follow the Suf path in Marrakesh. Married to a Suf, Eva jokes with Julia: “This is what happens when you come to Morocco for a good time – you get married and join the Sufs.” Eva shows Julia a slipper of “the greatest living Suf,” Sheikh Ben Jalil, who is the “a great teacher and a true saint” working in “school of the annihilation of the ego” in order “to fnd the god within.” Eva wears niqab when they travel outside the house to attend a dhikr, a meditative and musical Suf ceremony of divine remembrance, where Julia shakes in trance and faints ostensibly in ecstasy. The flm also ofers a critique of Sufsm, delivered through the perspectives of two male characters. When Julia says she is no longer afraid of death because of the “annihilation of the ego,” her Moroccan boyfriend Bilal, who is a charming acrobat and conman, shoots back: “How can you people talk like that?” When she speaks with a middle-aged Moroccan friend about her intention to fnd a Suf sheikh, in her search for “knowledge” and “some kind of guidance,” he warns her against Sufsm, describing such practices as involving “sitting around on cushions, a great deal of illogic, and even a greater deal more incense” along with “days of fasting, interminable amounts of prayer, and a personal visit from God.” He calls Sufsm his “country’s tragedy – this escapism.” In his mind, the Sufs are “dangerous” – “Asian frauds” who would never be tolerated in Europe. But in Julia’s mind, “Europe lacks this inner world.” Julia’s daughters are also disturbed by her spiritual journey, believing that Sufs “live in a mosque, they pray all day, and they never go out.” Watching their mother kneel in prayer prostrations and faint in ecstasy at the dhikr, her daughters feel alienated from her and fear losing her to the Suf path, asking if they will still have a garden and mashed potatoes every night after she ofcially becomes a Suf. When Julia fnally make an exhausting pilgrimage to a faraway Suf lodge in search of a revered sheikh, she learns that he has died, so she speaks instead with another sheikh – Sheikh Habas. While she wants to talk about baraka (spiritual power), he instead asks her mundane questions about her

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family and partner. Realizing she is still in love with her partner in London, she responds: “I’m not ready, am I?” With this acknowledgment, she returns to Marrakesh to pack her bags and return to London. The death of the sheikh she was seeking and her spiritual unpreparedness to step formally onto the Suf path abort her mystical journey in Morocco; however, due to her encounters with Sufsm, she has grown in self-awareness and maturity and feels ready to “return” to her homeland enriched by the self-knowledge16 she has gained through these Orientalized subjects and landscapes. Door to the Sky, a 1988 flm from Morocco written, directed and produced by Farida Belyazid,17 revolves around the hybridized postcolonial subject of Nadia, a young Moroccan emigre, who journeys from Paris to Fez to visit her dying father. Though she arrives as a drinking, smoking punk with dyed hair, she gradually moves from feeling “alien” to feeling at home in Fez through her encounters with Sufsm.18 She is drawn to the Suf path when she hears the Quranic recitations of a Moroccan spiritual guide named Karina at her father’s funeral. Soon, she transforms her father’s home into a zawiya, a Suf lodge, which she uses to shelter and care for women on the margins of society.19 She severs her ties to France by ending her relationship with her French boyfriend Jean-Phillipe, wearing the veil, and stepping onto the Suf path. The flm was created at a time when flmmakers in Morocco were trying to cultivate a new “national” cinema and local audience in opposition to Morocco’s “Years of Lead” and the rise of Islamist movements that proliferated as a counter to Marxism and the political repression of the state. At that time, women were also engaged in the struggle to change post-independence personal status laws (mudawwana) which favored men in matters like inheritance – a prime theme in the flm as Nadia fghts her siblings for possession of the house. Door to the Sky broke with the aesthetic of social realism to suggest a world and cinema style that might transcend the east-west divide and the secular-religious dichotomy. However, like Hideous Kinky, the flm does fetishize the visual elements of Islamic architecture and practice, and upon feeling the pull to Islam, Nadia asks herself: “Am I in the 15th century or the 20th?” She encourages her French boyfriend Jean-Philippe to “listen to the timelessness of Islam,” another tired Orientalist trope. By beginning the flm with a dedication to Fatima al-Fihriya, founder of the al Qaraouine Mosque in Fez in 10th century,20 Belyazid aimed to reclaim the image of women as respected scholars, religious guides, and patrons in Morocco’s history at a time when radical Islamist groups were gaining ground. Nadia also discovers her healing powers as a sherifa (a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad). Her spiritual evolution has been understood by scholars like Ella Shohat as a “rebuke of both white, western bourgeois models of feminism and Islamic fundamentalism, and a destabilization of postcolonial oppositions of tradition and modernity,”21 as she is able to spiritually evolve and care for others “out of the patriarchal regional context of Morocco” (Gönül Dönmez-Colin, 127). Nevertheless,

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her stated desire at the beginning of the flm “to have it all” is ultimately unattainable. At the end of the flm, disappointed when the women in her Suf lodge refuse to welcome an atheist young woman and a sick young man that she healed into their shelter, Nadia realizes that no sacred space is free of the prejudices outside its walls. She leaves her home behind in pursuit of a diferent freedom, seeking to become untethered even to the structures of Sufsm. While in the beginning of the flm, Sufsm is sanitized as a spiritual discipline untainted by the ugliness of the world, such as hypocrisy, class inequality, fanaticism, and racism, by the end of the flm, Nadia realizes that a spiritual community cannot be separated from the world that created it, and she awakens to the “folly in exchanging one cultural identity for another” (Martin 2011, 64). Nadia leaves behind her female collective and seeks freedom of movement as an individual on an inner and outer journey to the “vast, spiritual expanse of ‘the sky’ ” (Gönül Dönmez-Colin 2007, 125) alluded to in the flm’s title. Tony Gatlif’s22 Exiles (2006), which features two Parisian lovers – Zano (son of French colonists in Algiers) and Lubna (daughter of Algerian Arabs) – on a journey to Algeria,23 also explores the therapeutic nature of return to postcolonial countries of origin. Since neither one of them speaks Arabic, they feel culturally adrift in Algeria; their journey mirrors that of the North African migrants they encounter who are trying to make their way to Europe.24 In this sense, the flm “underscores the links and continuities between colonial mobilities and postcolonial ones, and emphasizes the fact that not everyone is free to move or stay put in the same way” (Bayraktar, 66). At the end of their circuitous road trip, they experience a spiritual awakening of sorts at a dhikr gathering, which (like in Hideous Kinky) resembles more of a zar-ceremony to exorcise jinn than a typical dhikr.25 In the penultimate scene, a female spiritual guide tells Lubna that her spirit is lost and implores her: “Refnd yourself, your family, and bearings.” In the following 12-minute single-take trance scene, Naima dances and shakes uncontrollably, her convulsing26 resembling an epileptic ft or exorcism. While Naima begins the movie lounging naked in bed, laughing at Zano’s suggestion that they travel to Algeria, she ends the flm in an ecstatic trance – exorcizing her demons, and fnding liberation in her body not through sexuality but spiritual catharsis. Caught between east and west, Naima fnds her “home” in her own body, a “defant gesture in the face of loss” (Holohon, 33) that (re)connects her to her spirit, the Maghreb, and by extension Islam. Through the music and movement of the “ceremony,”27 Lubna moves from a state of alienation (“a stranger everywhere”) to one of embodiment, reconnected with her body, culture, and land of origin. Trance also provides a pivotal point of spiritual, moral, and political conversion in the 2017 award-winning28 flm The Journey from Iraq. Set in 2006, the flm centers upon Sara, a young woman wrapped in a hidden suicide vest in Baghdad’s train station, whose plans to detonate her vest to “purify” Iraq

104 Emily Jane O’Dell from the American occupation keep getting thwarted by unwelcome intrusions. However, it is not until she encounters the ecstatic music, dancing, and dhikr of a wandering group of dervishes from the Qadiri29 Suf Order (Iraq’s largest and most popular) that she begins to experience a change of heart as she becomes lulled into a trance. According to director Mohamed Al Daradji: “The Suf dancer’s scene in the station is my favorite it’s so trance-like and transcends you into another world, I love this scene because it’s very signifcant to the story and marks the beginning of the change in the main character Sara.”30 This scene reconfgures the “journey” of the title from a physical one to a spiritual one. Daradji has said he made the flm to combat terrorism intellectually rather than militarily. According to him, “We’re trying to fght terrorism through ideas and to get rid of extremist and fanatical behaviors and concepts through dialogue, understanding and rapprochement between people.”31 Thus, this flm, which was the frst Iraqi flm to be shown in Iraqi theaters in more than 25 years,32 employs Sufsm as an alternative to terrorism in occupied Iraq – an inward and transcendent escape from imperialism, violence, and injustice.

Mystic masters and holy fools: masculine models of morality and modernity While flms from the Maghreb feature women who fnd respite from their dissociated bicultural identities, economic anxieties, and relationship issues through Suf encounters with female guides, other flms, such as Takva: A Man’s Fear of God (Takva) (Turkey), The Wedding of Zein (Urs Al-Zayn) (Sudan), and The Nine Holy Men (Sembilan Wali) (Indonesia) center male mystics whose spiritual journeys explore the complex intersections of modernity, masculinity, and morality. In the 2006 Turkish flm Takva (directed by Özer Kızıltan), Muharrem, a pious middle-aged Suf, is catapulted from a quiet ascetic life of seclusion to the excesses of modern daily life when his Suf sheikh asks him to manage the fnancial afairs of the order and its real estate properties.33 Outftted with new digs, Western-style clothes, a cell phone, and a car with a driver,34 Muharrem is forced to compromise his spiritual and moral principles, and confront hypocrisy in his Suf Order, the world, and himself. After fnding himself lusting after the daughter of the Sheikh, Muharrem’s competing desires eventually drive him to madness,35 and he ends the flm in a catatonic state in the arms of the Sheikh’s daughter on a bed in the dargah. While he begins the flm separated from modernity through seclusion and asceticism, he ends the flm in internal exile, trapped in his own body and immobilized between two seemingly irreconcilable desires and multiplicities.36 Takva: A Man’s Fear of God is unique in Turkish cinema for depicting dervishes in a sympathetic light. According to director Özer Kiziltan, there have been many flms which “attack the dervishes and make fun of Islam, like for example Vurun Kahpeyi,”37 but he “wanted to take a more conciliatory

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approach.”38 Throughout Turkish flm history, flms have focused on the tension between modern and traditional life, as a result of the modernization / westernization eforts of the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic. Since the early republican period, flms have portrayed imams, sheikhs, dervishes, and religious people in general negatively, recycling clichés and stereotypes of spiritual seekers as backward, unethical, and obstacles to the development of society and the modern nation-state.39 Suf leaders in early Turkish flms were presented as major obstacles to modernization and unethical traitors who used religion for their own personal interests – including sexual abuse. The flm The Mystery of Bogaziçi, which critiques sexual abuse in Suf orders, prompted Sufs in the Bektashi Order to destroy the movie set and attack the actors and crews as they flmed in the courtyard of Eyüp Sultan Mosque. Later, flms from the 1960s directed by religiously devout Muslims directors featured historical Suf fgures, such as Yunus Emre, Haji Bektash Veli, and Jalaluddin Rumi, but they were not historically accurate and lacked all aesthetic considerations. In Marxist-inspired social realist flms from around the same time, Sufs are portrayed as backward, irrational, superstitious, fatalistic and out of touch with modern life. With the rise of moderate Islamic politics in the 1990s,40 however, Turkish directors began to carve out more creative and sympathetic representations of Islam – paving the way of flms like Takva: A Man’s Fear of God to emerge. Takva: A Man’s Fear of God presents an unusually nuanced, objective, and realistic depiction of Suf Orders in Turkey today. The flm is a landmark in Turkish flm history, as it is the frst Turkish flm in which a lengthy (four minute) dhikr ceremony is depicted41 with real dervishes. According to director Kiziltan, “There are many flms about Muslim topics in Turkish cinema but no-one has ever flmed inside a mosque or within a religious order before.”42 Dervishes were also involved in the means of production, as Kiziltan explains: “The Dervishes helped us a great deal throughout the process of making the flm because the flm deals with their own problems, and they identifed with the screenplay.”43 Such realistic details can be found in the sheikh’s assistant Rauf kissing a glass of sherbet before handing it to the sheikh in true dervish fashion, and politicians from Ankara visiting the sheikh out of respect. The flm has been framed by the director as a corrective of earlier depictions of Sufs in Turkish cinema.44 However, while the flm revolves around a modern dervish trying to straddle modernity and traditional life, the flm ends with him paralyzed by this dialectical divide – suggesting that such reconciliation may not be possible. The tension between modern life and traditional life can also be seen in Sudan’s most famous flm with Suf sentiments, The Marriage of Zein, a 1976 flm based on Tayeb Salih’s classic novel45 and directed by Kuwaiti director Khalid Siddik.46 The flm revolves around the marriage of Zein, a lovable village simpleton, and his friendship with Haneen, a Suf fgure with magical abilities who only associates with those on the margins of

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society, such as Zein and “Mousa the Lame.” Haneen is “called a holy man not because of his dedication to his religious devotions, but because of his ability to see through appearances and to gauge the importance of the role played by Zein in the life of the community” (Abbas, 56). As the novel explains, Zein appears to be a village idiot to normal eyes, but in reality, he has the heart of a saint: “Zein is no imbecile . . . Zein’s a blessed person” (Salih 1985, 64). Haneen stops an attack on Zein by the local “bad guy” – drinking and womanizing Seif ad-Din. While Zein is a symbol of the Suf simplicity and saintliness of traditional life, Seif ad-Din represents the dangers and sinfulness of modernity. Haneen repeatedly confrms throughout the book and the flm that Zein is blessed with special spiritual qualities. He calls Zein a “Blessed One of God” and considers him a “darwish” (dervish). In the novel, “everyone knew that Zein was a favorite of Haneen and that Haneen was a holy man who would not frequent the company of someone unless he had perceived in him a glimmering of spiritual light” (Salih 1985, 93–94). Haneen spiritually educates Zein and teaches him how to confront and transform evil into good. Both characters represent “the mystical side of the spiritual world” (Abbas, 58). Haneen rarely speaks with the villagers; as a Suf ascetic, he is focused on the divine realm and guiding Zein into his own spiritual powers and saintly station. Haneen also performs miracles and draws the villagers to God through his love, piety, and asceticism. He successfully prophesizes that Zein will marry the best girl in the village, and he turns Seif ad-Din from a scoundrel into a pious Muslim. He stands in opposition to the imam who represents the exoteric and legalistic dimensions of Islam. Accordingly, one of the main tensions in the narrative is the tension between Sufsm, epitomized by the loving heart of Zein and the miraculous powers of Haneen, and orthodox Islam, represented by the imam with his fery sermons of dogma and damnation. Zein’s loving embrace by diverse sectors of Sudanese society also hints at the possibility of national unity and spiritual love triumphing over tribal divisions and fanaticism.47 Through Haneen’s mystical blessing, Seif ad-Din leaves his sinful ways behind, gets married, and even delivers the call to prayer at the mosque.48 Tayeb Salih wrote the novel as a rebuke of socialist realism; as a result, the supernatural triumphs over the secular and Sufsm is positioned as a more desirable method of reform and community building than tribalism and “heterodox” Islam.49 A number of New Order Islamic flms in Indonesia from the 1980s feature the Javanese mystics (Wali Songo) credited with helping to spread Islam in Indonesia in the 15th and 16th centuries.50 Films such as The Nine Holy Men (dir. Djun Saptohadi) and Sunan Kalijaga51 (dir. Sofyan Sharma) depict these “civilizing” medieval mystics as models of masculinity and morality who ignite social change through Islamic virtue and values that usher in the proto-nation state (Izharuddin 2017).52 While these historical fgures, framed as “founding fathers,” were educated Muslim mystics, they are

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framed frst and foremost as “dakwah warriors”53 (Soenarto 2005, 36), spreading Sunni Islam after the disintegration of the Majapahit Kingdom at a time when Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic/Suf, and animist practices existed side-by-side and blended into kejawen (a Javanese spiritual blend of these traditions) (Daniels 2012, 36). While it is commonly accepted that these nine saints54 had a Suf orientation and claimed supernatural powers (Hanan, 33), the Islamic modernism movement that appeared in the 19th century and still infuences Islamic practice in Java today rejected mysticism. As a result, the Suf nature of these saints is usually downplayed in flm, and Wali Songo flms that do depict their miraculous mystic powers have been criticized (even though these flms are based on mystical stories in The Chronicles of Java [Babad Tanah Jawi] – a set of manuscripts on the history of the Java).55 In The Nine Holy Men, Sunan Gresik is depicted as the frst Javanese mystic, inspiring his disciples to instill social order, justice, and morality in Java through Islam. However, the acceptable limits of mysticism are made clear through the persecution and execution of Syeikh Siti Jenar, who is deemed an infdel for his teaching of the principle of wahdatul wujud – becoming one with God.56 Instead of focusing on the mysticism of the Wali Songo, the Wali Songo subgenre frames them as symbols of Indonesian nationhood, Javanese refnement,57 and “founders of a proto-nation that would give rise to the modern-day nation and postcolonial state” (Izharuddin, 24). Further, the Wali Songo subgenre of flm islami depicts these early mystic missionaries as virtuous and non-violent crusaders against economic injustice (feudal lords), social degeneracy, and moral bankruptcy. Biographical flms about notable Sufs are not, of course, unique to Indonesia. Notable Suf fgures like Yunus Emre, Abdel Qader, Al-Ghazali, and Rumi58 have been commemorated and represented in flms from Tajikistan, Turkey, Pakistan, and the United States.59 A 1959 Soviet Tajik flm about the Tajik-Persian poet Abuabdullo Rudaki, A Poet’s Fate, was screened at the Turkmen National Music and Drama Theater in Ashgabat in 2008 for the 1150th anniversary of his birthday (“People’s Artist of Tajikistan,” Marat Aripov, plays Rudaki).60 Al-Ghazali: The Alchemist of Happiness (2004) traces the spiritual evolution of one of the greatest Suf philosophers in Islamic history, as he moves from a life of religious dogma to one of the Suf reverie. By contrast, the Hollywood flm Khartoum (1966) completely neglects the indispensable Suf background and context of “The Mahdi,” the anti-colonial Sudanese hero (played by Lawrence Olivier in blackface) who boldly fought the British.61 Similarly, Lion of the Desert (1980), starring Anthony Quinn and funded by Muammar Gaddaf, does not pay much heed to the fact that Omar Al-Mukhtar, the anti-colonial hero against Italy in Libya, was educated in the Sanusi Suf Order and frst joined the Sanusi resistance in 1911 to fght the Italian invasion.62 These productions intentionally downplay the Suf context of their respective protagonists in favor of a reductive narrative that strips these historical fgures of their mystic

108 Emily Jane O’Dell formations and allegiances to cater to the sensitivities and prejudices of their intended audiences.

Musical assemblages: portraying pilgrimage, zar, and qawwali on flm A number of dramatic flms and documentaries in global cinema feature Suf pilgrimage to the shrines of important Suf fgures as well as the Suf music performed at the world’s most popular shrines. The most notable documentary on Suf pilgrimage is Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Touba, which showcases the annual pilgrimage (Grand Magaal) of a million Sufs in Senegal to Touba, a city founded by Cheikh Amadou Bamba, a non-violent Suf leader exiled by French colonialists to Gabon in 1895 who remains a popular symbol of anti-colonialism, spiritual mastery, and the nation itself.63 Vasarhelyi felt “compelled to document this story to expose outsiders to another face of Islam”64 by showcasing the poetry, songs, and whirling dances of the Mouride Brotherhood enacted at this three-day festival in Bamba’s honor.65 Other documentary flms depict healing rituals associated with Sufsm. Films from Iran that document the zar-ceremony,66 a spiritual exorcism67 with music and dance associated by some with Sufsm and used to remove a jinn causing mental or physical sufering,68 include Dingomaro (2014), The African-Baluchi Trance Dance69 (2012), The Jinn’s Wind (1970),70 and Iran Southwestern (2010). Female healers who blend Sufsm with shamanism are featured in The Last Dervish of Kazakhstan (2010), which follows Bifatima, one of the “last practicing” dervishes in Kazakhstan,71 and the short flm Habiba: A Suf Saint from Uzbekistan, which showcases a traditional female healer in Bukhara from the Suf Order of Bahauddin Naqshband. As Habiba explains in the flm: “People come to me every day for help. . . . This is the step that opens their hearts, which allows them to surrender to God’s love and compassion.”72 An Uzbek documentary about the 14th century Suf master Bahauddin Naqshband himself, Beaming One (dir: Shukhrat Makhmudov), was created by the Foreign Trade Association of Bukhara for the 675th anniversary of Bahauddin Naqshband in 1993 to encourage pilgrimage from Southeast Asia and Turkey to his shrine.73 One neglected sub-genre of Hindi flm is the “Muslim Devotional,”74 a number of B‐movies from the 1970s and 1980s with Sufsm at their center that showcase sacred sites of pilgrimage like the shrine of Khawaja Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer.75 While Suf music in India has historically been confned to Suf shrines, qawwali has risen in popularity the past few decades due to the Suf craze that hit Bollywood in the 1990s after the release of Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s76 album Magic Touch (1991) followed by his performance several years later of “Ishq Da Rutba” in Cartridge (Kartoos, 1999).77 A  Chishti himself, Khan’s vocals have also appeared in Hollywood flms, such as The Last Temptation of Christ, Natural Born Killers, and Dead Man Walking, for which he collaborated with

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Eddie Vedder on two songs with indigenous American bluegrass chords.78 Suf music has appeared in a number of Hindi flms in the past few decades in flms with secular plots, such as Roop Kumar Rathod’s song “Moula Mere Moula” in the 2007 flm Anwar.79 In the 1990s, Madonna also joined in the Suf fad, with her 1994 music video for “Bedtime Story” that featured whirling dervishes, Arabic calligraphy, and the Suf inspired verse “let’s get unconscious”; in her 1998 song “Bittersweet,” she recites a Rumi poem on that theme. A number of Bollywood movies feature Suf-inspired songs that are performed at the most popular Suf shrines in India. Though khanqahi qawwali (i.e., qawwali associated with a specifc Suf shrine) is the most popular genre of Suf music in South Asia (Sarrazin, 182), Bollywood flms that use qawwali songs80 tend to reinterpret them to conform to the demands of the commercial flm industry. A. R. Rahman altered Suf melodies and adapted the verses of Bulleh Shah, a 16th-century Punjabi Suf, to create the popular hit “Chaiyya chaiyya” in the 1998 flm Dil Se, in which the “incessant repetition of ‘Chaiyya’ in the refrain serves as a simulacrum of the dhikr chanting breath required for trance and spiritual union with the divine” (Sarrazin, 182). Oftentimes, Suf music that celebrates divine love is repurposed in Bollywood to score scenes steeped in romantic love. The 2008 flm Jodhaa Akbar features the Suf-inspired song “Khwaja Mere Khwaja” (“Master my Master”) which was composed by A. R.  Rahman and  praises India’s most celebrated Suf sheikh, Khawaja Moinuddin Chishti. The plot revolves around the 16th century courtship of Mughal Emperor Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar and the Hindu Rajput princess Jodhaa Bai, who is reluctant to marry him just to cement a political alliance between Akbar and her father, King Bharmal of Amer. Akbar prays for guidance at the shrine of Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer prior to his marriage. Eventually, she is won over by his assurances that Hindus have the same rights as Muslims in his kingdom and his insistence that she does not have to convert to Islam. For their royal wedding, the song “Khwaja Mere Khwaja” (“Master my Master”) is sung by a troupe of Indian Sufs who are dressed in the white dress (tennure) and tall brown hat (sikke) of the Mevlevi whirling dervishes. To the accompaniment of this Suf-themed song that makes use of the scale structure of a classical raga and requires classical Indian musical instruments, the Sufs begin to whirl to the refrain: “O my Lord/Come and reside in my heart.” However, unlike Mevlevis who whirl with both arms raised above them (with the right palm open to the sky and the left palm pointed to the ground), these dervishes whirl with their right arm extended down to the ground in a creative appropriation of this ceremony. Above the head of Akbar, who is sitting in a meditative state, a bright light overtakes the sky and bathes Akbar’s body in luminosity. He then stands up and joins them in whirling in this climactic scene which hints at his spiritual illumination and the promise of a happy interreligious marriage.

110 Emily Jane O’Dell A. R. Rahman did not originally write the song for the flm. He had been going to the Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti shrine for 15 years and was yearning to do a song honoring India’s most revered Suf saint. He composed the song out of the blue in 2005, and later ofered it to the director, as he knew the flm’s story was inspired by Sufsm, specifcally the Chishti Order. The flm, with its strong Suf overtones, was created to encourage interreligious tolerance between Hindus and Muslims and warn of the dangers of religious nationalism. The flm Rockstar (2011) also features a qawwali by A. R. Rahman that praises another Suf saint buried in India – Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya of Delhi.81 The extended sequence scored by the song “Kun Faya Kun” (“Be, and It Is”) was shot at his dargah, which contains his tomb along with that of the poet Amir Khusro and the Mughal princess Jehan Ara Begum. After the main character Janardhan Jakhar (aka JJ) is thrown out of his house due to a family misunderstanding, he takes refuge at the shrine where he sings qawwali with other male musicians.82 The lyrics of “Kun Faya Kun” mirror his sense of being lost in life and experiencing a “homecoming” of sorts in seeking divine love to clean up his “dark soul.” The lyric mirror JJ’s inner struggle: “free me from myself” for “there is a mirage in my mind/ for the weakness of my actions have got me where/I am lost . . . I didn’t ft in the world/Yet you embraced me.” JJ transitions from clapping alongside the musicians to grabbing his guitar to sing qawwali and take center stage. JJ garners large and enthusiastic crowds at the shrine, and he even sings alongside the famous Nizami brothers, whose family has been provided the main singers at the dargah for centuries.83 After entering a Suf-like trance, however, JJ puts aside his guitar at the dargah, and changes into more standard Suf attire to enter a more sober and solemn spiritual state. Little does he know that Ustaad Jameel Khan, a renowned classical musician, witnessed him singing at the dargah and is prompting Dhingra, the owner of Platinum Records, to sign him. This extended Suf shrine sequence is the turning point in the flm, as JJ then goes on to be a “rockstar.” Like Jodhaa Akbar, the flm also borrows from the tradition of Rumi, as it ends with the same line of Rumi poetry with which it began: “Beyond all concepts of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a feld. I’ll meet you there.”84 The 2006 flm Slowly, Slowly (Ahista Ahista) showcases the song “Aawan Akhiyan Jawan Akhiyan,” a qawwali which is also performed by Suf singers at the shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi. The song, composed by Himesh Reshammiya with lyrics by Irshad Kamil, scores the emotional scene in which the main characters Ankush and Megha visit the dargah after Megha’s fancé fails to show up to Delhi’s Registrar of Marriages, where Ankush works as a marriage witness. Ankush takes Megha to the dargah where she waits outside, as women are not allowed inside the shrine. Ankush helps place a chaadar on the grave, upon which rose petals are also scattered, while Megha cries outside, despondent over having been seemingly abandoned by her fancé. The Suf lyrics to the song focus on turning

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away from the temptations of the material realm to drown instead in love. The song’s allusion to eyes wet as rain from crying out of the grief from being separated from “the beloved” mirror Megha’s plight, as she cries in yearning for her lost love. The spiritual love expressed in the qawwali is used to convey the desire and pain of romantic love. The scene also shows how the shrine is woven into the fabric of daily life for many in Delhi. The 2015 flm Bajrangi Bhaijaan, starring Salman Khan and Kareena Kapoor, features the Suf-inspired song, “Bhar do Jholi Meri” (“Fill My Bag”), which was the frst song to ever be shot at the Aishmuqam Shrine in the Kashmir Valley. In the flm, the Pakistani mother of a mute girl takes her to the Nizamuddin Auliya Dargah in India in hopes that she will miraculously be able to speak. However, along the way she loses her daughter, who is eventually found by Bajrangi (played by Khan), a dedicated Brahmin devotee of the Hindu deity Hanuman. He decides to journey with the Muslim girl to her hometown in Pakistan to reunite her with her family. The old qawwali-inspired song, “Bhar do Jholi Meri,” written by Kausar Munir and sung by Adnan Sami, plays while Bajrangi carries the girl on his back into the dargah of Sheikh Hazrat Zain-Ud-Din Wali. At the shrine, he prays for a way to reunite her with her family and he ties a piece of cloth on the fence to make his wish. In this sense, the scene at the Suf shrine is the heart of the flm, as it highlights the flm’s theme of the power of love to transcend all religious, linguistic, and caste diferences. As for Lollywood (the flm industry in Lahore), Pakistan’s frst feature flm in English, Kashf: The Lifting of the Veil (2008), directed by Ayesha Khan, revolves around the Suf shrines of Lahore. The flm tells the story of a man who returns to Pakistan after 25 years away and fnds himself caught in a web of mystical experiences, unaware that his mother made a promise to a Suf master when he was a child that he would “walk the Suf path when he grows up.” According to the director, Ayesha Khan, “The experiences Armaghan’s character undergoes are based on true stories that have very generously been passed on to me by real people on the Suf path.”85 In Bollywood and Lollywood alike, Suf shrines are important characters that serve as communal sites of interreligious harmony, intoxicating portals of divine and romantic love, and ready reminders of the possibilities of personal and spiritual transformation.

Conclusion While award-winning flms from Iran like those by Abbas Kiarostami have been celebrated for their mystic subtexts, several Persian language flms that are more explicit in their Suf themes feature blind protagonists whose “disability” privileges the insight of faith over sight in the material world. In several flms that take place in North Africa, Europeans – Arab and nonArab – travel from Europe to North Africa and become transformed through their encounters with Sufsm and especially female spiritual guides. Sufsm

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also serves as a counter to terrorism in cinematic narratives, and a device through which directors can challenge stereotypical portrayals of Islam in the west. Cinematic intersections of Sufsm and postcolonality mirror the Suf spiritual narrative of “return,” to comment upon ongoing migrations, diasporic longing, interstitial identities, and postcolonial relations between Europe and the Maghreb. Exploring how Suf identities are imagined and rituals depicted in global cinema reveals how Sufsm serves as sacral salve for the soul and a liminal respite from the pressures of modernity, postcolonialism, imperialism, and alienation. Documentary flms that feature Suf pilgrimage, sema (the ceremony of the whirling dervishes), and the zar ceremony (a healing exorcism) display and preserve the diverse practices of Muslims both on and of the screen. The rise in popularity of Suf music in global cinema, especially qawwali-inspired songs in Bollywood, and the increase in biographical flms about notable Suf fgures in history attests to a growing presence of Sufsm in cinematic space in the 21st century. For the celebrated flmmakers in this chapter, Sufsm has been alternatively embraced in the pursuit of a distinctly feminist and national cinematic consciousness, employed as a missionizing model of moral masculinity, and enlisted in the fght against terrorism, occupation, and negative portrayals of Islam at home and abroad. Sufsm has been deployed as a cinematic third space in which (neo/post) colonial, patriarchal, and political discourses can be interrogated and intercultural tensions and suspicions difused through the trope of a spiritual journey. Suf narratives in cinema produce liminal spaces of interreligiosity, migration, marginality, and transnationality that suggest and ofer new forms of viewership, tolerance, and understanding for flm audiences around the globe. Just as Suf-themed flms with blind protagonists employ visual impairment as a modality of spiritual insight, the flms in this chapter use Sufsm as a “seeing” device through which narratives of modernity, alienation, and postcoloniality can be re-envisioned, mysticism re-interpreted, and flmmaking celebrated as a transcendent modality poised to direct the audience’s gaze toward unseen realms.

Notes 1 The framing of Sufsm as a vehicle of “tolerance” is also incorporated into Monsieur Ibrahim, a 2003 flm starring Omar Sharif as a Turkish grocer in the 1960s living in France who becomes a father-fgure to a young Jewish boy. Though he takes the boy to Turkey where they see the whirling dervishes, the only direct mention of Sufsm is when Sharif’s character defnes it as an “inner religion that is not legalistic.” 2 For more examples of disability in Iranian flm, see Emily O’Dell, “From Leprosy to The Willow Tree: Decoding Disability and Islamic Spirituality in Iranian Film,” Disability & Society 30, no. 7 (2015). 3 Similarly, another Persian flm which marries together visual impairment, mysticism, and the arts is The Silence (Sokout), a 1998 Iranian flm by Mohsen Makhmalbaf set in Tajikistan. The flm focuses on a young blind boy who

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supports his family by tuning instruments, but he is constantly being distracted by his love of mystic music. The award-winning Iranian flm The Color of Paradise (Rang-e Khodā) also features a young blind boy as its lead character, but The Silence is more explicit in its Suf themes. The flm won the Golden Dagger for best picture at Oman’s 2006 Muscat Film Festival, even though Sufsm is not considered acceptable Islamic practice in the Sultanate of Oman. Of course, the blind “seer” trope can be traced back to Tiresius in Greek literature. Desert scenes in the flm were shot in the Iranian central desert (near Annarak) and in Tataouine in Tunisia. Other scenes flmed in Iran were shot in Kashan, Yazd, Kerman, and the ancient city of Bam (where the fnal scene of the dervish gathering was flmed just a few months before the devastating earthquake destroyed the citadel). In Tunisia, additional scenes were also shot in Tunis, Korba, and Walad Sultan. Nawara Omarbacha, “Interview with Nacer Khemir: Director of ‘Bab Aziz, The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul’,” The Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society, 2006, www.Ibnarabisociety.org/events/khemir_interview.html. Accessed 23 January 2020. This could very likely be a reference to Ibrahim ibn Adham, the eighth-century Prince of Balkh, in present day Afghanistan, who walked away from his princely life to become a dervish. ibid. ibid. Iklim Arsiya, “God, Beauty, and Love: An Interview with Nacer Khemir,” Daily Sabah, 2017, www.dailysabah.com/cinema/2017/02/22/god-beauty-and-love-aninterview-with-nacer-khemir. Accessed 23 January 2020. Nawara Omarbacha, “An Interview with Nacer Khemir,” Spirituality and Practice: Resources for Spiritual Journeys, 2006, www.spiritualityandpractice. com/flms/features/view/17822/an-interview-with-nacer-khemir. Accessed 15 January 2020. ibid. ibid. The flm is based on Esther Freud’s semi-autobiographical 1992 novel of the same name. After they have decided to leave Africa behind and return to Europe, Julia shows her girls the Suf slipper and says, “When a holy man dies, his things become magical. So you can make a wish on the Suf slipper.” The daughters make a wish to return to her boyfriend Bilal’s village in Morocco, and for Bilal to be safe from harm. The end of the flm ends with one of the daughters saying, “The Suf told Mum and Mum told me: ‘If all the roads close before you, he can show you a hidden path which nobody knows.’ ” When she returned to Morocco in 1981 after having studied French literature and cinema Paris in the 1970s at the University of Paris VIII and The Ecole Superieure des Etudes Cinematographiques, she struggled to convince Moroccan authorities to create and protect flmmaking for the preservation and promotion of Moroccan culture. While Door to the Sky is not autobiographical, Belyazid has said that it was inspired by her “own spiritual quest” (Martin 2011, 64). See Gauch (1988, 2015a, 2009). See Khannous (2001); Shafk (1998); Dönmez-Colin (2004). As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have noted, the “Maghrebi form of feminism” is “distinct from white, western bourgeois models of feminism, rooted in a

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female (re)interpretation of Islamic values of faith and solidarity” (DönmezColin 2004, 125). Exiles can be considered “post-beur cinema due to Gatlif’s identity as an emigre director and the flm’s focus on Maghrebi French characters on a home-seeking journey to Algeria” (Bayraktar 2015, 62). Gatlif, who was born in Algeria in 1948 and exiled to France in the early 1960s, is not unlike the characters in his flm; he has stated: “I reject the idea of having a homeland. I am a foreigner in Algeria. I am a foreigner everywhere, a chronic foreigner. It is an idea I don’t dislike, in fact. I feel very close to France and I feel it is my culture after all these years, but I  always say one culture is as good as another.” See “The Gypsy King,” The Age, January  9, 2005, www.theage. com.au/entertainment/movie/the-gypsy-king-20050109-gdzbpf.html. Accessed 24 January 2020. See Amy L. Hubbell, Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity, and Exile (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015); and Kaya Davies Hayon, “‘Je suis une étrangère de partout’: The Material Realities of Exile in Tony Gatlif’s ‘Exils’ (2004),” Studies in French Cinema 17, no. 1 (2017): 70–90. For documentary flms on dhikr and moulids, see Celebrating the Prophet in the Remembrance of God: Suf Dhikr in Egypt, which shows how dhikr is traditionally performed in Egypt and discusses the inclusion of women and children, and the flm For Those Who Sail to Heaven, which investigates the moulid (festival) of the Suf “saint” Abu’l Hajjaj held annually in Luxor (his shrine today sits atop Luxor Temple as it was built on top of it before the temple was excavated). The flm includes clips flmed by Henry Barnes of the same festival in 1925. After independence and due to the rise of fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, Sufsm in Algeria was seen as an “innovation” and hence heretical. However, in the post-911 era, Sufsm has been promoted by President Abdelaziz Bouteika and government bodies as a peaceful alternative to Salafsm and terrorism. For more on the shifting local attitudes on Sufsm in Algeria, see Khemissi, Larémont, and Eddine (2012). In terms of authenticity, it should be noted that this depiction does not resemble any dhikr I have attended in North Africa as no divine names are chanted and no spiritual lyrics are sung. Further, the character’s barely clad body would not be tolerated at a dhikr in any Suf circles I have visited in my feld research in the region. The 2018 Muscat International Film Festival in the Sultante of Oman awarded the flm the Jury Award and the flm’s star Zahraa Ghandour received the Best Actress Award. The Qadiri orientation of the dervishes would not be apparent to most audiences, but as an expert on Sufsm, I picked up that they were Qadiri and had the chance to ask the director at the Muscat Film Festival if they were real dervishes and from the Qadiri Suf Order. He said yes to both questions. Joey Tamburello, “BFI London Film Festival: Director Mohamed Al Daradji Talks to the Blog About ‘The Journey,’ ” Let’s Start with This One, 2016, http:// letsstartwiththisone.blogspot.com/2017/10/bfi-london-film-festival-director. html. Accessed 6 December 2018. Mustafa Saadoun, “ ‘The Journey’: An Iraqi Film in Iraqi Cinema After 27 Years,” Al-Monitor, March 7, 2018, www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/03/iraqcinemas-movies-journey-daraji.html. Accessed 6 December 2018. It was jointly produced by producers in Iraq, the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands. See Nilüfer Göle, “The Quest for the Islamic Self Within the Context of Modernity,” in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, eds. Sibel Bozdogan et al. (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1997).

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34 See Hülya Önal, “From Clichés to Mysticism: Evolution of Religious Motives in Turkish Cinema,” Religions 5, no. 1 (2014): 199–218. 35 This is not the frst Turkish flm, however, in which a character loses his mind. For instance, the flm Hope (Umut) tells the story of a poor man named Cabbar who turns to a revered hodja (Hüseyin) when his horse dies – and ultimately loses his mind. Of course, Muharrem’s descent into madness in Takva also evokes the insanity at the end of the Persian flm The Cow (Gaav) (1969) in which a villager completely loses his mind and believes he has become his lost cow. This classic Iranian flm has also been interpreted as an allegory for modernity as a catalyst for the erosion of traditional values and an example of the madness that the “everyday” man sufers from in navigating the transition from the “traditional” to the “modern.” 36 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,  A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (1980), trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum Books, 2004). 37 Strike the Whore (1949). 38 Amin Farrzanefar, “Crisis of Faith in Modern Turkey,” Qantara, March  16, 2007, http://en.qantara.de/content/interview-with-ozer-kiziltan-director-of-takvacrisis-of-faith-in-modern-turkey. Accessed 19 January 2020. 39 See Levent Yaylagül, “In 2000’s Cinema and Religion in Turkey: The Sample Film of ‘Takva’ (A Man’s Fear of and Respect to God),” Iletisim Kuram ve Arastırma Dergisi 34, no. 3 (2012): 42–65; Levent Yilmazok, “Eurimages and Turkish Cinema: History, Identity, Culture.” (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2012); Bilal Yorulmaz and William L. Blizek, “Islam in Turkish Cinema,” Journal of Religion & Film 18, no. 2 (2014): 8. 40 The production of religious flms by Turkish directors began in 1961 with The Justice of Omar (Hz. Ömer’in Adaleti), and the number increased gradually through the 1970s. These flms were poorly made but broadened religious representations in Turkish flm. 41 See Gönül Dönmez-Colin, ed., The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East (New York: Wallfower Press, 2007); Serezar Pekerman, “ ‘Framed Patterns of Infnity’: ‘Takva’, a Mortal Individual’s Fight for Becoming-Imperceptible,” in Cinema in Muslim Societies, ed. Ali Nobil Ahmad (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 42 Amin Farzanefar, “Crisis of Faith in Modern Turkey,” Qantara, March  16, 2007, http://en.qantara.de/content/interview-with-ozer-kiziltan-director-of-takvacrisis-of-faith-in-modern-turkey. Accessed 19 January 2020. 43 ibid. 44 Önal, “From Clichés to Mysticism.” 45 Tayeb Salih, The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories (London: Heinemann Education, 1968); Ahmad Nasr, “Popular Islam in Al-Tayyib Salih,” Journal of Arabic Literature 11 (1980): 88–104; Ali Abdalla Abbas, “Notes on Tayeb Salih: Season of Migration to the North and The Wedding of Zein,” Sudan Notes and Records 55 (1974): 46–60. 46 Siddik studied at the Pune Film and Television Institute in India and he also directed The Cruel Sea (1971). 47 See Roy Armes, Third World Film Making and the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 48 After the flm premiered, my friend and colleague Professor Malik Badri spoke with Salahi who played the sheikh and said: “Salahi, I think you were not acting. You were completely spiritually absorbed.” According to Professor Badri: “He was moved. He was tearful.” 49 See Eiman El-Nour, “The Development of Contemporary Literature in Sudan,” Research in African Literatures 28, no. 3 (1997): 150–162.

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50 While Islam frst appeared in Indonesia in the eighth century, it did not fourish until the thirteenth century beginning in the kingdom of Aceh at the northernmost tip of Sumatra (van Doorn-Harder 2006, 21). 51 Having received a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship in Indonesia to study the Wali Songo, I visited their tombs and the Demak mosque complex to document ritual practices at these sacred sites in Java which remain popular to this day. 52 For an in-depth discussion of masculinity in Wali Songo flms and gender and Islam in Indonesian flm in general, see Alicia Izharuddin, Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema, 1st ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Also Eric Sasono (2010). 53 The flm was endorsed by the ulema of Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) who helped with its production. 54 The Wali Songo are Sunan Gresik, Sunan Kalijaga, Sunan Bonang, Sunan Kudus, Sunan Giri, Sunan Ampel, Sunan Gunung Jati, Sunan Muria, and Sunan Drajat. The title “Sunan” is an “honorifc for these early prostelytizers of Islam in Java” (Quinn 2008, 65). 55 Since the end of the 17th century, the “legend of the wali songo was read aloud as babad literature or court chronicles to large groups of people in mosques or performed as wayang storytelling traditions” (Ras 1986, 344). 56 See Ermita Soenarto (2005, 62–64) for more on how misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Syeikh Siti Jenar have eclipsed the nuances of his teachings. 57 The Wali Songo embody the Javanse concept of “refnement” idealised in Javanese masculinity and culture in general (Clark 2004, 119). 58 The Turkish government produced a flm about Rumi entitled Tolerance which frames him as the precursor to Turkish nationalism and embodiment of the secular values of modernity, despite the fact that Sufsm has been illegal since 1925. See Ernst (2017). 59 Turkey alone has seen the production of historical flms on Yunus Emre, Haji Bektash Veli, and Rumi. The recent popular Turkish television series Yunus Emre focuses on the medieval poet’s dervish wanderings while feeing the Mongol invasions. A  2008 PBS documentary, Rumi Returning: The Triumph of Divine Passion, features Rumi’s life in Central Asia and legacy in Afghanistan and Turkey. 60 Directed by Boris Kimyagarov and written by Satim Ulugzad. 61 One British military ofcial in the flm at least acknowledges that the Mahdi is “a mystic, an idealist with ideals strictly his own.” For more, see Vivian BickfordSmith and Richard Mendelsohn, Black and White in Colour: African History on Screen. 62 Al Qaeda in Libya has invoked Omar Al-Mukhtar as a hero and martyr. 63 Vasarhelyi’s previous flm, Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love, also showcased Suf practices in Senegal, as she flmed Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour going on pilgrimage to Touba while they were flming. The flm pivots around the controversy surrounding the release of his 2004 album Egypt, which celebrates Sufsm. N’Dour, in an interview with William Dalrymple for the TV documentary flm, Suf Soul: The Mystic Music of Islam (2005), remarks: “Before the recent problems, for the majority of Muslims, Islam was always a religion of peace and tolerance . . . Music can correct the image of Islam.” 64 See Vadim Rizov, “Five Questions with Director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi,” Filmmaker Magazine, March  8, 2013, http://flmmakermagazine.com/66467fve-questions-with-touba-director-elizabeth-chai-vasarhelyi/#.WhFFtXeZM1g. Accessed 24 January 2020. 65 The frst documentary on Touba was Blaise Senghor’s Grand Magal  à Touba (The Great Pilgrimage to Touba (1962).

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66 See Behnaz A. Mirzai, “African Presence in Iran: Identity and Its Reconstruction in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” Revue française d’histoire d’Outre Mer 89, no. 336 (2002): 229–246; Taghi Modarressi, “The Zar Cult in South Iran,” in Trance and Possession States, ed. Raymond Prince (Montreal: R.M. Bucke Memorial Society, 1968), 149–155. 67 See Henkesh (2016). 68 More recently, the zar-ceremony has become especially popular in Egypt (Cairo) and Mali (Bamako) as a form of women-only entertainment. Natvig (1988) notes that the zar-cult “served as a refuge for women and efeminate men” in the Sahel (Sudan) region under Islamic rule. When I attended a zar-ceremony in Bamako, Mali it was attended only by women and there was homosexual activity in the audience which no one felt compelled to stop or comment upon. 69 Mirzai (2002) suggests that the zar was introduced to Iran in the 19th century (Qajar period) by enslaved Africans who arrived in Iran as a result of the Arab slave trade; this also would explain its ubiquitous presence in neighboring Oman, which once controlled the slave trade in Zanzibar. The practice of zar still exists today in Iran in Makran, Baluchistan, and in the coastal areas of southern Iran such as Salkh, Keshm and Kish island. 70 This flm was adapted from Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi’s The People of the Air (Ahl-i Hava), an ethnographic monograph about zar as practiced by descendants of African slaves in Bandar Lengeh. Nasser Taghvai’s The Jinn’s Wind (1970) is signifcant in flm history because it is narrated by renowned modern poet Ahmad Shamlou. See Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi, Ahl-i Hava (Tehran, Iran: University of Tehran Press, 1967). 71 See Cinema in Central Asia: Rewriting Cultural Histories, edited by Michael Rouland, Gulnara Abikeyeva, and Birgit Beumers (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013). 72 For more on Sufsm in Central Asia, see Emily O’Dell, “Subversives & Saints: Sufsm and the State in Central Asia.” In Islam, Society, and Politics in Central Asia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). See also Hohmann (2010); Kamp (2011); Kandiyoti and Azimova (2004). 73 The flm compares him to Gandhi and Tolstoy to secularize his narrative and life. 74 See Dwyer (2010). 75 Chaturvedi (2015). 76 See Sufs at the Cinema: 50 Years of Bollywood Qawwali & Suf Song 1958– 2007 (Times Square Records, 2011), a two CD set, and A Voice from Heaven: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. 1999. Directed by Giuseppe Asaro, performances by Supinder Bedi et al., Winstar. 77 He also performed the song “Haq Ali” in the 1981 flm Nakhuda. 78 Those songs are “The Long Road” and “The Face of Love.” 79 It should be noted that the mainstream song style of Hindi flms actually arose in the late 1940s as a result of Christian musicians in Goa with knowledge of cabaret, jazz, and western classical styles fooding into the flm industry after the British left India. They also modeled some songs at that time on Suf qawwali. For more on Sufsm in Bollywood, see T.J. Nelson. “Suf Expression in Bollywood Films.” World Music Central, April 18, 2011 – November 29, 2017. 80 Save for Hot Winds (Garam Hawa, 1973) which showcases traditional qawwali (Boyk and Faruqui 2006, 22). 81 A.R. Rahman also dedicated the Suf-inspired qawwali “Arziyan,” which appears in the flm Delhi 6 (2009), to Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya; scenes from the flm scored by this song show pilgrims giving charity and taking photos at his shrine. 82 While female singers are incorporated into many Suf rituals in Pakistan and India, especially the singing of devotional poetry, Even though female singers

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perform sufana-kalam (mystical poetry) at Suf shrines, community gatherings, and concerts in India and Pakistan, female singers have received little academic attention until recently flms in the west that have incorporated Suf music tend to use male singers. See Shemeem Burney Abbas, The Female Voice in Suf Ritual: Devotional Practices of Pakistan and India (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003). In the 1960 Bollywood flm Barsaat Kki Rraat (A Rainy Night), 1960), however, the heroic protagonist performs the qawwali “Na To Karvan” alongside female qawwals. in perhaps the most famous qawwali of the Indian cinema, “Na to caravan.” Even though female singers regularly perform sufanakalam (mystical poetry) at Suf shrines in the region, community gatherings, and concerts, female singers have received little academic attention until recently. 83 The Nizami singers lip-synched the song which was actually sung by singer Mohit Chauhan, Javed Ali, and the music director of the movie, A.R. Rahman. 84 It should be noted that this is not an accurate translation of the original Persian which does not say “right doing” and “wrong doing” but beyond “faith” and “being an infdel.” 85 “Q&A: Ayesha Khan Talks About the Santa Fe Film Festival, Producing Films in Hollywood, & the Need for Diversity in the Pakistani Film Industry,” Synergyzer no. 3 (2013), www.synergyzer.com/the-pakistani-at-santa-fe.

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Soenarto, Ermita. 2005. “From Saints to Superheroes: The Wali Songo Myth in Contemporary Indonesia's Popular Genres.” Journal of Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JMBRAS) no. 78: 32–85. Sunan Kalijaga. 1984. Directed by Sofyan Sharna, performances by Zainal Abidin et al., Tobali Putra Productions. Takva: A  Man’s Fear of God. 2006. Directed by Özer Kiziltan, performances by Erkan Can et al., Özen Film. Tamburello, Joey. 2016. “BFI London Film Festival: Director Mohamed Al Daradji Talks to the Blog About ‘The Journey’.” Let’s Start with This One, 2016. http:// letsstartwiththisone.blogspot.com/2017/10/bf-london-flm-festival-director.html. Accessed 6 December 2018. The African Baluchi Trance Dance. 2012. Directed by Behnaz Mirzai, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The Last Dervish of Kazakhstan. 2010. Directed by Olesya Bondareva et al., International Festival of Ethnographic Film. The Wedding of Zein. 1967. Directed by Khalid Alsiddig, performances by Ali Mahdi et al. Touba. 2013. Directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi et al., performances by Sahr Ngaujah et al., Company 3. van Doorn-Harder, Pieternella. Women Shaping Islam: Reading the Qu’ran in Indonesia. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Vasarhelyi, Elizabeth Chai. 2013. Interview by Vadim Rizov. “Five Questions with Touba Director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi.” Filmmaker, 2013. https://goo.gl/ z9P7KE. Wanderers of the Desert. 1984. Directed by Nacer Khemir, performances by Nacer Khemir et al., France Media. Yaylagül, Levent. 2012. “In 2000’s Cinema and Religion in Turkey: The Sample Film of Takva (A Man’s Fear of and Respect to God).” Iletisim Kuram ve Arastırma Dergisi 34, no. 3: 42–65. Yilmazok, Levent. 2012. “Eurimages and Turkish Cinema: History, Identity, Culture.” Ph.D. Thesis, University of Amsterdam. Yorulmaz, Bilal and William L. Blizek. 2014. “Islam in Turkish Cinema.” Journal of Religion & Film 18, no. 2. Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love. 2008. Directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, performances by Youssou N’Dour et al., Shadow Distribution. Yunus Emre: Askin Sesi. 2014. Directed by Kürsat Kizbaz, performances by Sinan Albayrak et al., Pinema.

9

Depicting Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) without showing him Bilal Yorulmaz

Introduction The Prophet Muhammad has served as a model of exemplary behavior since the earliest period of the tradition, in some contexts even referred to as the perfect human being (al-Insān al-Kāmil).1 Muhammad’s example shapes the everyday lives of Muslims in numerous ways, including devotional practices, pious behaviors, sartorial norms, and ways of speech.2 The mediums through which Muslims have encountered Muhammad over the generations have shifted but several threads remain strong across these differences. Muslim visual culture is one of the most important forms for circulating Muhammad as a representative framework for social and spiritual life. In this chapter, I argue that there are important but obscured aesthetic continuities between historical artistic forms and contemporary popular cultural productions focused on the representation of Muhammad. More specifcally, I draw out the genealogy between premodern textual icon and illustrated manuscript traditions with contemporary flms about Muhammad, including Moustapha Akkad’s The Message (1976) and Majid Majidi’s Muhammad: The Messenger of God (2015). While the legitimacy of depictions of Muhammad remains tendentious within diferent communities, there is a rich artistic heritage revolving around his portrait. Overall, across  these visual forms we see that Muslim artists have found creative ways to depict Muhammad without showing him.

Prophet Muhammad as model God informs his believers in the Qur’an, Prophet Muhammad is sent as a mercy for all creatures (Qur’an 21:107), a bearer of glad news and a warner to the whole of mankind (Qur’an 34:28) and He has a good example for whosoever hopes for God and the Last Day (Qur’an 33:21). God also orders the believers to love, follow, and obey His messenger (Qur’an 3:31–32). As the frst believers, Muhammad’s companions (ṣaḥāba) were eager to take him as a model for every aspect of their life. They behave just as the prophet

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when loving their kids, living together with their neighbors, selling or buying something, even eating, drinking, speaking, and walking. The second generation of Muslims, the successors of the companions (tābi’ūn), did not see Muhammed but were also eager to imitate him. They asked a lot of questions about his characteristics, including his physical appearance. For example, Muhammad’s grandson Ḥasan asked his uncle Hind ibn Abī Hālah about the Prophet’s appearance and he explained: Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was neither tall nor short, his face was shining like the full-moon on the 14th night, his hair was slightly curly, his head was moderately large, his eyes were black and eyebrows were long, his joint bones were strong. His chest and tummy were not hairy, just a line of hair from chest to tummy. He used to walk with strength. When he paid attention toward left or right, he moved his whole body (not just face).3 There were a lot of hadiths on Muhammad’s appearance and behaviors. Hadith collections had sections named faḍā’il (virtues), manāqib (excellences), adab (ettiqutte), libās (clothing), “Et’ima” (food), dhikr (remembrance), and “Dua” (prayer). Since reports were narrated from a second person perspective hadiths described the physical appearance or outward behaviors of Muhammad rather than his internal experiences. Within a few generations after Muhammad’s death specifc books that focused on his appearance began to emerge, named shamāʾil (features).

Visual representation of Prophet Muhammad The most famous shamāʾil book was written by Al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī’s (824– 892) Shamāʾil al-Nabawiyya (The Characteristics of Prophet Muhammed).4 al-Tirmidhī collected 424 hadith and divided them into 56 sections, such as noble features, hair, dressing, shoes, and walking.5 Other famous Arabic shamāʾil books include Farrā’ al-Baghawī’s (d. 1116) al-Anwār fī Shamāʾil an-Nabiyyi al-Mukhtār (The Illumination of the Appearance of the Chosen Prophet), Ibn Kathir’s (1300–1373) Shamāʾil al-Rasūl (The Appearance of Prophet Muhammad), and Yaḥyā Ibn Abī Bakr al-ʿĀmirī’s (1413–1488) Bahjat al-Maḥāfl wa bughyat al-Amāsthil fī Talkhīṣ al-Siyar wa al-Muʿjizāt wa al-Shamāʾil (The Gladness of Gatherings and Searching of Examples in Summarization of Muhammad’s Life, Miracles and Characteristics).6 However, Najm al-Din Abu Bakr Mahmud b. ʿAli al-Ravandi wrote a shamāʾillike book named Sharaf al-Nabī (The Nobility of the Prophet) in Persian in 1211. Al-Ravandi’s book helped spread knowledge in Persian lands about the Prophet’s physical features and illustrations of Muhammad fourished in Persian and Mongol lands, especially during the Ilkhanid (1256–1353), Timurid (1370–1506), and Safavid (1501–1722) reigns.7 Mongols were familiar with religious paintings because they lived together with Manichaeists and Buddhists in Central Asia. Therefore, religious illustrations spread in Muslim world by means of Mongols.8

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Shamāʾil and dalāʾil al-nubuwwa (proofs of prophethood) books infuenced Muslim artists and became the main source of veristic and realistic depictions of Muhammad. The earliest paintings of the Prophet depict him as a fully visible corporeal fgure, whose facial features are neither hidden beneath a veil nor engulfed by fames. These sorts of realistic depictions of the Prophet are included in the earliest illustrated manuscripts produced from the period of Anatolian Seljuk (1077–1307), Ilkhanid, and Timurid.9 During Ilkhanid and Timurid times, depictions of Muhammad were included mostly in illustrated histories and biographies. In these manuscripts, including the Timurid Mirajnama (The Book of Ascension), Muhammad is represented with his facial features on full display and his prophetic attributes, such as his turban, black tresses, and a faming gold nimbus.10 The oldest full description of the prophet is found in Ayyuqi’s illustrated Persian manuscript titled Warqa and Gulshāh (Warqa wa Gulshāh), completed in Konya around 13th century. The Prophet was depicted in at least four other manuscripts dating from the end of the 13th century or the beginning of the 14th century. They are a Shahnameh (Book of Kings) manuscript, a copy of a Persian translation of the Tārīkh al-Rusul wa al-Mulūk (History of the Apostles and Kings) by al-Ṭabarī (839–923), a copy of the al-Āthar al-Bāqiyah ‘an al-Qurūn al-Khāliyah (Chronology of Ancient Nations) by Al-Bīrūnī (973–1050), and a copy of the Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh (The Compendium of Chronicles) by Rashid al-Din (1247–1318).11 Not only books of history and biography but also other genres included veristic portrayal during 13th–15th centuries. For example, Saʿd al-dīn al-Varāvīnī’s collection of didactic fables written in Baghdad in 1299, Marzubānnāma (Book of the Margrave), the Prophet sits cross-legged and enthroned. Two fying angels hover above Muhammad and the companions of the prophet sit or stand around him. Another example of an anthology of stories is Kalīla and Dimna written in Arabic around 750 by Ibn alMuqafa‘(d. ca. 756). It is translated into Persian by Nasrallah Munshi and produced as an illustrated manuscript in Iran between circa 1350 and 1400. Nasrallah Munshi added a translator’s preface, and he praised God and the Prophet in this section. The preface illustration portrayed the ascension (miʿrāj) of the Prophet. In this painting Muhammad’s slightly round face, his black eyes and long eyelashes, his beautiful wheat-colored complexion and radiant color, his long and very dark hair, his full and dense beard are depicted much as they are described in the shamāʾil texts composed by al-Tirmidhī and others. These kinds of portraits of the Prophet faded around 1500, nevertheless a few later paintings exist that continued veristic traditions of depiction. One of them is the copy of Saʿdī’s (1210–1257) Būstān (The Orchard), in which painting was added in 1550 in Bukhara. The composition depicts Muhammad’s ascension, and he is depicted in a realistic manner: his beard, his two long tresses, and his eyes are fully visible.12 Another example is an Indian miniature titled Muhammad and his Companions, painted circa 17th century. This miniature represents a

126 Bilal Yorulmaz mosque, Muhammad on a raised throne, with his grandsons Hasan and Ḥusayn one on each side of him, the frst four caliphs and the frst muezzin Bilal around him.13 Another similar example is a 1468–9 Herat edition of Saʿdī’s Gulistān (The Rose Garden) with paintings added in India around 1645 depicting a similar scene.14 By the 16th century artistic patterns of realist depictions of Muhammad were waning and abstraction became the predominant form of prophetic representation.15 Suf thought, which developed the belief that God’s divine word (kalima) manifested itself in the person of Muhammad rather than just through the Qurʾan, spread across both Ottoman and Safavid lands. Those inspired by this Suf understanding created inscribed kalima portraits of the Prophet. In these portraits Muhammad’s facial features were removed and replaced by the vocative statement “Ya Muhammad” (O Muhammad). Muhammed was depicted with a body but without facial features in most of these portraits. Similarly, in Niẓāmī Ganjavī’s (1141–1209) poem Makhzan al-asrār (Treasury of Secrets) angels and other people had full bodies and faces but the Prophet was portrayed only as a gold disk ascending through the heavens.16 The other source of abstract depictions of the Prophet is the notion of the “Light of Muhammad (nūr Muḥammad).” The Qur’an defnes Muhammad as a “luminous lamp” (sirājun munīr) that can lead people out of darkness (Qur’an 33:46). There are also many hadiths saying Muhammad’s face shines like a full moon.17 Paintings produced after the 16th century frequently portrayed the Prophet’s face covered by a gold or white veil and faming halo around his head.18 From this point on, we fnd that “linked to the growth of mysticism and sectarianism, these prophetic light metaphors in the painterly arts no doubt refected – and further enhanced – Suf and Shi’i modes for expression in Persianate lands.”19 Prior to that time, there were not signifcant diferences regarding prophetic portraiture across Turkic, Arabic, or Persian manuscript traditions. For example, al-Darir’s book Sīrat al-Nabī (Biography of the Prophet), illustrated in 1596 by the order of the Ottoman Sultan Murād III (1546–95), portrayed Muhammad with his veiled face and faming halo around him.20 However, by the 17th century, artistic conventions and norms took shape along sectarian lines that were situated in Ottoman and Safavid political domains. In Sunni communities of West Asia textual icons (ḥilye) became the predominant form of prophetic representation while Shi’a artists in Persianate lands focused on visual depictions of Muhammad that were composed of veiled and luminous motifs for his visage. Ottoman calligraphers inscribed the Prophet’s physical beauty in textual forms and the ḥilye (ornament) tradition was born. The text of ḥilye is a verbal image of Muhammad describing both his personality and appearance. Calligraphers transformed the text into an ornamented calligraphic image eventually perfected by Hāfz Osman (1642–1698) in the late 17th century.21 It is still common in modern Turkey and can be found easily on calendars, postcards, or walls at homes and small mosques.

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On the other hand, portraying the Prophet is complex in the Shi’a world. From the 16th century until the last quarter of the 20th century, Persian artists both show the Prophet with his facial features exposed or provided with a veil. Figural imagery of Muhammad increased after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. From the revolution until the Danish cartoon controversy of 2005–2006, a variety of posters, postcards, stickers, and carpets depicting Muhammad could be purchased in stores and are found in private homes, shrines, and cemeteries.22 One widely circulated image in Iran between the 1990’s and the 2006 cartoon controversy was that of Muhammad as a young boy. It is a modern print of an adolescent male in a sensual pose, his head bent down toward his shoulder, his lips are parted in a smile.23 However, this image was based on a photograph titled “Young Arab Boy” or “Muhammad” taken by two Orientalists in North Africa around 1905–1906 showing a young Arab boy named Muhammad.24 After the Danish cartoon controversy, Iranian ofcials wanted to control fgural representations of the Prophet. Muhammad was portrayed in children books with a veiled face and solar halo. The Ministry of Endowments and Charitable Works had issued an internal memo requiring that all shrines remove their pictorial icons in 2008. Despite increasing ofcial restrictions, pictorial representations such as postcards representing the Prophet can be sold in supermarkets, placed on walls in private homes, and appear as framed icons in shrines. In fact, the famous “young Muhammad” image can be found side by side with Ayatollah Khomeini’s photo on martyr’s tombstones.25 The history of these prophetic images developing over time and space shape the visual landscape in which our directors, Moustapha Akkad and Majid Majidi, were socialized. In what follows, I show that the dominant practices governing artistic norms in Sunni and Shi’a communities are refected in the ways each director depicted Muhammad. Akkad’s The Message employs strategies similar to those developed in Ottoman visual icons, while Majidi’s Muhammad: The Messenger of God mirrors visual practices of illumination and abstraction derived from miniature portraiture. These vernacular cultural conventions are certainly just one of many artistic stimuli, but they should be recognized as a powerful structure shaping the cinematic aesthetics in each flm.

Cinematic representation of Prophet Muhammad A cinematograph was brought to the Ottoman Palace a couple of months after the Lumiere brothers’ frst public show in the Grand Café in 1895. Ottoman Sultan Abdul Ḥamīd II (1842–1918) and his ofcials embraced the cinematograph and accepted it as “an important device for mankind.”26 Istanbul, Anatolia, the Balkans, and West Asia became acquainted with the cinema for the frst time during the Ottoman period.27 After the Ottomans, local cinema industries emerged in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey etc.28

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Inevitably Muslim flmmakers imagined producing a movie on the Prophet as cinema industries progressed in Muslim countries. Turkish-Egyptian flmmaker Vedat Örf Bengü wanted to produce a movie on Muhammad’s life that was fnanced by Turkey. He ofered the role of Muhammad to Yusuf Wahbi, famous Egyptian actor who was of Turkish origin. Wahbi announced his intention to take the role in 1927 but scholars of al-Azhar University in Egypt protested. They objected again in 1930 for similar reasons insisting on a prohibition against portraying Muhammad.29 The message In 1973, the flm Jesus Christ Superstar was shown in cinemas all over the world and made a deep impression on audiences, inspiring Muslims to produce a similar flm about Prophet Muhammad.30 Director Moustapha Akkad, Syrian-born Hollywood flmmaker, would be the one to fulfll this desire among audiences. Akkad was infuenced by classic Hollywood cinema, such as the epic flm Lawrence of Arabia, directed by David Lean in 1962. Akkad said “the scene that I admired most in my life is David Lean’s scene when Omar Sharif was introduced. I  was so moved by that scene, and I tried to really kind of do similar.” He was determined to create a flm spectacle about the life of the Prophet Muhammad.31 Akkad faced resistance from Hollywood to make a flm about Muhammad and had to go outside the U.S. to raise money for the flm production.32 Moroccan and Libyan leaders King Ḥassan II and Muammar Gaddaf, sponsored the movie.33 Akkad wrote the screenplay in cooperation with writers and scholars from Al-Azhar to restrain any controversies. The script was scrutinized and approved page by page by scholars from Cairo. The Prophet’s name was eventually removed from the original title Mohammad, Messenger of God and the flm was renamed simply as The Message. The members of the Shi’ite Council of Lebanon also gave the flm their approval. In cooperation with scholars, Akkad decided that the Prophet himself would not appear on screen at all, only his cane and camel would be visible.34 After production had started in 1974, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia put pressure on Morocco’s King Ḥassan II and forced him to expel the flmmakers. The Muslim World League in Mecca, Saudi Arabia rejected the project and the Muslim scholars who had initially approved the shooting script withdrew their support and called the completed flm “an insult to Islam.” Akkad moved flming to Libya, with the support of Gaddaf, which presented a whole new set of political problems for the flmmakers.35 The problems were not yet over, however. When the flm was scheduled to premiere in the U.S. Black Muslim extremists occupied the building of the Jewish B’nai B’rith organization in Washington, DC, threatening to kill everyone unless the American premiere of the flm was cancelled.36 They assumed mistakenly that Anthony Quinn played the prophet in the flm. The problem was resolved without injuries but the flm’s American box ofce never

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recovered from the controversy.37 Moreover, Western flm reviewers were not impressed and made negative comments about the flm.38 The Message released frst in London on July  30, 1976, followed by screenings in the USA, France, West Germany, Sweden, Philippines, and Colombia. One of the frst Muslim-majority countries showing the flm was Turkey on October  1979.39 Because of the controversies many Muslimmajority countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, and Egypt, banned the movie. Interestingly, al-Azhar repeated its opinion about the flm in 2004 by declaring that “The Message was not allowed to be screened in any cinema on Egyptian territory, or to be broadcast by any television company transmitting from Egyptian soil.”40 However, in spite of the debates about it permissibility, The Message circulated within Muslim communities by means of DVD’s, CD’s, the internet, and TV broadcasting. For example, one can watch The Message on television during Ramadan every year, even 41 years after its release. Many people learned about the Prophet’s life by watching The Message more than reading books in Turkey. Muhammad: the messenger of God In 2006, Majid Majidi’s flm The Willow Tree was about to premiere at the 17th annual NatFilm Festival in Copenhagen. However, Majidi backed out the screening of the flm citing the controversy over cartoon depictions of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. He thought, “while there are 250 flms on Jesus Christ, 120 flms on Moses, 80 about the other prophets and 40 flms on Buddha, there is only 1 movie on the life of Prophet Muhammad. Unfortunately, we fail to introduce our Prophet to the Western world. What can we do to make them to love Prophet Muhammad? We have to show who the Prophet Muhammad is.” This realization and challenge led him to the idea of making a flm about Muhammad.41 Majidi had consulted with both Sunni and Shi’i scholars from Iran, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, and Iraq.42 He researched using sources from hadith and prophetic biographies (sīra) for four years.43 The flm’s set, which depicted 7th century Mecca, began production in the city of Qum, Iran in 2011. However, this was also triggering some of the controversies over the flm. Scholars from al-Azhar opposed the movie before its release, stating “we demand that Iran refrain from releasing the movie, so that an undistorted image of the Prophet can be preserved in the minds of Muslims. We call upon all flmmakers to respect religions and prophets.”44 After the production, Al-Azhar ofcials said that “portraying the Prophet Muhammad was tantamount to belittling his spiritual status.” Abdel Dayyem Nosair, adviser to Al-Azhar head Ahmed al-Tayyeb, pointed out another concern that “the actor who plays this role may later play a criminal, and viewers may associate these characters with criminality.”45 Reinforcing al-Azhar’s position, the mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, criticized, “The movie tarnishes and antagonizes Islam. It should

130 Bilal Yorulmaz not be shown if Sharia is to be respected.” That same day, the Muslim World League issued an announcement and called on Iran to “stop showing the movie and ban it because it disrespects the Prophet.” It also advised Muslims worldwide to “boycott the movie because it insults the position of prophecy.”46 Finally, the Mumbai-based Raza Academy exaggerates the criticism. They have issued a fatwā against Majid Majidi and the Indian composer A. R. Rahman. The non-binding legal opinion accused Majidi and Rahman of sacrilege and called for them to re-read the testament of faith (kalimat al-shahādah) in order to be a Muslim again. They also wrote a letter to the Indian Government calling for them to ban Majidi’s movie.47 On the other hand, Majidi criticized al-Azhar and Saudi Arabian scholars. He said that “I ask the opponents to let people announce their own opinion after watching the flm. I also invited the ofcials of Saudi Arabia and Al-Azhar University that banned this movie to watch it, but, they condemned it without watching this flm.” According to Majidi, the Sunni scholars in other countries like Russia watched the flm and not only did they not ban the flm but they also encouraged people to watch it. For example, before screening the flm in Turkey, Majidi watched the movie along with Hayrettin Karaman, Turkish Sunni scholar, and he approved of the movie, saying that the flm was an appropriate model for youths and young adults.48

Visual continuities in depicting Muhammad Akkad’s The Message and Majidi’s Muhammad: The Messenger of God share similar objectives. Both flms seem to be produced for a wider non-Muslim Euro-American audience more than general Muslim publics. Akkad and Majidi were both personally motivated to show Muhammad and Islam in a more nuanced and positive light for these audiences. Both also attempted to stop any potential controversy among Muslim viewers by consulting Sunni and Shi’i scholars. Ultimately, they could not manage to prevent their movies from being banned in many Muslim-majority countries. Some objections to the flms from Muslim audiences are rooted in the modern disapproval of any representation of Muhammad but others are embedded within the visual grammar of diferent cultural traditions. The Message’s visual logic is based on the Ottoman ḥilye tradition while Muhammad: The Messenger of God’s representational patterns use techniques popularized in Persianate miniature portraits of Muhammad after 16th century. Similar to Ottoman ḥilye, which does not show the Prophet’s physical features, Akkad does not show Muhammad’s body in his flm. The ḥilye is the verbal image of Muhammad describing both his personality and appearance. In The Message Akkad only uses camera movements to give his point of view. When the Prophet needs to speak, one of his companions voices his sentiments as if he ordered him to inform the others. In this way, the companion says “The Prophet said that . . .”

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This type of verbal imagery is operative in the opening scenes of The Message where delegates are sent to deliver Muhammad’s invitation to Islam to neighboring leaders. Like the ḥilye, Muhammad’s personal identity is embodied through the words on these letters. The Byzantium king Heraclius respectfully welcomes Muhammad’s communication while the Persian ruler Khosrow II insults the delegate and rips up Muhammad’s words. In a later scene, Muhammad’s presence is conjured before the Abyssinian King when Muslims were seeking asylum from Meccan polytheists who wanted to recapture and punish them. The Muslims recited some Qur’anic verses about Jesus and Mary, which appealed to the Christian king, and Muhammad was embodied as the deliverer of wisdom through the Qur’an. The king said there was no diference between these verses and the Bible so he refused to Meccans request and hosted Muslim asylum seekers in his country. In other scenes, Muhammad is corporealized through his visual point of view as represented by the camera’s gaze. For example, when his followers are protecting him on the way to the Ka‘ba, Hamza shows up, saves Muhammad and his companions from Meccan pagans. While he declares his belief to Muhammad, we see Hamza’s face from Muhammad’s point of view. In another scene, when Hamza and other Muslims are building a wall on the frst mosque in Medina, the audiences view the scene from Muhammad’s perspective. Hamza walks toward the camera, takes a big stone from Muhammad, and says, “Give me that. You are doing too much. Please go and sit down.” In the scenes entering Medina and conquering Mecca, the audience sees Muhammad’s camel’s head, his stick, and the crowd around him from his point of view. People salute him and the camera frame gestures to looks at them, giving the viewer the impression of following Muhammad’s line of sight. We see Muhammad enters Ka‘ba and view the many idols. The camera follows along as Muhammad is depicted as knocking down an idol with his stick. These camera movements are also used when Muhammad consults Hamza about the Battle of Badr, when he talks to a Meccan delegate about the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, when he turns away from a Meccan leader when they break the peace, and when he witnesses Abu Sufyan and Halid b. Walid declare their conversion to Islam. As I  have demonstrated, very often Akkad’s flm, like the ḥilye, depicts the Prophet Muhammad without showing him. In Muhammad: The Messenger of God, Majidi uses the same types of techniques that miniature portraits have traditionally employed to show Muhammad. As noted earlier, later Persianate representations of the Prophet showed his whole body, including his feet, legs, hands, arms, chest, and turban. However, they portrayed his face covered by a gold or white veil or illuminated with a faming halo around his head. Throughout the flm, Majidi uses these techniques to obscure Muhammad’s direct image, hiding his face subtly by using veils, lights, and hands.

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On the night Muhammad is frst born, his grandfather looks up to see a big star like a shiny medal in the sky. He heads home and when he approaches the house, it is full of light and pouring out of every opening. He enters the home and sees the newly born Muhammad wrapped in a white blanket, showered in bright light, with only his hands and feet visible to the viewer. In the following scene, his grandfather gives Muhammad his name outside in front of a group of Meccans. He puts his hand on the baby’s face to protect it from the sun, through which the viewer can see his whole body except for his face. As he raises the child in the air, he is illuminated by the sun in a silhouette. In a later scene, Muhammad returns to Mecca to visit his wet nurse, or milk-mother, Halima, and covers his face with his hands in order to avoid seeing victims of the plague lying on the streets. The audience can only slightly see his eyes. Majidi also used hair and a turban to cover the Prophet’s face. For example, when the young Muhammad goes to a poor fshing town, or later when he goes to a waterfall to fll his water bottle, his face is covered and obscured for the viewer. However, in both scenes the audience is able to see his body in full view except for his face. In the flm, there are many scene that employ these techniques that allow the viewer to see Muhammad’s hair, hands, feet, turban, and full body but conceal his face. Three other scenes are very similar to traditional miniature portraits and echo methods from this artistic genre. In the frst, Muhammad has a fever during a journey. His nanny lays him in a pond and puts a wet white cloth on his face in order to break the fever. This frame replicates many portraits where Muhammad’s full body is displayed but his face is covered with in white. In another scene, the Prophet slowly enters Monk Bahira’s monastery through the front doors. At the entrance, dense light from the door covers his whole head and makes a halo around his body. As he moves forward toward Bahira, light pours in from outside illuminating his back, making it look as if he is glowing. In the last scene, Muhammad’s followers gather by candle light to listen to him recite the Qur’an. They all gather side by side looking up the mountain side at Muhammad. His body is never pictured but as he starts to recite verses the crowd begins to be showered in bright light. Here, his body is visualized as pure light that totally engulfs him. Overall, throughout the flm Majidi represents the Prophet Muhammad in ways that draw on visual patterns found in traditional miniature portraits, showing hands, feet, hair, turban, and his full body but always obscure his face. It is clear that Majidi shares the same understanding about the representation of Muhammad as traditional portraiture artists. Moreover, Majidi uses exactly the same visual techniques as traditional miniature portraits, depicting Muhammad as a shiny medal and pure light. When they portrayed him as a human, they showed his full body with a veil on his face and an illuminating halo around him. Majidi inherited all of these techniques and used them frequently in his movie.

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Conclusion Through the analysis of visual patterns in two contemporary biographical flms about Muhammad, I  have tried to demonstrate that flmmakers are drawing upon diferent historical genres of prophetic representation. Shamāʾil and dalāʾil al-nubuwwa books infuenced Muslim artists and became the main source for depictions of Muhammad. The earliest paintings of the Prophet from 13th century depict him as a fully visible corporeal fgure, whose facial features are completely visible. By the 16th century, abstraction became the predominant form of prophetic representation, frequently portraying the Prophet’s face covered by a gold or white veil and faming halo around his head.49 In the 17th century, artistic conventions took shape along sectarian lines. In Sunni communities textual icons (ḥilye) became the predominant form of prophetic representation while Shi’a artists focused on visual depictions of Muhammad that were composed of veiled and luminous motifs for his visage. These two approaches can be seen in Akkad’s The Message, employing strategies similar to ḥilye, and Majidi’s Muhammad: The Messenger of God, using visual practices of traditional miniature portraiture. In The Message, Moustapha Akkad follows the ḥilye tradition which does not show the Prophet’s physical features and only uses camera movements to give his point of view. When the Prophet needs to speak, one of his companions voices his sentiments as if he ordered him to inform the others. In this way, Muhammad’s personal identity is embodied through the words just like the ḥilye. In Muhammad: The Messenger of God, Majid Majidi shows Muhammad’s fgure, extremities, hair, or turban but like traditional miniature portraits his face is kept hidden from view. Majidi imitates many of the same techniques as miniature portraits to cover Muhammad’s face, such as using a veil, light, curtain, hand, or hair. He even reproduces traditional ways of depicting the Prophet by showing him as a faming disk or as pure light. Overall, we fnd that contemporary flmmakers are relying on a vast and varied tradition of Islamic visual culture to address new challenges and heightened sensitivities to the representation of Muhammad. They have creatively adapted long-established artistic strategies into a new medium of cinema in order to picture the Prophet without showing him.

Notes 1 Fitzroy Morrissey, “An Introduction to ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Jīlī’s Commentary on the ‘Futūḥāt’,” The Maghreb Review 41, no. 4 (2016): 499–526. 2 Annemarie Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). 3 al-Tirmidhi, Shamāʾil al-Muhammadiyyah: A Commentary on the Depiction of Prophet Muhammad (Birmingham: Dar al-Arqam Publishing, 2015), 22.

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4 M. Yaşar Kandemir, “Şemail,” Diyanet Islam Ansiklopedisi XXXVIII (2010): 497, www.islamansiklopedisi.info/dia/ayrmetin.php?idno=380497&idno2= c380303#1; M. Yaşar Kandemir, “eş-Şemâilü’n-Nebeviyye,” Diyanet Islam Ansiklopedisi XXXVIII (2010): 500, www.islamansiklopedisi.info/dia/ayrmetin. php?idno=380500&idno2=c380304#1. 5 al-Tirmidhi, The Characteristics of Prophet Muhammed, trans. Bahaa Addiin Ibrahim Ahmed Shalaby (Mansoura: Dar Al Manarah Publication, 2003), 3–8. 6 M. Yaşar Kandemir, “Şemail,” Diyanet Islam Ansiklopedisi XXXVIII (2010): 498–499, www.islamansiklopedisi.info/dia/ayrmetin.php?idno=380497&idno 2=c380303#1. 7 Christiane Gruber, “Between Logos (Kalima) and Light (Nur): Representations of the Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Painting,” Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World XXVI (2009): 235. 8 Zeren Tanındı, Siyer-i Nebî, Islam Tasvir Sanatında Hz. Muhammed’in Hayatı (İstanbul: Hürriyet Vakfı Yayınları, 1984), 9; F. Banu Mahir, “Minyatür,” Diyanet Islam Ansiklopedisi XXX (2005): 118, www.islamansiklopedisi.info/ index.php?klme=minyat%C3%BCr. 9 Gruber, “Between Logos (Kalima) and Light (Nur),” 234. 10 Christiane Gruber, “Images of the Prophet Muhammad In and Out of Modernity: The Curious Case of a 2008 Mural in Tehran,” in Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East, eds. Christiane Gruber and Sune Haugbolle (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), 20. 11 Freek L. Bakker, The Challenge of the Silver Screen, An Analysis of the Cinematic Portraits of Jesus, Rama, Buddha and Muhammad (Boston: Brill Publication, 2009), 207. 12 Gruber, “Between Logos (Kalima) and Light (Nur),” 236–239. 13 T.W. Arnold, “An Indian Picture of Muhammad and His Companions,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs XXXIV, no. 195 (1919): 250. 14 Abolala Soudavar, Art of the Persian Courts: Selections from the Art and History Trust Collection (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 332. 15 Bakker, The Challenge of the Silver Screen, 209. 16 Gruber, “Between Logos (Kalima) and Light (Nur),” 240–246. 17 Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger, 123–143. 18 Gruber, “Images of the Prophet Muhammad In and Out of Modernity.” 19 Christiane Gruber, The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019), 18. 20 Christiane Gruber, “Kur’an-ı Kerîm Hz: Muhammed’in resmini yapmayı yasaklamaz.” T24 (2015), http://t24.com.tr/k24/yazi/islamveresim,187. 21 Oleg Grabar, “The Story of Portraits of the Prophet Muhammad,” Studia Islamica (2003): 33–34; Mustafa Uzun, “Hilye,” Diyanet Islam Ansiklopedisi XVIII (1998): 47, www.islamansiklopedisi.info/dia/ayrmetin.php?idno=180044&idno 2=c180021#2. 22 Christiane Gruber, “Images,” in Muhammad in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia of the Prophet of God (Oxford: ABC Clio Publications, 2014), 292. 23 Grabar, “The Story of Portraits of the Prophet Muhammad,” 35; Bakker, The Challenge of the Silver Screen, 209. 24 Gruber, “Images of the Prophet Muhammad In and Out of Modernity,” 22. 25 Christiane Gruber, “Prophetic Products: Muhammad in Contemporary Iranian Visual Culture,” The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief (2016): 1–35. 26 Bilal Yorulmaz, Sinema ve Din Egitimi (İstanbul: DEM Yayınları, 2016), 55. 27 Bilal Yorulmaz, “The Early Life of Cinema in Turkey: Religious, Moral, and Social Problems Arising Between 1896–1923 and Solutions in the Light of the Ottoman Archive Documents,” Journal of Islamic Research (2012): 186.

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28 Viola Shafk, Arab Cinema, History and Cultural Identity (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1998), 2. 29 ibid., 49. 30 Freek L. Bakker, “The Image of Muhammad in ‘The Message’, the First and Only Feature Film About the Prophet of Islam,” Islam and Christian – Muslim Relations XVII (2006): 78. 31 R.H. Greene, “40  Years On, a Controversial Film on Islam’s Origins Is Now a Classic.” www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/08/07/485234999/40-years-ona-controversial-flm-on-islams-origins-is-now-a-classic. 32 Ika Dewi Oktavianingrum, “Martyrdom of Prophet’s Uncle in the Message Movıe Dırected by Moustapha Akkad (1976): An Indıvıdual Psychologıcal Approach.” (M.A. Dissertation, Muhammadiyah University of Surakarta, 2011), 2. 33 Kevin Smets, “Connecting Islam and Film Culture: The Reception of the Message (Ar Risalah) Among the Moroccan Diaspora,” Journal of Audience and Reception Studies IX (2012): 76. 34 Greene, “40 Years On”; Bakker, “The Image of Muhammad,” 78. 35 Bakker, “The Image of Muhammad,” 78; Oktavianingrum, “Martyrdom of Prophet’s Uncle,” 6; Greene, “40 Years On.” 36 Bakker, “The Image of Muhammad,” 78. 37 Oktavianingrum, “Martyrdom of Prophet’s Uncle,” 4. 38 Anton Karl Kozlovic, “Islam, Muslims and Arabs in the Popular Hollywood Cinema,” Comparative Islamic Studies (2007): 217. 39 The Message, www.imdb.com/title/tt0074896/releaseinfo?ref_=tt_ov_inf. 40 Bakker, “The Image of Muhammad,” 88. 41 Remarks from Majid Majidi at workshop on Biography and Visuality at Meridyen Foundation, April 15, 2013. 42 Carmel Kilkenny, “Montreal World Film Festival 39th Edition Opening with ‘Muhammad: Messenger of God’,” Radio Canada International, www.rcinet. ca/en/2015/08/13/montreal-world-film-festival-39th-edition-opening-withmuhammad-messenger-of-god/. 43 Phil Hoad, “Muhammad Biopic Director Calls for More Movies About the  Prophet’s Life,” The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/flm/2015/aug/28/ muhammad-biopic-director-calls-for-more-movies-about-the-prophets-life. 44 Saeed Kamali Dehghan, “Iranian Film on Prophet Muhammad Set for Premiere,” The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/30/iranian-flmprophet-muhammad-premiere. 45 Frederick J. Brown, “Iranian Biopic on Prophet Muhammad Sparks Anger,” France 24, www.france24.com/en/20150825-iranian-epic-cinema-movie-prophetmuhammad-comes-under-fre-majidi. 46 Ahmed Fouad, “Is This the Next Movie to Be Banned by Egypt?” Al-Monitor, www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/09/egypt-al-azhar-ban-iran-movieprophet.html. 47 Ben Child, “Indian Clerics Issue Fatwa Against Makers of Muhammad: The Messenger of God,” The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/flm/2015/sep/14/ fatwa-muhammad-the-messenger-of-god-majid-majidi-ar-rahman. 48 “Majid Majidi Criticizes Saudi Arabia and Al-Azhar A Report on Interview of Majid Majidi with Anadolu News Agency,” Islamic Development Organization, http://ido.ir/en/pages/?id=624. 49 Gruber, “Images of the Prophet Muhammad In and Out of Modernity,” 20.

Part IV

New directions

10 “I Can Take Your Eyes” Re-envisioning religion and gender in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night Megan Goodwin A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Dokhtari dar shab tanhā be khāne miravad, 2014) is your basic Iranian Vampire Western (Vice 2014). Boy steals cat from neighbor’s yard for reasons undisclosed. Pimp steals Boy’s car to settle Boy’s father’s heroin debts. Vampire Girl kills pimp for genderbased vengeance, also dinner. Boy steals pimp’s drugs with intent to distribute. Girl wheels Boy, high on his own supply, home on her skateboard. Boy gives up on his junkie father, hurls a brick of heroin at his head, and kicks him and the cat out. Boy’s father forces sex worker to shoot up while cat looks on. Vampire Girl kills Boy’s father for gender-based vengeance, also dinner; takes cat home with her. Boy fnds father’s body dumped on street, decides to get out of Bad City, begs Girl to leave with him. Cat wanders out of Girl’s bedroom. Boy realizes Girl was involved in his father’s death, takes her (and the cat) with him anyway. David Lynch highway shot.1 Fin. It’s hard to know what to make of this flm. Girl Walks Home Alone is a gorgeous music video with pacing problems.2 It’s a love story with no kissing, but which includes romantic impromptu DIY ear-piercing. The flm’s ageless protagonist is obsessed with bleeding edge pop music that sounds nostalgic for the 1980s.3 The writer/director and lead actor are both women, and the eponymous Girl feeds only on men, but it is not a feminist flm. The Girl wears a chador, but there is no mention of Islam or any specifc religious tradition in the flm. It’s an American flm whose actors speak only in Farsi. It’s an Iranian story with Iranian characters flmed outside Bakersfeld, California. Amirpour has insisted that the flm’s setting is “not Iran, it’s like a fairytale world, it’s universal. It’s like any town where there’s corruption and there’s secrets and there’s loneliness and people that got dealt a shit hand.” The Girl lives in Bad City, something like an imaginary Tehrangeles suburb planned by Frank Miller. The town’s name is almost certainly an allusion to Miller’s monochromatic Sin City; Amirpour is an avowed fan of serial art and is two volumes into a planned six-volume series of graphic novels that explore the Girl’s backstory. The place of religion in Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is elusive, at once everywhere and nowhere. The movie features no (professed) Muslims,

140 Megan Goodwin notable for a flm set in a fctionalized Iran. No character mentions Muslim identities, practices, or beliefs. There are no mosques in Bad City; public spaces are bleak and unmarked by Persian calligraphy. Given the marked Iranian infuences throughout the flm, Islam is conspicuous in its near-absence. There are two brief allusions to Iran’s Islamic commitments, and the frst is admittedly a bit of a stretch. At the end of the flm, we glimpse the license plate for Arash’s beloved 1957 Thunderbird. The plate, formatted like an Iranian license plate, reads “BAD CITY 67b433.” 67b433 is the hex color code for green, a color strongly associated with Islam.4 If Amirpour were slightly less geeky, we could probably write this of as coincidence. As it stands, I’m inclined to read the plate as a nod to Bad City’s Islamicate ambiance. The only explicit reference to religion occurs during an exchange between Atti, the sex worker, and the Girl, in which Atti asks if the Girl has been watching her. When the Girl admits she has, Atti asks if the Girl is “religious or something.” She demurs. Her chador seems to be more a nod to vampire aesthetics than to piety – its appeal is as a disguise not as devotional practice (Waste 2015).5 Nevertheless, the Girl’s chador has rendered her conspicuous. Bad City itself watches the Girl, even as she watches its inhabitants, stalking, attacking, or protecting them by turns. In a stunning commentary on the hypervisibility of covering women’s bodies, even the walls are watching the Girl. Early in the flm, we see her leaving a grocery store, fanked by a poster that reads “Is this you? If so, call this number now.”6 The Girl is the only character dressed in chador; we may assume that the poster refers to her and is asking for leads as to her whereabouts – though there is no explanation provided for this request. The Girl leaves the grocery store and returns to her own room. On the walls, a poster of Margaret Atwood, designed to look like the cover of Madonna’s frst album, echoes this suggestion of surveillance. Atwood is of course best known for her Handmaid’s Tale, in which a totalitarian theocracy rigidly monitors and controls women’s bodies. We might read this as a critique of American gender politics, or Iranian, or both. Though writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour has been candid about her distaste for Iran, describing the country as “a mess. Medieval. Sufocating,” she does not aford Western viewers an opportunity to disdain Islam or its “treatment” of women (Leigh 2015).7 The Girl dons a chador, true, but the garment functions as a disguise and an allusion: when she skates down the street, she is transformed, without any special efects, into a winged creature of the night. This image at once captures the defance of both the flm’s anti-heroine and its director, who lean into the Girl’s monstrosity. Girl Walks Home Alone at Night resists American cultural imperatives for Muslims to present themselves as good citizens and for women’s agency to present itself as resistance – as Western feminism.

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This is not a feminist flm. Its delight in threatening and murdering men might qualify it as a misandrist fantasy, but symbolic castrations do not a feminist flm make. It is not a feminist flm because it does not advocate for the political, fnancial, and social equality of people of all genders. And it is not a feminist flm if we may judge the story by the evaluations of its writer/ director, Ana Lily Amirpour, and its lead actor, Sheila Vand. Vand was blunt on this point. She told Salon that “we didn’t set out to make a feminist movie . . . the lead is a female who happens to be a badass. But is that all it takes to be feminist? I don’t know. It’s certainly not about being feminist, but it certainly follows some of the requirements,” (Silman 2014). [In an interview with The Guardian, Amirpour called Lars von Trier – director of such graphic flms as Nymphomaniac and The Antichrist  – “the biggest feminist,” which suggests Amirpour’s defnition of feminism might be slightly left of center (Leigh 2015).] When the New Republic asked if she intended the flm to have “feminist themes,” Amirpour demurred, asking the interviewer if she interpreted the flm as feminist. When the interviewer said she had, Amirpour countered, “that probably says more about you than it does about me. A flm is like a mirror,” (Breger 2014). Girl Walks Home Alone may not be a feminist flm, but feminists’ reception of the flm clearly mirrors certain desires (Shepherd 2014; Barcella 2014; Derr 2015). A Google search for “feminist Iranian vampire movie” results in over two hundred thousand hits, most for Girl Walks Home Alone. Our collective longing to see an Iranian feminist vampire story might be a form of neo-Orientalism, in which Western audiences are still reveling in fantasies of “the East” – except now we expect them to refect ourselves, our commitments, our desires, back to us. Girl, like a good vampire, will not cast this refection. Western feminists’ desire to see Girl Walks Home Alone in their own image is perhaps understandable. Linda Willliams’ “When the Woman Looks” famously argues that women see ourselves in the monster (1984). Horror flms also create space for women’s hero(in)ic agency and for audience identifcation with a female protagonist, as Carol Clover insists in her unforgettably titled Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (2015).8 Horror movies are a genre in which “badass” women, to use Vand’s phrase, make it out alive (thus Clover’s famous trope, the Final Girl). Twenty-frst-century American audiences, it seems, are eager to elide women’s violent agency with feminism. Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety both observes and insightfully disrupts the impulse to identify Muslim women’s agency as feminism (2005). She highlights the cultural imperialism at work in collapsing agency with resistance. Mahmood’s critique suggests that we need to fnd a new lens for this flm. Amirpour’s work might not be feminist but that might not be a bad thing. Girl Walks Home Alone literally fips the script on how we see “women of cover.”9

142 Megan Goodwin The flm deliberately disrupts the gaze: it refects neither heterosexual male desire nor Western fantasies of “good Muslims.” With regard to heterosexual male desire: there are several brief scenes in which the camera’s point of view seems to encourage the sexual objectifcation of women, only to punish the actor and audience soon after. Arash, the Girl’s love interest, watches a wealthy debutante dance at a party. Arash’s father, Hossein, commands Atti the sex worker to dance for him. Neither of these scenes ends well for the men. Arash is rebufed and humiliated; the Girl murders and feeds on Hossein, dumping his body in the street. The most overt sexualization of a female character occurs when the camera lingers closely on the Girl as Saeed, the pimp, caresses her face. (His neck reads SEX in all capital letters, lest you misinterpret his intent.) He suggestively traces her bottom lip with his index fnger, opens her mouth with his thumb . . . and startles as her vampiric incisors descend. Despite the Girl’s fangs, Saeed allows her to sensuously slip his index fnger in and out of her mouth, simulating fellatio. This exchange ends in literal dismemberment and symbolic castration: the Girl, mouth bloody, traces a screaming Saeed’s mouth with the fnger she bit from his hand. The camera viscerally disciplines the audience for having objectifed the Girl. Indeed, all acts of penetration in this flm – even the consensual one, in which Arash pierces the Girl’s ear at her request – end in bloodshed. In light of these examples, it’s fair to say Amirpour’s flm disciplines and redirects the audience away from what flm theorist Laura Mulvey famously termed the male gaze.10 Amirpour does not merely discipline heterosexual male desire; she confounds it. A gender-ambiguous character haunts the peripheries of Bad City and the narrative. They are never formally introduced or referred to by name, but the credits identify them as Rockabilly. There is no indication of Rockabilly’s sexual orientation in the flm, though their appearance does resemble Iranian men preparing for sexual reassignment surgery. (While Iran does not recognize homosexuality as a condition of possibility, the state subsidizes sexual reassignment surgery.11) Girl Walks Home Alone includes an extended non sequitur sequence in which Rockabilly dances with a balloon in an abandoned public square. As journalist Sophie Mayer notes, this scene is so out of place, so deliberately Lynchian, as to suggest the gender diference Rockabilly embodies should unsettle the viewer (2015). This is a curious and perhaps unintentionally unkind presentation of gay and/or trans identity by Amirpour, who identifes this character as the flm’s only overt political actor. “If there’s one political thing [in the movie], it’s not the chador,” Amirpour told Wired. “It’s Rockabilly, because it’s not OK to be gay in Iran” (Watercutter 2014). But Rockabilly reads as disjointed, bizarre, and out of time, not political. While the camerawork confounds compulsory heterosexual desire, Amirpour’s vampire performs an unwavering heterosexuality and presents as cisgender – a departure from the western vampire’s queer literary genealogy.12 Girl Walks Home Alone at Night does little to critique gender as an oppressive social construct – again, this is

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not a feminist flm – but does resist Orientalist impulses toward fetishizing women who cover. Girl likewise resists Western fantasies of “good Muslims.” Mahmood Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror notes the emergence of “good” and “bad” Muslim tropes in American political discourse following September 11th, 2001 (Mamdani 2005, 15, 23). In George W. Bush’s war on terror, Mamdani argues, all Muslims were presumed bad until proven otherwise. Muslims proved themselves good by disavowing and supporting the United States in their assault on “bad Muslims” (i.e., fundamentalist terrorists) and by espousing western values. Interestingly, Sheila Vand played just such a “good Muslim” in the 2012 Academy Award winning flm Argo; as Sahar, housekeeper for the Canadian ambassador, she lies to Iranian military personnel to protect fugitive American embassy workers during the 1979 revolution. Not so in Amirpour’s flm. There are no good Muslims in Bad City, and its nights are flled with monsters. Girl Walks Home Alone at Night rejects the “good Muslim” trope by afording its main character her monstrosity. Muslims have long been monstrous to western minds, as Sophia Arjana reminds us. Arjana engages Stoker’s Dracula and other Orientalist blood-suckers at length in her Muslims in the Western Imagination (2015, 84–132). Arjana traces the “monstrifcation” of Muslims in popular Western culture to an Orientalist exoticization of Muslims as timeless, hypersexualized, and essentially foreign.13 In other words: Muslims make great vampires. Amirpour plays on the blood-sucking Muslim trope when Arash – the Persian James Dean who becomes the Girl’s love interest – dresses as Dracula for a costume party at which he is dealing (Tyler 2015). Amirpour makes the Muslim-monster trope work for her. This Girl who walks home alone at night is not vulnerable or weak. She is not in need of saving. Indeed, Amirpour afords her Girl the luxury of rage. We see her dismember Saeed, the pimp, after he mistreats and robs Atti, the sex worker. She murders and eats Hossein, her love interest’s father, for likewise mistreating Atti. But though all her victims are male, they are not all bad men. One is a nameless man living rough on the mean streets of Bad City. The other is a small boy, a street urchin of perhaps nine. In what is arguably the flm’s most haunting scene, the Girl stalks the urchin down a deserted street.14 She demands to know if he is a good boy. When he claims he is, she insists he not lie to her. “I can take your eyes out of your skull and give them to dogs to eat. Till the end of your life, I’ll be watching you. Understand?” she hisses. “Be a good boy,” she warns him. And then she steals his skateboard. The moral ambiguity of this moment is striking; we are haunted by the threat of constant vampiric surveillance. Indeed, the Girl is watching everyone at every moment in this flm. But she is not alone in this. The characters are all watching each other across physical and emotional distances – they

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dance for each other, spy on one another, long for contact but seldom touch. (The chief exceptions being physical violence or the dragging of dead bodies to the unremarked-upon corpse pit at the edge of town.) Islamicist Michael Pregill has suggested that Bad City’s corpse pit is “an allusion to totalitarian states like Iran where people get disappeared.  .  .  . How can we not think of the hundreds if not thousands of people who were jailed and disappeared during the 2011 demonstrations?” (2016). The corpse pit, then, is perhaps a third place in which the Islamic Republic of Iran, if not Islam itself, irrupts through Bad City, suggesting surveillance and the violent, often fatal consequences of resistance. But the Girl resists and evades both surveillance and consequence, acting according to her own inaccessible motivations. When she cautions Arash that she’s bad – “I’ve done bad things. You don’t know the things I’ve done” – we believe her. But she also rescues Atti from Arash’s violent father and gives her the resources to leave town. She seems to genuinely care for Arash, uprooting her life at a moment’s notice when he begs her to leave with him. The Girl faces no consequences for her actions, even upon Arash’s realization that the Girl has killed his father. In these moments – her righteous vengeance, her petty thefts, her compassion, her loneliness and longing, her lack of conscience and accountability – the Girl is neither good nor bad. She is neither an overt political statement nor a heroine. She is, however, most assuredly an agent in her own right, unconstrained by government, religion, conventional morality, or cultural mores. Amirpour’s Girl will not be your mirror: at every turn, she resists both facile stereotypes of Muslim women and attempts to map Western feminism onto non-Western agents. American media and political discourse frequently deny Muslims the luxury of individualism; as Dohra Amad asserts, Muslims are perceived as “singular and representative,” (Ahmad 2009, 127). Any one Muslim in the public eye too often stands in for all Muslims everywhere. Amirpour’s Girl, by contrast, is merely herself. She walks home alone at night, and in doing so, presents trenchant commentary on both the hypervisibility and the perceived vulnerability of women of cover. Ultimately, then, the Girl’s threat to the young boy is the flm’s promise to its audience: I can take your eyes, redirect your gaze, force you to look diferently at Muslim women (or women in Muslim-majority countries, or perhaps just women, full stop).

Notes 1 As Amirpour says, “David Lynch is magic,” (Waste 2015). 2 A number of reviewers have commented on the length and slow pacing of the flm. I remain undecided as to whether the pace of the flm is an ingénue director’s indulging a confessed over-fondness of David Lynch, Sergio Leone, and Jim Jarmusch, or a deliberate and disciplined homage to Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979). Herzog’s flm overlays German band Popol Vuh’s

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droning, repetitive score onto sustained shots of clouds moving over the sun to emphasize the relentless, banal despair and detachment of immortality. The inclusion of slow-paced extended shots of the setting sun, set as they are to grating music uncharacteristic of Girl, incline me toward the latter reading. “Death,” a song by the band White Lies, is a particularly trenchant example of the genre. As Amirpour says, “It has this vintage nostalgia, it’s a new song but it has this feeling of synth-pop from the 80s. It just felt like the feeling of falling in love but in an adolescent way, it has a high school love feeling, it’s this innocent John Hughes kind of feeling,” (Sélavy 2015). I am indebted to Dr. Kathleen Foody of the College of Charleston for this observation and translation. The chador’s function for the eponymous Girl – disguise, not devotion – mirrors Amirpour’s own experience covering in Tehran in 2003. She wore the chador, but was still marked as an outsider, chided by older Iranian women in public. But covering made Amirpour feel “badass,” and “like a bat.” Thus was her Iranian vampire born. (Leigh 2015). My thanks for Dr. Foody for this translation as well. On the hypervisibility of Muslim women, see Hoodfar 1992. On the problematics of the perceived helplessness of or Western concern for Muslim women, see Abu-Lughod 2013. On the impact of Clover’s Final Girl analysis, see also Totaro 2002. On October  11, 2001, George W. Bush gave a press conference in which he referred to American Muslim women as “women of cover.” Bush applauded American Christian and Jewish women for showing Muslims “true friendship and support” by going shopping with them. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey famously theorizes that the camera, as “male gaze,” “projects its phantasy onto the female fgure,” (2009, 19). On state-subsidized sexual reassignment surgery in Iran, see Najmabadi 2008. As Halberstam (1993) notes, the western vampire trope trades on gender ambiguity and sexual voracity. This hunger and fuidity is observable in Le Fanu’s predatory lesbian Carmilla, Rice’s sexual omnivorous Lestat, and most recently in Lindqvist’s gender ambivalent Eli in Låt Den Rätte Komma In (Let the Right One In). Halberstam has also suggested that the vampire can be read as both Jewish and queer (1993). Vand’s movements are distinctly and deliberately serpentine and feline: she and Amirpour watched videos of cobras and cats striking as part of the Girl’s characterizations (Moreno 2014).

References Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2013. Do Muslim Women Need Saving?  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ahmad, Dohra. 2009. “Not Yet Beyond the Veil: Muslim Women in American Popular Culture.” Social Text 27: 105–131. Arjana, Sophia. 2015. Muslims in the Western Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Barcella, Laura. 2014. “The Feminist Vampire Movie That Teaches ‘Bad Men’ a Gory Lesson.”  Jezebel,  November  25, 2014. http://jezebel.com/the-feministvampire-movie-that-teaches-bad-men-a-gory-1662788544. Breger, Esther. 2014. “We Like Vampires Because We Hate Death.” New Republic, November  24, 2014. https://newrepublic.com/article/120376/interview-analily-amirpour-director-iranian-vampire-movie.

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Bush, George W. 2001. “Bush on State of War.” Washington Post, October 11, 2001. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bush_ text101101.html. Clover, Carol. 2015. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Derr, Holly L. 2015. “A  Feminist Guide to Horror Movies, Part 7: New Beginnings.”  Ms. Blog,  October  27, 2015. http://msmagazine.com/blog/2015/10/27/ a-feminist-guide-to-horror-movies-part-7-new-beginnings/. Halberstam, Judith. 1993. “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’.” Victorian Studies 36: 333–352. Hoodfar, Homa. 1992–1993. “The Veil in Their Minds and on Our Heads: The Persistence of Colonial Images of Muslim Women.” Resources for Feminist Research no. 22: 5–18. Leigh, Danny. 2015. “The Skateboarding Iranian Vampire Diaries.” The Guardian, May  7, 2015. www.theguardian.com/flm/2015/may/07/skateboarding-iranianvampire-ana-lily-amirpour-feminism-porn-girl-walks-home-alone-at-night. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2005. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York: Harmony Books. Mayer, Sophie. 2015. “Film of the Week: ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’.” Sight & Sound,  May  22, 2015. www.bf.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/ reviews-recommendations/flm-week-girl-walks-home-alone-night. Moreno, Abeni. 2014. “Vampires, Skateboards and Autonomy:  ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’.” Ms. Blog, November 27, 2014. http://msmagazine.com/ blog/2014/11/27/vampires-skateboards-and-autonomy-a-girl-walks-home-aloneat-night/. Mulvey, Laura. 2009. Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Najmabadi, Afsaneh. 2008. “Transing and Transpassing Across Sex-Gender Walls in Iran.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36: 23–42. Pregill, Michael. 2016. Personal correspondence. Sélavy, Virginie. 2015. “A  Girl Walks Home Alone at Night: Interview with Ana Lily Amirpour.”  Electric Sheep,  May  19, 2015. www.electricsheepmagazine. co.uk/features/2015/05/19/a-girl-walks-home-alone-at-night-interview-with-analily-amirpour/. Shepherd, Julianne Escobedo. 2014. “Watch the Trailer for the First-Ever Iranian Feminist Vampire Western.” Jezebel, October  27, 2014. http://jezebel.com/ watch-the-trailer-for-the-frst-ever-iranian-feminist-v-1651418042. Silman, Anna. 2014. “Sheila Vand: ‘This Is Not a Movie About Being Feminist.” Salon, December 12, 2014. www.salon.com/2014/12/12/sheila_vand_this_is_not_ a_movie_about_being_feminist/. Totaro, Donato. 2002. “The Final Girl: A Few Thoughts on Feminism and Horror.” Ofscreen 6, no. 1 (January). http://ofscreen.com/view/feminism_and_horror. Tyler, Kieron. 2015. “Style Over Substance in the Supposed ‘First Iranian Vampire Western’.” The Arts Desk,  May  21, 2015. www.theartsdesk.com/flm/ girl-walks-home-alone-night. Vice Media. 2014. “A  Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” http://flms.vice.com/ a-girl-walks-home. Accessed 4 January 2018.

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Waste Magazine. 2015. “A  Girl Walks Home Alone at Night: An Interview with Ana Lily Amirpour.” https://web.archive.org/web/20160817022246; http://wastemagazine.com/post/98311332325/a-girl-walks-home-alone-at-night-an-interview. Accessed 4 January 2018. Watercutter, Angela. 2014. “Meet the Woman Who Directed the World’s Only Iranian Vampire Western.”  Wired,  February  5, 2014. www.wired.com/2014/02/ girl-walks-home-alone-at-night/. Williams, Linda. 1984. “When the Woman Looks.” In Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Mary Anne Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, 561–577. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

11 Negotiating borders, gender, and identity A transnational feminist study of an Iranian documentary Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi Introduction A glance at the history and the politics of cinematic image production in Iran reveals the situatedness of this visual practice within a multicultural context through which a contested national identity comes to exist. For instance, the frst documentary images of Iranian cinema, showing Moẓafar al-Dīn Shah Qajar, the king of Iran (r. 1313–1324/1896–1907), in Ostend, Belgium in 1900, were captured by the European camera of Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkasbashi, the court photographer. These images thus mark the frst representations of Iranians on the screen within a transnational context that also nod to the increasing diversity of Iranian society itself in the Qajar era. After the turn of the 20th century, Iran, a semi-large empire under the rule of the Qajar king, was home to diverse communities, such as “Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, and Russian,” many religions, such as Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Judaism, and many ethnicities, such as Lor, Turk, Kurd, Baluch, and Arab. However, while since the advent of cinema in Iran both spatial and cinematic sites have pointed to a social and artistic “cosmopolitan” experience,1 nonetheless this experience is in part shaped through discourses on nationalism that necessitate the progress of the nation and the construction of its national identity. In particular, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the religious and anti-imperialist discourses have required Iranian cinema not only to purify its vision and practice from the Western “corruption” of pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema,2 but also to promote a unifed notion of Islamic community (Ummah) regardless of Iran’s ethnic, religious, and cultural diversities.3 Yet the post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, as this chapter emphasizes, has creatively challenged this homogenous perception of “Iranian nation.” Furthermore, the reception of post-revolutionary Iranian flms at international flm festivals under the banner of “Iranian national cinema” not only hints toward the idea of nation as a fxed, concrete entity, but also perpetuates the notion of national cinema as a recognizable set of cinematic tropes and meanings.4 Challenging this stable notion of national cinema, Andrew Higson asserts, “The process of nationalist myth-making is not simply an

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insidious (or celebratory) work of ideological production, but is also at the same time a means of setting one body of images and values against another, which will very often threaten to overwhelm the frst. . . . Histories of national cinema can only therefore really be understood as histories of crisis and confict, of resistance and negotiation.”5 It is through the consideration of these conficts and resistances that this chapter aims to situate its transnational feminist argument underlining the dynamic interaction and contestation of both the global and national through cinematic (and media) images. This chapter, therefore, uses cinematic medium to foreground the body of an Afghan woman within the context of Iranian society through a transnational feminist study of acclaimed documentary Sonita (2015), directed by Iranian woman documentarian Rokhsareh Ghaem-Maghami. In doing so, it acknowledges the signifcance of challenging both the reductive discourses of Western media regarding the notion of “Muslim women” that confate substantial diferences in the lives of these women in various Muslim-majority countries and the coherence and fxity of “Iranian nation.” Post-revolutionary Iranian flms have investigated and challenged the stable and homogenous notion of Iranian nation. Minoo Moallem writes, “In its obligation to create the nation visually, Iranian cinema has also participated in the undoing of the nation by challenging the idea of Islamic ummat [sic] as unifed and homogenous, disturbing the revolutionary harmony of the nation of mostaz’afan [the oppressed] in its war against the estekbar-e jahani (world powers).”6 In the same line of observation, Michelle Langford distinguishes “a multilayered politics of language and location,”7 used by post-revolutionary Iranian flmmakers, as a way to represent “the cultural diversity of their nation” and “to challenge and usurp the long-held myth of a homogenous Iranian identity.”8 In this regard, the fgures of Afghan refugees and immigrants have been a recurrent theme in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, depicted in both fction and documentary flms, such as Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The Cyclist (Bicycleran, 1987) and The Afghan Alphabet (Alefbay-e Afghan, 2002), Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (Ta’m-e guilass, 1997), Majid Majidi’s Baran (2001), Abolfazl Jalili’s Delbaran (2001), Mehrdad Farid’s Afghan Children (2002), and Bahman Kiarostami’s Exodus (2019). However, a few flmic practices have tackled the issues of Afghan refugees in Iran from a transnational gender perspective and in a dialogical relation between Afghan and Iranian women.9 What then can a transnational feminist flm studies approach ofer to cross-cultural women’s alliances while at the same time acknowledging the sociopolitical and gender specifcities of each country? Anneeth Kaur Hundle, Loana Szeman, and Joanna Pares Hoare explain, “Transnational feminisms extend postcolonial feminist criticism to focus on the situations of women in multiple geographic contexts in feminist theories and activist practice, through the decentering of both national and imperialist/neocolonial power structures.”10 Inspired by this observation, this chapter employs a transnational feminist flm studies lens

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to analyze the documentary Sonita by focusing on two major goals. First, to examine multiple layers of gendered negotiation presented in the documentary without implying homogenous oppressions and resistances regarding both Afghan and Iranian women. Second, to showcase the connectivity and intersectionality of these women’s modes of resistances in regard to both Afghan and Iranian contexts as they challenge “national and imperialist/neocolonial power structures.” As Chandra Talpade Mohanty asserts, “It is only by understanding the contradictions inherent in women’s location within various structures that efective political [and feminist] action and challenges can be devised.”11 This chapter thus analyzes crucial concepts of mobility, border crossing, displacement, and national identity in Sonita through the prism of transnational feminist flm studies to show that transcultural and globalized fows of images and bodies do not occur within equal and symmetrical settings, but they are highly gendered and racialized.

Immigration, identity, and the places in between The documentary Sonita centers on an undocumented Afghan female refugee, named Sonita, who lives in Tehran with her sister and her niece. A  viewer learns early in the flm that two brothers of Sonita also live in Iran. The settlement of Afghans in Iran is not something new and as Fariba Adelkhah and Zuzanna Olszewska write, “Citizens of Afghanistan had been visiting Iran as migrant workers, pilgrims or merchants long before the period of confict that began in 1978,”12 inducting a Marxist government through a coup d’état. However, a consistent set of national and political upheavals since 1978 including the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Afghan Civil War (1992–1996), the ruling of Taliban, and the US-led “War on Terror” mobilized a large number of Afghans from Afghanistan to Iran, a country with linguistic and religious proximities, and other neighboring countries.13 Sonita and some of her family members moved to Iran during the Taliban regime. While the Iranian government has provided some facilities to ease the Afghans’ life in Iran, such as “work permits, access to education, health care and reasonably stable residency permits,”14 nonetheless the accessibility and availability of social welfare have remained highly restrictive for Afghan refugees, especially those illegal and undocumented ones such as Sonita, who due to her undocumented residential status cannot have access to ofcial education system. This paradoxical approach, welcoming yet marginalizing, in the rhetoric and practice of Iranian society has made Afghan refugees, in the words of Zuzanna Olszewska, “an absent presence: living alongside Iranians, yet strangely invisible.”15 Sonita attends a non-proft organization, called the Society for Protection of Working and Street Children, and uses various classes and resources ofered by this center. Yet the socio-economic disparity that she, her sister, and her niece face becomes apparent early in the flm. They live in a rented house, soon to be evicted, in one of the

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lower-class districts of Tehran. When Sonita is urged by her sister to go out and look for a place, the particularities of her marginality come to the fore. At a real-estate ofce, a man asks Sonita whether she is an Afghan and what residential status she has. Upon learning about her undocumented status, the man asserts, “You need at least a residential card or an Iranian guarantor. Otherwise, we cannot provide you with housing.” This scene refects the socio-economic and legal hierarchies of Iranian society underlining the challenges Afghans face in navigating these hierarchical spaces. Sonita wants to become a rapper and to use music as a way of artistic and sociocultural expression through which she aims both to question women’s issues in Afghanistan, especially in regard to the tradition of child marriage, and to investigate the liminality of her national identity as an Afghan refugee in Iran. Inspired by the stories of Afghan girls at the nonproft center, some of whom are going to be “sold” as young brides, and later by her own personal struggle regarding the bride sale, Sonita decides to mobilize Afghan women and their families against this tradition through her music. However, the possibility of her goal seems contested as since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, women are not allowed solo singing in the public.16 Here, the channeling of a specifc sociocultural problem pertinent to Afghanistan through musical expression, fnds its challenging momentum in the gender politics of the host country. While Sonita tirelessly continues to meet with various musicians and producers, the gendered limitations and economic imperatives of producing music in Iran relegate her passion to an imaginary space. Sonita maintains a scrapbook regarding her dreams. In fact, the flm begins by highlighting this in-between mode of living: Sonita, while trimming the edges of a picture that shows a large crowd of excited audiences in a concert hall, says, “I want the concert I’m performing in to have as many as people; I  want them to be excited like this.” She then sticks her own photo on the image of Rihanna, the popular American singer, and asserts, “And this is me!” In creating this imaginary future against the backdrop of a traumatic past and a difcult present, Sonita’s cultural identity, in Stuart Hall’s words, becomes “a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being.’ It belongs to the future as much as to the past.”17 Furthermore, this state of cultural and personal identities mingles with the issue of national identity in such a way that engenders a liminal subject position. For instance, there is a crucial scene in which Ms. Poori, the director of the non-proft organization, asks some Afghan girls including Sonita, to create two passports: one derived from their real life and another from their wishful imagination. In this scene, Sonita selects the imaginary name of Sonita Jackson and calls Michael Jackson and Rihanna her parents thus recognizing Americanness as her national identity. Ms. Poori upon examining Sonita’s imaginary passport surprisingly asks, “Born in the U.S.! Why? Because with a U.S. passport you could go anywhere?” To which Sonita positively responds. These conversations underline the signifcance

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of the politics of location in a globalized era that regardless of the interconnected fow of information and capital remains highly unequal restricting the mobility of human bodies align the axes of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and nationality. It can also be argued that Sonita’s desire for having U.S. nationality derives from her past difcult experiences in Afghanistan and her current unstable and marginal situation in Iran which push Sonita’s hopes and dreams toward imagining life in another place/country. This complex and double-sided nature of Sonita’s negotiation with her homeland and her current host country inevitably draws the flmmaker’s involvement in her life. Ghaem-Maghami not only supports Sonita’s music passion regardless of the limitations imposed on women in Iran in this regard, but she also pays $2000 to Sonita’s mother in exchange for Sonita to be allowed to stay in Iran instead of going to Afghanistan and getting married. At the beginning of the flm, Ghaem-Maghami mostly follows an observational stand to register Sonita’s life. However, the struggles of Sonita urge Ghaem-Maghami to change her directorial role from an observer behind the camera to a participant in front of the camera afecting not only the course of the flm but also Sonita’s life.18 Thus, a crucial female alliance forms between the flmmaker and the main character that signifcantly resists diferent workings of patriarchy in Iran and Afghanistan. Here, one might argue for the ethics of the flmmaker’s involvement in the subject’s life within the context of a documentary flmic discourse; what Bill Nichols, drawing from Vivian Sobchack’s discussion of ethical space in documentary, calls “the interventional gaze: the camera abandons the precondition of distance, transforming the detachment of a gaze into the involvement of a look.”19 Nichols primarily explains the concept of the interventional gaze in relation to moments of possible physical harm or even death in which “intervention is usually on behalf of someone else more immediately endangered than the cameraperson him- or herself.”20 In the case of Sonita, while there is an immediate possibility of Sonita being taken back to Afghanistan by her mother causing the flm to end abruptly without its main subject and possibly engendering a precarious situation for Sonita herself, GhaemMaghami’s involvement should be mainly read based on a cross-cultural and humanitarian female solidarity that is initiated by Sonita’s call for help: SONITA: Would you buy me? GHAEM-MAGHAMI: What do you mean? SONITA: If any Afghan man can buy me, you could do it too. I am for sale any-

way. If you can fnd someone who would pay for me; give me the money, then I will pay them back as soon as I make enough money with music. GHAEM-MAGHAMI: Sonita, dear, I must record the truth. It’s not right for me to interfere like this in your life.

The concerns over the ethics of participatory action and the possible risks and responsibilities associated with it are explicitly expressed by both the

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flmmaker and her crew in diferent occasions through the course of the flm. In fact, while at frst an ethical dilemma looms over the flmmaker’s response to this complex condition, Sonita’s urgent call for help changes the situation for Ghaem-Maghami creating a sense of ethical responsibility and female solidarity and alliance based on which Ghaem-Maghami intervenes in Sonita’s life.

Digital navigation, border crossing, and the paradoxes of movements in a transnational era Sonita with the help of Ghaem-Maghami produces her music video, Brides for Sale, in which she critiques the tradition of child bride in Afghanistan. As the video is produced privately, with available equipment, and without any ofcial permission, social media become the best and most efcient outlets for its distribution. Sonita and Ghaem-Maghami upload the video on YouTube, which becomes an instant online hit. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden consider this mode of production and dissemination through digital technology “the rise of a culture of access,” which: functions as a delegitimating shadow of the ofcial flm [and music] cultures of most nation-states as they have been determined by the processes of screening, censorship, rating, and critique. Digital technology . . . has functioned to disrupt and decentralize the forces that have, heretofore, maintained strict control over the representational politics of the cinematic [and musical] public sphere.21 Decentering the controlled national regulations, Sonita is thus able to reach a large number of audiences through social media. By the success of Sonita’s music video within online platforms, an American woman working for a US-based NGO, contacts Ghaem-Maghami and Sonita via Skype to inform them that she has shown Brides for Sale to the faculty of Wasatch Academy in the state of Utah, and they have awarded a full-time scholarship to Sonita for studying music in the U.S. Without a doubt, the possibilities ofered by new media and digital technologies in regard to production, dissemination, and reception of Sonita’s work are truly empowering for her; however, the mere celebratory reading of these technologies seems naïve. Ella Shohat, regarding the implications of digital technology, especially in relation to the issues of national afliation and the politics of location, challenges “the contemporary futurist euphoria of cyberdiscourse” by stating: The digitized world, within this perspective, will facilitate neighborhoods and cities free of geographic limits on streetwalkers, bordercrossers, and transcontinental faneurs. The migrating homesteader, or “armchair traveler,” sits in front of the computer screen but makes gigantic leaps from cybersite to cybersite. But is it really possible to

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Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi historically detach the facility of movement in cyberspace from the imperial culture of travel? . . . Does cybertravel continue to authorize the pleasures of predatory glimpses of otherized cultures, mapping the globe as a disciplinary space of knowledge?22

Sonita indeed shows that the “facility of movement in cyberspace” by navigating the Web and reaching a transnational audience highly difers from, and even contradicts, the mobility of the human bodies across geographical borders. This issue particularly shows itself in the fact that Sonita must go back to Afghanistan to obtain her birth certifcate, passport, and Visa to travel to the U.S. This is a risky trip for Sonita because as an undocumented Afghan refugee in Iran if she does not manage to get the required papers and travel to the U.S., she has to remain in Afghanistan and cannot return to Iran. Moreover, the imperial context of the “glimpses of otherized cultures” within digital platforms underlines a Western-centric articulation of hybridity and global connections which shows itself in the U.S.-based NGO’s eforts and contact facilitating the college ofer that Sonita receives. In this regard, Ella Shohat recognizes a benevolent, yet problematic, method regarding the studies, discourses, and practices of global feminism which she calls “the sponge/additive approach”: In this approach, paradigms that are generated from a U.S. perspective are extended onto “others” whose lives and practices become absorbed into a homogenizing, overarching feminist master narrative. This kind of facile additive operation merely piles up newly incorporated groups of women from various regions and ethnicities – all of whom are presumed to form a separate and coherent entity easily demarcated as “diference.”23 Shohat’s meticulous observation shows itself in the rhetoric of the NGO worker, who emphasizes that she and her organization have helped “other” young people (like Sonita) from diferent countries, such as Liberia, Uganda, and Afghanistan. In fact, regardless of this well-intentioned context and practice, there still remains the risk of overlooking the particularities of these individuals’ situations and experiences in relation to the specifcities of their locations thus engendering a homogenous discourse of global sisterhood. Nonetheless, Sonita is eager to embrace the unique ofer of a Western education for a better future, which she has all the rights to claim, and thus decides to go to Afghanistan in order to acquire the required papers for her U.S. travel. The crossing of Iran-Afghanistan border and the reunion with the homeland turn into a crucial moment of self-refection which resonates in Sonita’s rap song that accompanies this border crossing. The complex westward and eastward journeys across geographical borders further mingle with psychic and imaginative journeys, presented through Sonita’s songs and her scrapbook, and engender a liminal state through which Sonita enacts a poetics and politics of identity performance. The multiplicity of Sonita’s exilic experiences, the

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centrality of geographical and symbolic journeys in Sonita’s identity formation, the particular values and implications associated with these journeys, the signifcance of external and internal borders, and the moments of homelessness, home seeking, and homecoming all strongly situate Sonita as a documentary in the context of accented cinema, proposed by Hamid Nafcy in his book, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (2001). Yet Sonita also expands the categorization of this cinema beyond the authorial and autobiographical practices of the dislocated flmmakers residing in exile or diaspora discussed by Nafcy.24 The following and fnal section of this chapter explores some of the major features of Sonita as an accented flm.

Sonita: an accented documentary Hamid Nafcy’s framework of accented cinema exclusively focuses on those artisanal cinematic practices and modes of production that are performed by the exilic and diasporic flmmakers and thus are derived and formed based on their authorial and autobiographical experiences of displacement. Nafcy in this regard asserts that the accented cinema is “both a cinema of exile and a cinema in exile.”25 Sonita explicitly showcases a cinema of exile by centering on its exilic character, Sonita, and also by ofering an accented, interstitial mode of representation and production. Yet the flm is biographical rather than autobiographical. In fact, while Sonita’s narrative spans over three countries – Iran, Afghanistan, and the United States – and the flm was fnancially supported through a set of transnational resources including “grants from Germany, Switzerland, USA and the Netherlands [as well as the involvement of] TV channels from Japan, France, Germany, Switzerland, Korea and Taiwan,”26 the flm is not about the director’s life in another country. The crucial requirement of self-refexivity in regard to an accented flm thus resonates in Sonita through other means of representation and production. In addition to multiple roles Ghaem-Maghami performs in the production of her flm, including co-producer and director, the self-refexivity of the flmmaker shows itself in the changing of Ghaem-Maghami’s position from an observer behind the camera to a participant/performer in the flm’s narrative and Sonita’s life. This embodiment of Ghaem-Maghami and her emotional, humanitarian, and cross-cultural commitment to Sonita’s situation merge with the embodiment of Sonita as a displaced and exilic fgure forming an accented, gendered mode of representation and a transnational and cross-cultural act of solidarity and alliance. Sonita also explicitly incorporates written, telephonic, electronic, and digital media epistles. As Nafcy writes, “Exile and epistolarity are constitutively linked because both are driven by distance, separation, absence, and loss and by the desire to bridge the multiple gaps.”27 In various scenes, Sonita is shown writing her songs, some of which come to be heard through the performance of orality in the course of the flm. The use of telephone and cell-phone in the flm highlights the materiality of communication as Sonita talks on the

156 Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi phone with her mother in Afghanistan. The new media technology, such as laptop, Internet, and Skype, also brings a new dimension to the multiplicity and spatiotemporal connectivity as it allows Sonita (and Ghaem-Maghami) to connect with audiences across the world and later with the American woman working for the U.S-based NGO. The multilinguality presented in the flm also ofers another accented feature in Sonita. Iranian Farsi/Persian, Afghan Dari, and English constantly interact with each other presenting a dynamic linguistic context. There is a particular scene in which Sonita, while packing her suitcase, practices English with the help of Ghaem-Maghami in preparation for her upcoming U.S. journey. In this scene, not only the three languages mentioned earlier explicitly interact with each other, but also the linguistic barriers show themselves. For instance, Sonita says, “I am a rapper. I am a piano.” She is then corrected by Ghaem-Maghami who emphasizes, “I  play piano.” The language-related mistake made by Sonita metaphorically points to the linguistic ruptures and possible communication difculties experienced by exilic, diasporic, and migrant individuals. The linguistic scope may also be expanded to include the sociocultural barriers and struggles that these individuals come to experience in their new places. Furthermore, the accented cinematic features resonate themselves in Sonita in terms of its modes of production and reception. Sonita occupies an interstitial place in regard to both mainstream Western cinema and Iranian national cinema. It was fnanced by transnational sources and organizations, and used the collaboration of various individuals from diferent countries. The success of Sonita at major international flm festivals, such as Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA), Munich International Documentary Film Festival, Shefeld International Documentary Festival, and Sundance Film Festival, as some of the main venues for showcasing artistically and thematically crucial documentaries, brought about a signifcant amount of publicity and advertisement for the flm. However, this festival success, particularly within a Western context, raises the important issue of what the politics of international flm festivals are in terms of recognizing certain flms from Muslim-majority countries. In regard to the workings of Western flm festivals Negar Mottahedeh argues: In the context of extreme power diferentials, the selection of flms in French, Italian, British, and North American festivals, while formally grounded in the argument of “aesthetic brilliance,” is as much shaped by the products’ relation to known avant-garde and modernist flm traditions as by the racist combinatoire’s potential for commercial proft.  .  .  . Put bluntly, the fundamental factors that inform the flm festival encounter and the shaping of knowledge in that experience are proftability and festival politics.28 While without a doubt the flms’ racial and ethnic contexts and their subject matter play an infuential role in the festivals’ politics, in regard to the

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flms’ reception by critics and audiences, there is no coherent and concrete formula that shows whether the workings of flm festivals’ circuit lead to the perpetuation of racial, ethnic, and religious stereotypes, or instead break away sociocultural borders and bring about cross-cultural understanding and transnational alliances. In regard to the documentary Sonita, both of these possibilities can be seen. For instance, Ghaem-Maghami in an interview with Eboni Boykin of Indiewire laments the misconception of some (Western) audiences and critics in regard to women flmmaking practices in Iran by asserting, “Harsh censorship makes it difcult for all Iranian flmmakers, but being a woman does not make it more difcult. There is some misunderstanding and [mis]taking Iran for Saudi Arabia.”29 Here, Ghaem-Maghami critiques the homogenization of Muslim-majority countries based on a set of constructed notions within a Western context. Yet the possibility of this critique and discourse, as a signifcant call for a better cultural understanding, which is provided by the festival venues and journalistic and media platforms covering them, needs to be recognized as well. In fact, Ghaem-Maghami’s Sonita in its production and reception ofers a transnational context through which the issues of nationality and gender are highlighted creating a ground for the discussion and consideration of sociocultural specifcity. As Ella Shohat writes: Feminists of color have, from the outset, been engaged in analysis and activism around the intersection of nation, race, and gender. Therefore, while still resisting the ongoing (neo)colonized situation of their “nation” or “race,” post-Third Worldist feminist cultural [and cinematic] practices also break away from the narrative of the “nation” as a unifed entity to articulate a contextualized history for women in specifc geographies of identity. Such feminist projects, in other words, are often posited in relation to ethnic, racial, regional, and national locations.30 Ghaem-Maghami’s Sonita is indeed such a feminist practice that challenges the homogenization of Muslim-majority countries and Iranian society by shedding light on the difculties and struggles of an Afghan female refugee in Iran. In doing so, Sonita acknowledges the situatedness and particularities of women’s resistances and negotiations in regard to Afghan and Iranian women, yet at the same time ofers a dialogical and relational mode of documentary practice that creates cross-cultural and transnational women’s solidarity and alliance.

Notes 1 Rekabtalaei 2019, 5 and 7. 2 Ayatollah Khomeini “in his frst post-exile speech [in Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery of Tehran] announced: ‘We are not opposed to cinema, to radio, or to television. . . . The cinema is a modern invention that ought to be used for the sake

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of educating the people, but as you know, it was used instead to corrupt our youth. It is the misuse of cinema that we are opposed to, a misuse caused by the treacherous policies of our rulers’ ” (cited by Nafcy 2012, 7–8). Contemporary Iran has a signifcant multiplicity of ethnic groups such as Arabs, Kurds, Azaris, Turkmen, Baluchis, Lors, and Gilakis as well as religious diversity such as Shi’i and Sunni Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians. Iran also hosts a considerable number of immigrant and refugee populations including Afghans, Pakistanis, and Iraqis among others. Hamid Nafcy asserts that, in its conventional sense, the categorization of flms under the rubric of ‘National Cinema’ “benefted from both certain contextual formations – flm industry practices, market forces, government support, reception and censorship practices – and certain textual and authorial formations – thematic, generic and stylistic conventions and innovations. However, the specifcities of this defnition were often elided and it was applied inaccurately to all the flms of a nation” (Nafcy 2008, 97). Higson 1989, 37. Moallem 2005, 130 (original emphasis). Langford 2007, 151. ibid., 156. While some scholarly works have discussed Samira Makhmalbaf’s At Five in the Afternoon (Panj-e asr, 2003) through a feminist and gender perspective, this article is particularly concerned with the cinematic portrayal of Afghan refugees in Iran. See Patricia White’s chapter one in Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (Duke University Press, 2015) on “Samira Makhmalbaf’s Sororal Cinema,” and Haim Bresheeth’s “Two Theses on the Afghan Woman: Samira and Hana Makhmalbaf Filming Agheleh Farahmand” (Third Text 24.1, 2010). Hundle, Szeman, and Hoare 2019, 3. Mohanty 1991, 66 (original emphasis). Adelkhah and Olszewska 2007, 140. The linguistic proximity between Iran and Afghanistan shows itself in the varieties of Persian spoken by the people of two countries: Farsi/Persian is the ofcial language of Iran, while Dari is a “dialect of Persian that is spoken in contemporary Afghanistan and that is one of the ofcial languages of that country” (Olszewska 2015, XI). In terms of religion, in addition to religious minorities, Afghanistan has both Shi’i and Sunni Muslims. Given that the majority of Muslim population in Iran is Shi’ah, the statistics of Afghan population in Iran showed that “as of late 2005, Shia [sic] Hazaras at 47 percent constituted the single largest ethnic group among Afghans in Iran . . .” (cited by Adelkhah and Olszewska 2007, 143). Langford 2007, 152. Olszewska 2015, 22. In fact, Iranian women’s solo singing activities are restricted to homosocial spaces and women-only gatherings. Hall 1990, 225. The observational mode here, however, occurs within a conscious context which difers from a fy-on-the-wall approach. The camera asserts its observational presence and the subjects acknowledge the camera’s observational act by at times talking to the camera and addressing the flmmaker. Nichols 1991, 85. ibid. Ezra and Rowden 2006, 6. Shohat 1999, 215–216 (original emphasis).

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23 Shohat 2001, 1270. 24 In this regard, Nafcy himself aims to “problematize both authorship and autobiography by positioning that the flmmakers’ relationship to their flms and to the authoring agency within them is not solely one of parentage but also one of performance” (Nafcy 2001, 4). However, within this nuanced reading of authorship and autobiography, the emphasis still mostly remains on the accented flmmakers themselves and their accented (exilic, diasporic, or ethnic) experiences and refections. 25 Nafcy 2001, 8 (original emphasis). 26 Boykin 2016. 27 Nafcy 2001, 101. 28 Mottahedeh 2004, 1411–1412 (original emphasis). 29 Boykin 2016. 30 Shohat 2006, 292.

References Adelkhah, Fariba and Zuzanna Olszewska. 2007. “The Iranian Afghans.” Iranian Studies 40, no. 2: 137–165. Boykin, Eboni. 2016. “Sundance 2016 Women Directors: Meet Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami – ‘Sonita.’ ” Indiewire, January 22, 2016. www.indiewire.com/2016/ 01/sundance-2016-women-directors-meet-rokhsareh-ghaemmaghami-sonita206910/. Bresheeth, Haim. 2010. “Two Theses on the Afghan Woman: Samira and Hana Makhmalbaf Filming Agheleh Farahmand.” Third Text 24, no. 1: 25–38. Ezra, Elizabeth and Terry Rowden. 2006. “General Introduction: What Is Transnational Cinema?” In Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, edited by Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, 1–12. New York: Routledge. Hall, Stuart. 1990. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Diference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Higson, Andrew. 1989. “The Concept of National Cinema.” Screen 30, no. 4: 36–47. Hundle, Anneeth Kaur, Loana Szeman, and Joanna Pares Hoare. 2019. “What Is the ‘Transnational’ in Transnational Feminist Research?” Feminist Review 121: 3–8. Langford, Michelle. 2007. “Iran and Its Others: Locating Cultural Diversity in Iranian Cinema.” International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Nations 6, no. 6: 151–158. Moallem, Minoo. 2005. Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1991. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, edited by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, 51–80. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mottahedeh, Negar. 2004. “Life Is Color! Toward a Transnational Feminist Analysis of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s ‘Gabbeh’.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30, no. 1: 1403–1426. Nafcy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

160 Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi Nafcy, Hamid. 2008. “For a Theory of Regional Cinemas: Middle Eastern, North African and Central Asian Cinemas.” Early Popular Visual Culture 6, no. 2: 97–102. Nafcy, Hamid. 2012. A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Olszewska, Zuzanna. 2015. The Pearl of Dari: Poetry and Personhood among Young Afghans in Iran. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Rekabtalaei, Golbarg. 2019. Iranian Cosmopolitanism: A Cinematic History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shohat, Ella. 1999. “By the Bitstream of Babylon: Cyberfrontiers and Diasporic Vistas.” In Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, edited by Hamid Nafcy, 213–232. New York: Routledge. Shohat, Ella. 2001. “Area Studies, Transnationalism, and the Feminist Production of Knowledge.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26, no. 4: 1269–1272. Shohat, Ella. 2006. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. White, Patricia. 2015. Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

12 Film as a scene of “Rupture” Religion, gender, and rights in Muslim communities Milja Radovic

How Muslim communities are constructed in cinema and how it is viewed through the “camera eye” of “local flmmakers” has been the focus of international scholars for some time now. In this work, I discuss how the local flmmakers produce “open-ended” flms by investigating the issues of religion, gender, and rights. Before moving on to a detailed discussion of the flms, it is necessary to frst provide the theoretical framework within which this work is placed. I approach flm as a scene of rupture1 that is the “rupture” which creative acts of citizenship produce.2 This is the theory that I developed following theoretical work primarily of Engin F. Isin on acts of citizenship. So, what is it then that makes flm a scene of rupture and what is an “open-ended” flm? Filmmakers “create rupture by initiating something novel that is both ‘unexpected and unpredictable’3 by claiming (citizenship) rights.”4 The act of claiming rights (for self and/or undesirable and oppressed Other) produces activist citizens through the scene producing a political (and often aesthetical) rupture. These flms are “open-ended” because the audience is invited to “continue” the debate or take concrete action. So in a way we can say that “an open-ended flm” bears a potentiality to initiate an of-screen debate, or produce an of-screen (political) rupture. Whether this will necessarily happen or not in reality is of less concern, the focus is here rather on flm itself: what makes it a scene through which creative acts (of citizenship) emerge. The scene of rupture is visualized (and multiplied through the reel) in flm, and it is transformative as it provides something that is novel and authentic that breaks with the main-stream political practices, standing or looking outside the oppressive system(s), both locally and globally. Thus, flm becomes a rupture itself as flmmakers break existing boundaries and oppressive realities through flmic language: the ways they use the storyline and aesthetics to depict reality surpasses mere subversion and goes a step further, where the realities are transformed envisioning society that is yet to be. By visualizing something novel (or what already exists on a small level5), flmmakers rupture the given socio-political realities on-screen and of-screen. It is through the scene of flm that acts of citizenship emerge,6

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constituting the artists (flmmakers, actors, citizens, and “aliens” of their own societies) as activist citizens. Furthermore, by touching upon the issues of rights, these flms communicate the complexity of reality(ies) of their own societies, often envisioning “citizenship that is yet to come.”7 Among a number of flms devoted to the question of human rights in Muslim communities, I focus here specifcally on two flms by Iranian director Marzieh Meshkini, Stray Dogs (2004)8 and The Day I Became a Woman (2000),9 Saudi Arabian director Haifaa al-Mansour’s Wadjda (2012),10 Siddiq Barmak’s Afghani flm Osama (2003),11 and Lebanese director Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now?(2011).12 All of the flms are international co-productions, apart from The Day I  Became a Woman, made by local flmmakers and actors. My aim is to look more closely at how the flmmakers explore rights, gender, and religion, and how these flms embed creative acts of citizenship that are expressed through the flmic scene. In the selected flms, the question of rights is closely bound to religion, both explicitly and implicitly, and religion is further closely tied with the issue of belonging, determining “who belongs to a specifc group,” and who constitutes the second-class citizens and the outsiders. The issue of gender is central and inseparable from the question of rights, and consequently that of religion, and as such is largely problematized in the flms. The flmmakers engage with the position of women in societies driven by religious laws, extremist groups, and war and terror inficted on the basis of religious belonging. The flms I  selected illustrate my argument on the flmic scene as rupture: by interrogating the issues of rights, gender, and religion, and in claiming the rights for the oppressed, the flms embed the acts of citizenship.13

Middle East or Middle Easts? Contextualizing the themes The “Muslim World,” as it is often dubbed in Euro-American debates, is not represented in these flms as a single entity: the complex histories and cultural specifcities of each country are crucial for the flms, being both the answer to and a result of these specifc and diverse socio-political and cultural contexts. At the same time, the flms (as flm in general) operate on a transnational level, and the flmmakers recognize the similarities between diferent countries with signifcant Muslim communities. While the intention is not to investigate the feasibility of these categories, it is important to understand that the flmmakers, while operating in their local contexts, refect some of the specifcities of the region as a whole.14 For instance, in representing the issue of gender and women’s rights, many of the flmmakers emphasize that this as a problem across Muslim societies, rather than of one particular country. Similarly, I is seen as one of the crucial players in the escalation of the confict and in determining the position and rights of women and the minority groups. Interestingly, as we will see further, Islam while critically approached for its direct infuence on understanding the question of rights, for the individuals – the oppressed it is also

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a vehicle that can be used against the oppressor.15 It is individualism and collectivism that are strongly contrasted in the cinematic representations and exploration on rights in diverse Muslim contexts. The flms which I discuss have been produced in Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. They bear transnational dimension, not only in a sense that they bring forward the political problems common to the region, but also in the sense that they represent a “shared struggle” of their inhabitants (citizens and non-citizens). The flms embed the lived experience of gender, religion, and rights (or rather lack of it) of the citizens and second-class citizens and excluded. The issue of citizen is at the focus of the flmmakers, with the underlying question of how the outside political circumstances (created equally by the local governments and the international community) directly impact the most vulnerable members of society. The Iranian director Marzieh Meshkini compared the role of the artists to that of a doctor, the same way we have the “doctors without frontiers” we must have “the artists without frontiers”; in other words, arts cannot be limited to one country, one context, one ideology or norm. The flms under analysis here speak not only about their local contexts but also have a transnational dimension by bringing forth and connecting the issue of rights with that of gender rights and religious laws, a common issue across Muslim communities. Moreover, they connect it to the transnational audiences across the world, in the ways that will be discussed further, and in that appeal they go beyond the geographical boundaries of Middle Eastern nations. The flmmakers create what I call the “rupture” on-screen and, in some cases, of-screen. For it is through the scene of these flms that we can better understand acts of citizenship and the political actors – the claimants of rights produced through those acts.

Rupturing the oppressive: bicycle as a symbol of rights Two flms I discuss here are made by women, in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, the former by Haifaa al-Mansour and the latter by the acclaimed Iranian director Marzieh Meshkini. Both directors apply realism, inspired by Vittorio De Sica (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) and Cesare Zavattini (screenwriter and theorist of Italian neorealism). Al-Mansour is infuenced by De Sica, she uses the techniques of cinéma vérité, with editing “of classical Hollywood cinema,” while focusing on women’s socio-political role in modern day society of Saudi Arabia. Meshkini on the other hand, uses “the invisible style of flming and editing to ensure realism . . . and respect for continuity of time, space . . . in short, reality.”16 Through a combination of “improvisational practices” in dealing with lives of ordinary, marginalized people, Meshkini applies social criticism by depicting their lived experiences, thus refecting the tradition of Iranian-style neorealism. Stray Dogs (2004) is a flm that deals with homelessness and the position of women and children in Taliban-destroyed Afghanistan, where religious

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laws in the war-devastated society still dictate the fate of women. Meshkini’s flm is a fne example of “transnational cinema”: not only that Meshkini being Iranian made a flm about a neighboring country, seeing its particular problems as “universal” but also because through her clear reference to Cesare Zavatini’s neorealist infuence, she emphasizes the struggle of the sufering people as universal and unifying at the same time. While Meshkini’s flm has been seen as a sort of homage to the sufering people, primarily children and their mothers in Afghanistan, Meshkini goes further than that. She is not a distant observer, a “concerned neighbor,” rather she uses the camera as a participant. The camera is an unobtrusive element of reality. Meshkini’s flm at the same time induces reality through the aesthetics carefully crafted with the storyline. The story of Stray Dogs is that of exclusion, homelessness, deprivation of basic rights for the children and women, of a world where everyone is unequal and oppressed. However, due to the “religious laws” it is the women and their children that are most afected. The story follows two children, the girl Gol-Gothai and her brother Zahed, both “street children” of post-Taliban Kabul. Their mother, as many other women in Afghanistan, has been arrested under the charge of infdelity because she remarried believing that her frst husband died in the Taliban war fghting against Americans. Her husband is found to be alive, imprisoned as well, but with no willingness to forgive her “infdelity” and thus condemning his wife to prison and his children to homelessness. The characters in the flm “curse” both their own leaders and Americans: they feel to be “hostages” and “collateral damage” of both local and global politics. Meshkini uses long shots in the real environment: cold and snowy, often deserted, landscapes are contrasted to the liveliness of the two children. The contrast between cold-whiteness of barren terrain to the warmth of children provides a sense of hope to the Afghan reality. While in similar European realist flms, for example, the mise-en-scène refects the hopelessness of both the situation and their characters, Stray Dogs shows that the real answer is in the main characters, Gol-Ghotai and Zahed. Meshkini’s flm becomes a visual and political rupture: she creates a story, deprived of the subjectivity of a documentary, in which the real characters (non-professionals) can act, and their act is turned into that of demanding rights through their flmic characters. Meshkini gives a storyline as a framework, but what she actually does is enable the real Gol-Ghotai and Zahed to emerge as (second-class) citizens who act: guiding them through the major storyline, she allows them to express themselves naturally. Moreover, it is these spontaneous and purposive acts that produce “ruptures” throughout the flm: homeless children emerge as political actors through flm. Gol-Gothai and Zahed are one of many homeless children, that Meshikini found in Afghanistan and cast to play “themselves,” without changing their real names and merely “adjusting” them to the main plot of the flm. The flm starts with the children fnding a “stray dog” saving him from a “children’s mob.” The dog accompanies them in their daily lives in the

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street and nights in the prison with their mother. He is a clear reference for the homeless children of Kabul as the title of the flm suggests. The fate of the children changes once they are forbidden to spend nights in prison with their mother. From that moment, all their actions become an attempt at getting arrested so they can be with their mother again. In a number of cunning attempts, with often comical elements to it, intertwined with their struggle to survive in the cold nights, they fnally discover the flm Bicycle Thieves that represents a solution to their situation. Zahed steals a bike and is sent to jail but not to his mother’s, and Gol-Ghotai is left alone with her stray dog in the streets of Kabul. The last scenes almost blend into one: the scene of desperate boys in the prison making the “uprising” by stumping the foor with their feet, and that of Gol-Ghotai calling out to the police with the words: “Arrest me. I am a sister of the bicycle thief.” (Figure 12.1) The transnational aspect of Meshkini’s flm is not just in the fact that she creates a flm about the burning problems of a neighboring country (and not her own), neither is it that she depicts the problems of homeless children, women without rights, and the limitations of freedom in the war-torn Afghanistan. Rather, Meshkini’s last scene with Gol-Ghotai’s exclamation “I  am a sister of the bicyle thief” reveals transnationalism in its deepest form: as that of a shared struggle of the people.17 This cry of Gol-Ghotai at the end of the flm resembles the cry for unity of all the oppressed people. With its clear reference to De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves – “I am a sister of the Bicycle Thief” – the artist here addresses the space beyond the Middle East: Gol-Ghotai’s ‘look’ turns toward Europe, reminding that the struggle of one geopolitical space is a shared struggle. Meshkini’s flm surpasses descriptive narration: it is not a static ‘re-created scene’ of something past but becomes

Figure 12.1 “I am a sister of the bicycle thief”

166 Milja Radovic an on-screen rupture through which actors – claimants of rights – emerge in an active event that is happening ‘now’ as the camera captures it on the reel. In her earlier flm The Day I Became a Woman, Meshkini also uses the bicycle race to instigate the issue of women’s freedom and rights. The bicycle, as with al-Mansour, literalizes the process of conquering freedom that is yet to be fully realized in cultural and political spheres. Haifaa al-Mansour (Wadjda) makes a similar reference to De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. In Wadjda, the bicycle becomes a symbol of freedom for the main protagonist, the girl Wadjda. The bicycle is particularly related to one of the basic human rights: the freedom of movement. Through the story of a girl who ‘just wants to ride a bike’ al-Mansour reveals the complexity of life for women in Saudi Arabia: their freedom of movement is limited, they are deprived of the majority of rights that men have, and subordinated to the will of a husband or a father, and the strict religious laws carried out by the religious police. Al-Mansour uses a formalist aesthetic to visualize the oppression: she shows the women primarily through interior framing, conveying their physical restrictions in Saudi society, gradually eradicating the presence of women in public spaces. The free space appears only in the fnal scene when Wadjda is riding the bicycle, only to reach the cross-road and motorway where she stops and where the flm ends, leaving the question of political freedom to the of-screen debates. The flm successfully bears innocence in being flmed from the perspective of a child. Although constructed in closed, constricted spaces (walls, windows, narrow street paths), for alMansour, making Wadjda meant creating a hopeful and optimistic story, in contrast to (and in spite of) tragedies experienced by the people of the Middle East, which will inspire people to go out and make the changes happen.18 Moreover, for al-Mansour the very creation of Wadjda was a way of fnding her own voice both as a woman and as an Arab, and creating a space that she could inhabit as a person.19 The girl Wadjda attempts to buy and ride a bike despite the fact that girls and women are banned from this activity. In a number of attempts, which all fail, one of which even includes entering a competition in reciting the Qur’an, Wadjda remains a cheeky and playful girl determined to fulfll her goal. After her name is taken of the family tree and her father marries another woman to have a male heir, Wadjda receives a bicycle as a gift from her mother. Although, in al-Mansour’s words, the bicycle here is only a toy and as such should not be feared by the society, it also represents a symbol of freedom that is yet to be achieved. It is a “metaphor for the freedom of movement” and thus Wadjda literally represents a (second-class) citizen in motion: the frst-time actress Waada Mohammed was the frst girl to ride a bicycle in the streets of Riyadh. (Figure 12.2) For the young actress, it was both her and her flmic character Wadjda that accomplished this, and the rupture produced through this acceleration of movement is both an on-screen and of-screen rupture: it takes place in ‘real-life’ in the streets of Riyadh during the process of shooting and

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Figure 12.2 Accelerating freedom

remains recorded on the reel. The example of Wadjda is perhaps the best example for illustrating how the rupture of the existing socio-political and cultural practices is achieved in flm and by flm: in the reel and in the real environment. By creating a seemingly political “neutral space” in flm, alMansour accelerated the dialogue,20 which resulted with the Saudi Arabian government lifting the ban and allowing girls and women to ride bicycles in designated areas.21

Women claim rights The flms I discussed in the previous section embody women as claimant of rights. Wadjda claims rights for women and by woman (the frst Saudi Arabian flm director) starting with the basic right, the right to free movement. The acceleration of the bicycle embodies a physical freedom of movement, while the bicycle as symbol accelerates the process of liberation on the political and cultural level precisely as it challenges the physical boundaries by which women move within Saudi Arabian society. It is the process in freedom that is yet to be conquered in Saudi Arabia. For al-Mansour, these small steps in liberation lead in the right direction.22 In Stray Dogs, the girl stands as a symbol of the oppressed on the transnational level: the identifcation of the Iranian woman flmmaker with the girl from Afghanistan, and the director’s inclusion of the European landmark flm Bicycle Thieves in conjunction with the girl crying: “I  am the sister of a bicycle thief” directly addresses Europe, and the oppressed of the world. The stolen bicycle, the girl, and the reference to Bicycle Thieves convey oppression on a meta-level.

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Meshkini in her flms approaches women as oppressed across Muslim societies, including Afghanistan and Iran. In her frst flm The Day I Became a Woman, Meshkini commits to a “poetics of realism”23 that involves “political commitment” and criticism of both traditions and governments, with elements of surrealism integrated into the storyline, subjective experiences of time within a shared objective space that unifes the triptych. The flm is a “grand narrative of a woman’s life viewed sequentially from childhood to womanhood to old age”24 depicting the stories of three women. Meshkini divides the flm into three segments that are unobtrusively intertwined and connected. The frst story ‘Hava’ (Eve in translation) is about a girl who is informed on the morning of her ninth birthday that this is the day she will become a woman – meaning she is to be covered and forbidden from her childhood games with boys outside. Hava uses her last hours left by playing outside. The story of ‘Hava’ achieves aesthetically the impression of imprisonment by contrasting open and closed spaces separated by the thick bars of a window. However, both Hava and her friend, the boy, are framed behind the bars of the window making it purposely unclear as to who is actually “imprisoned.” This scene suggests that girls and boys share a similar position, because their relationship functions within limited circumstances. ‘Hava’ however suggests that woman is most free at her young age, before “she becomes a woman.” With Hava being classifed as a woman at noon, the camera focuses onto the handcrafted raft in the sea, to then shift to the road. The road leads us to the second tale of Ahoo (meaning Deer), a woman cyclist, who is chased by her husband and mullah on horseback. The mullah annuls her marriage (while riding the horse next to Ahoo on the bicycle) because cycling, although allowed, represents an inappropriate activity for a woman. Surrounded by other women cyclists in a specially designed area for such activity, Ahoo continues her race. The whole event takes place on the dusty road, and the bicycle here is again used as a symbol of the freedom of movement and freedom from oppression. When her marriage is annulled, and the mullah predicts her inevitable ruin for her disobedience, Ahoo is alone in the shot, reaching the clifs with the waves and the sign on the road “you are here.” Whether her freedom represents an abyss or ‘liberation with a price’ we do not fnd out (it remains a secret) as the camera takes us to the fnal story, the tale of Hoora (meaning Nymph). Hoora is an old lady, of whom we do not know much except that she lives alone and never had children. She hires a group of boys to help her buy all the goods she never had in her life and then lay them out all on a beach. Hoora tells her fragmented life story to the boys, and the women cyclists from the previous tale (who are guessing whether Ahoo reached the end of the race or not), and the beach becomes an inhabited space of all the characters joining together. A kitchen, washing machine, bedroom, and wedding dress are set up on the beach. The utility prescribed to the usual household items, however, receive a diferent meaning in the beach: in Meshkini’s own words “the old generation does not mind using the products of modern technology but the usage has to conform to the traditional outlook.”25

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Figure 12.3 Hoora’s departure

Finally, Hoora leaves toward the ship on the same handcrafted raft and we see the veiled Hava from the frst tale, seeing her of. (Figure 12.3) Michelle Langford argues that the flm functions as a “complex allegorical register,” suggesting that the particular symbolic work of this flm takes place along two axes, the horizontal and the vertical.26 For her, the flm should be viewed as “horizontal series from beginning to end.” As the flm reveals “Hava is not yet woman, Ahoo, who receives a divorce, is no longer woman, and Hoora, the old woman who never married, has in a sense never become woman/wife.”27 The process of becoming, suggested in the title of the flm, Langford further argues “is presented along this horizontal axis of the flm as a state imposed from the outside.”28 Meshkini’s flm, similarly to her Stray Dogs, problematizes gender as a social problem, for to achieve an independence or an active social position, women have to forgo their emotional attachments and houses, in which they are basically imprisoned not necessarily out of hatred, but sometimes out of love,29 in accordance with the cultural traditions. The flm Osama by Siddiq Barmak also focuses on the problem of gender. Barmak problematizes the oppressed position of women, questioning the meaning of gender in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Opening with the words of Nelson Mandela: “I  cannot forget, but I  can forgive,” the flm starts with the demonstrations of women who demand the right to work to keep their families from starvation, and the attack of the Talibans on the protestors. Filmed in a documentary style, the only narrator of the tragedy to take place is a boy-beggar who says to the camera “give a dollar to see

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the revolution.” The flm further focuses on the girl who lives with a widowed mother and grandmother, without any income or possibility to work, and on the verge of starvation. Barmak shows here women and children in Afghanistan as the frst and foremost victims of diferent wars, including the Taliban rule. When the girl says to her grandmother that she wished that God never created a woman, her grandmother replies that man and woman are created equal, and that they are also equally unfortunate. On the premises of the gender equality, grandmother concludes that gender is interchangeable and thus she transforms the girl into a boy:30 she cuts her hair and dresses her in her father’s clothes to send her of to work, under a symbolic name: Osama. Eventually, the boy-girl Osama is recruited by the Taliban’s school and forced into a number of activities until she is eventually discovered to be a girl and consequently jailed. Finally, instead of the public execution, she is given to an old man as his fourth wife. In the frst Afghani flm since 1996 Siddiq Barmak, like Meshkini, cast actors from the streets of Kabul: the main character of the girl-boy Osama was played by a Kabul beggar Marina Golbahari. Barmak constructs reality of Afghanistan, avoiding sentimentality in depicting the tragedy of women. He confronts the brutality with poetic aesthetics, depicting gently the metamorphosis of a girl into a boy, and fnally a boy into a girl put behind bars. In the prison scene, Osama looks directly at the camera implying her looking to the viewer. The straight-on close-up of Osama intensifes the directness and closeness of her address. The bars between her and the camera do not hide her face, she is not blurred, fragmented or out of focus. The bars are partially out of focus yet not fully blurred, keeping the awareness that somebody is imprisoned. Only the question remains: who is really behind the bars? (Figure 12.4)

Figure 12.4 A girl/boy Osama addresses the oppressors and the audience

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Osama remains one of the most important flms in recent Afghanistan history as a flm that, like Wadjda, created an aesthetical and political onscreen and of-screen rupture. Claiming the women’s rights from oppression and questioning the understanding of gender in Islam earned Barmak refugee status in France, while the actress Marina Golbahari soon had to seek the asylum in France due to death threats.31

Religious freedoms and freedom of religion Religion remains a key and underlying issue in the Middle East and in Muslim societies and is directly connected with the issue of rights and gender. A  set of restrictions are imposed on the rights of people, in particularly women, through religious laws (in some countries overlooked by religious police). Religion in the flms is approached implicitly nonetheless as inseparable from the oppression. Al-Mansour approaches religious laws critically and exposes the hypocrisy of the religious elite through Wadjda’s reciting the verses from Qur’an32, which has a subversive function in the flm. Al-Mansour portrays the religious school which Wadjda attends as a sort of Friz Lang Metropolis: girls are lined in front of the teacher’s megaphone, subordinated to the order of the oppressor, who in this scene is a woman. Al-Mansour here shifts oppression from men to women, who often become agents of the oppressive prescripts and religious laws, addressing and questioning the role of women in the Middle Eastern and Muslim societies. Al-Mansour does not necessarily reject Islam but certainly addresses the importance of its interpretation. Similarly, Siddiq Barmak who constructed his Osama based on the real-life event considers Taliban rule as a form of fascism that “broke up all the human systems in Afghanistan.”33 Islam is not approached as problematic per se, it is not ‘being a Muslim’ that falls under the scrutiny of the flmmakers, it is rather the power of religious institutions, movements and its leaders that are interrogated and subverted. Religion is interwoven in the flms, and rather than being its central point, it is related to the oppression, deprivation of (human) rights, and fnally war. It is important to distinguish two prevailing approaches to the question of religion: frst, that religion should rather be a source of freedom than oppression, and second, freedom from religion as an oppressive system of rule and vehicle of violence that works against the unprivileged and seeks only power over people. One of the flms that attempts to engage directly with religion and war is Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now? (Lebanon 2011) In contrast to the previous realist flms, Labaki’s work has elements of tragic-comedy. Her flm narrates the story about women living in a remote village in the mountains, populated by Muslims and Christians. The only connection with the ‘outside world’ is one TV set, and two boys who purchase goods for villagers traveling on a motorbike, mainly through the mine felds. Labaki’s flm is dedicated “to our mothers,” and is a result of a life-long experience in

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Lebanon and divided Beirut throughout the waves of wars. The imaginary village lives harmoniously until the problems of the ‘outside world’ interfere with otherwise peaceful life. The men are plunged into the confict, and conspire to start war in the village. Discovering this, the women decide to take the matter into their hands: frst, they cover up the accidental murder of a boy caught on his motorbike in a crossfre between Muslims and Christians, then they employ the local Priest and Imam to help them, as well as the Ukrainian female singers whose main job is to spy on and entertain the men of the village while the local women bake the cakes flled with marijuana that are to put the whole male population of the village asleep. Once they completed their last task, women fnd and steal the arms that the men hid, and their men wake next morning to a diferent reality. The women switched identities and changed their households accordingly: Muslim women became Christian, and vice versa. Labaki follows several female characters, integrating the love story between a Christian woman (played by herself) and a Muslim man. Labaki is also a narrator in the flm, where a number of comical situations are interrupted with tragic events. The flm opens and fnishes at the cemetery, shared by Muslims (on the left side) and Christians (on the right side). The flm begins with the women, both Christian and Muslim, dressed in black, approaching the cemetery as a unit, half-walking, half-dancing, gently swinging, resembling the mourning dance. (Figure 12.5) Labaki’s narration introduces the flm as “a long tale of women in black” who lost their husbands, sons, brothers because of the allegiance “to a cross or a crescent.” The camera then shows the village with a mosque and a church next to each other. It is the women that from that moment are the central characters conspiring to prevent the next possible confict. Labaki, playing one of the major roles, addresses her audience through her character Amal, shouting at the men fghting in her restaurant: “is that what being man means?  .  .  . Have you learned nothing? That is enough.” She

Figure 12.5 Women in black: Christian and Muslim women in fght for freedom

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stresses that women have no tears left anymore and no strength to put up with yet another war. Labaki’s speech comes across as her direct message to the people of Lebanon. Although her envisioned village, in which women appear as those who can preserve peace, may be read as idealist, idealism is certainly not what Labaki constructs, as suggested in the last scene of her flm. Labaki is aware that this is not enough, and that preserving the peace in Lebanon requires much more work. The last scene resembles the opening scene of the flm: again a group of women in black walks toward the cemetery, although this time with changed identities (between Christian and Muslim women), and accompanied by seemingly ‘defeated’ men. This time they are all gathered for the burial procession of a killed village boy, who was a Christian but whose mother has now embraced Islam. At the moment they reach the cemetery, confused with its division and switched identities, the cofn-bearers turn toward the group and ask: “Where do we go now?” They turn toward the camera, which at this point visualizes as if there is literally no space for them. The interchangeable identities of the same people living together for centuries, which Labaki brings forth, pose the problem as it seems that there is no space in Lebanon for those who do not explicitly belong to a specifc religious group. Labaki portrays women not only as victims of the Lebanese war but also as a possible vehicle for the reconciliation.34 Furthermore, rather than suggesting freedom from religion, she addresses those who commit crimes in the name of religion. Through the characters of the Imam and the priest, Labaki shows that they have no particular difculties in sharing the same space, as their coexistence is one of the elements that constitutes the cultural specifcity of Lebanon. Labaki, contrary to the opinions of some critics, does not create a “fairy tale,” although she admits she has been inspired by some, she rather envisions the possible society, and artistically constructs what I called earlier the “citizenship that is to come.” By doing so, her flm becomes a scene of a diferent and transformed reality, in which acts are envisioned and enacted through the creative act of the flmmaker, and the participants, mainly cast among non-professionals.

Rupturing realities Taken together, these fve flms made by local flmmakers emphasize the socio-political and cultural context of the specifc country through common threads: the issue of rights, which is closely connected, be it explicitly or implicitly, with religion and gender. I purposely approached the issue of rights and the issue of gender as separate but intertwined issues, although it could come across as logically constructing the topic under the theme of “gender rights” or “women rights.” The issue is not that simplistic, however, and this is revealed by the flms: although all the flmmakers clearly speak about the women as oppressed, they also depict women as the agents of oppression (Wadjda, The Day I  Became a Woman). Furthermore, aesthetically they communicate a more complex reality: in Osama and The

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Day I Became a Woman, the roles of men and women appear as equally restricted, and it is purposely not clear who is actually “behind the bars,” the oppressors, the oppressed, or both? The flms further suggest that it is the oppressive system, which is rarely visible (apart from the Taliban who again appear as agents of the oppressive), that produces the roles of the oppressors (men) and oppressed (women). Cultural specifcities in aesthetic expressions are used to break from and question the political norms of society that are seen as oppressive. Filmmakers emerge as citizens who claim rights through the act of flm creation, which fosters debate and self-scrutiny of the burning issues of a particular society (which is yet another of rights denied directly or indirectly). By the numerous creative acts embedded in the scene of flm, the flm becomes a scene of rupture of socio-political and cultural realities. The flms are “open-ended” precisely because they serve as a sort of platform for further debates (of-screen) for all society members. Each (oppressed) individual becomes a (political active) subject (from the flmmaker to actors) because each of them becomes a voice that now must be heard: this very act of creating the (flmic) space of many voices is crucial part for any political liberty. This voice is a rupture of political system par excellence. The flms become the voice of the conscience of society, where the tyranny of the power centers becomes a politically valid question to the oppressive system, the oppressors, and the oppressed. Furthermore, the flm becomes a scene of rupture because it presents a reality that is not determined by political or religious powers but by citizens for whom the voice of minorities have the crucial role in improvement of the questioned societies. The flms are not transnational only because of the direct confrontation of a struggle common to the whole Middle East but also because they address and question (though more implicitly) the reality of Europe, that is “a brother” in a shared struggle of people whose societies face the danger of slipping into pseudo-democracies. Perhaps, this is the biggest rupture created: while the flms create reality of a citizenship that can be – but it is yet not – in their own societies, they open the wider debate that is not limited only to the Middle East: the ‘oppressed’ become active subjects and their voices have transnational relevance not only in cinematic but also political space.

Notes 1 The flm is constructed from many scenes or shots which make up the whole ‘picture’. I  intentionally use the word scene for the flm as a whole to invoke Engin Isin’s argument that it is through the scene that actors are produced being constituted by acts of citizenship, and this scene thus becomes a ‘scene of rupture’. See Milja Radovic, Film, Religion and Activist Citizens: An Ontology of Transformative Acts (New York: Routledge, 2017). 2 Engin F. Isin in theorizing acts, distinguishes between acts, actor and action, and argues that it is scene through which actors are produced and constituted by acts. See, ibid., 9.

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3 Engin F. Isin, “Enacting Citizenship,” in Citizens without Frontiers, ed. Engin F. Isin (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012), 108–146, 113. 4 See Radovic, Film, Religion and Activist Citizens, 9–10. 5 For example, Amos Gitai in his Ana Arabia (2013) tells the tale about the Jewish-Arab community that lives as a peaceful community at the outskirts of Tel Aviv. The story is based on a real one. Gitai constructs the space of this microcosm that, in spite being ignored by everyone, represents the only solution to the Israeli-Palestinian confict. For analysis of Gitai’s flm see Radovic, Film, Religion and Activist Citizens. 6 For a wider discussion see, ibid. 7 Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen, Acts of Citizenship (London: Zed Books, 2008), 4. 8 An Iran, France, and Afghanistan co-production. 9 The Day I Became a Woman (Marzieh Meshkini, Iran, 2000). 10 A Saudi Arabia, Netherlands, Germany, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, and USA, co-production. 11 An Afghanistan, Ireland, and Japan, co-production. 12 A Lebanon, France, Egypt, and Italy, co-production. 13 It is often precisely the oppressed that claim those rights through the medium of flm. 14 For a critique of the delineation of a monolithic “Muslim World” see Sarah Kendzior, “The Fallacy of the Phrase, ‘The Muslim World’,” in The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018); and Cemil Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 15 For instance, al-Mansour’s, as well as Labaki’s characters in the flms vocalize this clearly. 16 Robert Sklar and Saverio Giovacchini, Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 191. 17 Milja Radovic, Transnational Cinema and Ideology: Representing Religion, Identity and Cultural Myths (New York: Routledge, 2014). 18 Personal Interview: September 6, 2016, included in Radovic, Film, Religion and Activist Citizens. 19 Paraphrased, see Lapin, Andrew, Wadjda director Haifaa Al Mansour, September 2013, http://thedissolve.com/features/interview/168-wadjda-director-haifaaal-mansour. Accessed 28 April 2016. 20 Radovic, Film, Religion and Activist Citizens, 132. 21 Sara C. Nelson, “Saudi Arabian Religious Police ‘Lift Bicycle Ban for Women’,” The Hufngton Post, April  2, 2013, www.hufngtonpost.co.uk/2013/04/02/ saudi-arabian-religious-police-lift-bicycle-ban-women-veil-male-relative_ n_2999576.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29v Z2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAAHsucGkIJstO-B_ulo5-nMLwbI QT09g2E2PclJFrey4i2kkwC95qkY9da0qdfUWTIJ-vCvXuyR2K2hQsw82YQlR2b_v0k-PR2jI9s3wJIF8Blx_6g_yubQFanjI6ylQTTq4OHr97WVk_ NidRd1_D_0Sc0e6ThqY70d3p6yYSyH. Last Accessed 9 April 2019. 22 Personal Interview: September 6, 2016 in Radovic, Film, Religion and Activist Citizens. 23 Sklar and Giovacchini, Global Neorealism, 192. 24 Michelle Langford, “Allegory and the Aesthetics of Becoming-Woman in Marziyeh Meshkini’s ‘The Day I Became a Woman’,” in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies 22 (1(64)) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 20.

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25 “Interview: The Day I  Became a Woman,” Film International, December  21, 2000, www.makhmalbaf.com/?q=article/interview-day-i-became-woman. Last Accessed 29 December 2017. 26 Langford, “Allegory and the Aesthetics of Becoming-Woman,” 6–8. 27 ibid., 21. 28 ibid., 22. 29 “ ‘The Day I  Became a Woman’ – Marzieh Meshkini (2000),” The Film Suf, March 24, 2016, www.flmsuf.com/2016/03/the-day-i-became-woman-marziehmeshkini.html. Last Accessed 29 December 2017. 30 It would be useful to compare the understanding of gender and its interchangeability in oppressive cultural spaces transnationally: the flm Virdzina (Srdjan Karanovic, Yugoslavia, 1991) shows an old custom of transforming girls into boys to save the family honour and preserve the family name. 31 “Afghan Film Star in French Exile After Death Threats,” The Local, May 5, 2016, www.thelocal.fr/20160505/afghan-flm-star-in-french-exile-afterdeath-threats. Last Accessed 29 December 2017. 32 “[T]here are some who say ‘we believe in Allah and the Last Day’ but they do not really believe. They would deceive Allah and those who believe but they only deceive themselves and do not realise it . . . when it is said to them, ‘Make no mischief on the earth’, they say ‘Why, we only want to make peace’ Certainly they are the ones who make the mischief but they do not realise it.” See flm, quoted in Radovic, Film, Religion and Activist Citizens, 124. 33 Maryam Maruf and Margaret Loescher, “Osama and Afghan Cinema: An Interview with Siddiq Barmak,” openDemocracy, March 4, 2004, www.opendemocracy.net/arts-Film/article_1769.jsp. Last Accessed 29 December 2017. 34 Women’s concerns are not with their own emotional problems, but with the wider issue of the potential for male violence in a fragmented Lebanese society. Roy Armes, New Voices in Arab Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015), 233.

Bibliography Armes, Roy. 2015. New Voices in Arab Cinema. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Aydin, Cemil. 2017. The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Isin, Engin F. 2012. Citizens without Frontiers. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Isin, Engin F. and Greg M. Nielsen, eds. 2008. Acts of Citizenship. London: Zed Books. Kendzior, Sarah. 2018. “The Fallacy of the Phrase, ‘The Muslim World’.” In The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America. New York: Flatiron Books. Langford, Michelle. 2007. “Allegory and the Aesthetics of Becoming-Woman in Marziyeh Meshkini’s ‘The Day I Became a Woman’.” In Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies 22 (1(64)). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Radovic, Milja. 2014. Transnational Cinema and Ideology: Representing Religion, Identity and Cultural Myths. New York: Routledge. Radovic, Milja. 2017. Film, Religion and Activist Citizens: An Ontology of Transformative Acts. New York: Routledge. Sklar, Robert and Saverio Giovacchini. 2011. Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

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Webography “Afghan Film Star in French Exile After Death Threats.” The Local, May 5, 2016. www.thelocal.fr/20160505/afghan-flm-star-in-french-exile-after-death-threats. Last accessed 29 December 2017. “Interview: The Day I Became a Woman.” Film International, December 21, 2000: www.makhmalbaf.com/?q=article/interview-day-i-became-woman. Last accessed 29 December 2017. Maruf, Maryam and Margaret Loescher. “Osama and Afghan Cinema: An Interview with Siddiq Barmak.” openDemocracy, March  4, 2004. www.opendemocracy. net/arts-Film/article_1769.jsp. Last accessed 29 December 2017. Nelson, Sara C. “Saudi Arabian Religious Police ‘Lift Bicycle Ban for Women’.” In The Hufngton Post, April  2, 2013. www.hufngtonpost.co.uk/2013/04/02/ saudi-arabian-religious-police-lift-bicycle-ban-women-veil-male-relative_ n_2999576.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xl LmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAAHsucGkIJstO-B_ulo5-nMLwbIQT09g2 E2PclJFrey4i2kkwC95qkY9da0qdfUWTIJ-vCvXuyR2K2hQ-sw82YQlR2b_v0kPR2jI9s3wJIF8Blx_6g_yubQFanjI6ylQTTq4OHr97WVk_NidRd1_D_0Sc0e6Th qY70d3p6yYSyH. Last accessed 9 April 2019. “ ‘The Day I  Became a Woman’ – Marzieh Meshkini (2000).” The Film Suf, March  24, 2016. www.flmsuf.com/2016/03/the-day-i-became-woman-marziehmeshkini.html. Last accessed 29 December 2017.

Filmography PrimaryOsama (Siddiq Barmak, Afghanistan/Ireland/Japan, 2003) Stray Dogs (Marzieh Meshkini, Iran/France/Afghanistan, 2004) The Day I Became a Woman (Marzieh Meshkini, Iran, 2000) Wadjda (Haifaa al-Mansour, Saudi Arabia/Netherlands/Germany/Jordan/United Arab Emirates/USA, 2012) Where Do We Go Now? (Nadine Labaki, Lebanon/France/Egypt/Italy, 2011)

Part V

New understandings of confict

13 Islam, gender, and extremist violence in contemporary Egyptian cinema Clarissa Burt

While the image of Arab as terrorist has been the subject of investigation in the study of American flms (Alsultany 2012, 2016; Gettl 2009; Semmerling 2006; Shaheen 2001; Slocum 2005), there has been much less examination to date of images of terrorism in Arabic cinematic production. Arab societies have sufered scourges of violence in recent decades attributable to militant groups espousing violent extremist ideologies, and the counteractive measures of regimes scrambling to maintain control. The governments and individuals within these societies have had to react to and strategize in response to militant groups which perpetrate violence, and to come to terms with the draw which extremist groups must have had to gain adherents in Arab societies. How have Egyptians, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, viewed the relationship between perpetrators of violence using religiously articulated justifcations, and more mainstream understandings of Islam which the nonviolent majority espouse? Cinematic production ofers us a window into attempts by Egyptian flmmakers to come to terms with sources of extremist violence, to understand the appeal of such groups in their societies, and to relate stories of victims and perpetrators of this violence. This chapter analyzes a set of flms from Egypt which contain characterizations of extremists, their perpetration of violent actions, and the exploration of the causal chain which led to their entry onto a pathway of violence. These flms also ofer contrasting images and discourse on Muslim identity, piety, devotion, social responsibility, and gender values, while exploring the communal and individual crises caused by or coincidental with violent extremist actions. These dramatic (and occasionally comedic) feature flms treat extremist phenomena directly, such as The Terrorist (al-Irhaabi, Nader Gelal, 1994) and Terrorism and Kebab (al-Irhaab wa-l-Kabaab, Sherif Arafa, 1992). Others such as Yacoubian Building (‘Imarat Ya’qubyan, Marwan Hamed, 2006) or The Closed Door (al-Abwab al-Moghlaka, Atef Hatata, 1999) examine the personal stories of those touched by extremist violence. These flms’ images of extremist violence are examined in the context of the social, economic, political, cultural, and individual characters’ circumstances presented in the flm and those contemporaneous to the flm’s production, to examine how contemporary Egyptian cinema suggests how

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Egyptians struggle to understand the violence labelled “terrorism” in their society. Egypt, with its signifcant history of cinematic production (Shafk 2007; Armes 2010), provides a fascinating locus for the divergent uses of Islamic discourse and images of the “terrorist” in contrast to other images of Muslim identity and practice in flm. It is critically important to distinguish between the broad range of mainstream religious expression among Muslims in Egypt, and modern fundamentalist currents which appeared in 20th century Egypt, most obviously with establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt at the hands of Hassan al-Banna, and the later appearance of a number of fundamentalist groups, including al-Gamaa’aat al-Islamiyyah (Jabbour 1993; Kenny 2006; Zeidan 1999).1 While some of these groups have focused in on understandings of communal and individual piety, others have espoused militant action to destabilize government, toward the goal of establishing an Islamic state according to literal “originalist” interpretations of Islamic texts. In this chapter, then, the term Islamist refers to an Islamic fundamentalist (who may not be violent at all), while radical, extremist, or militant Islamist is used to refer to a member of a group which deploys violence in pursuit of its political goals.

Terrorism and Kebab Terrorism and Kebab (1992) directed by Sherif Arafa, and starring Adel Imam, refects the social and political challenges in Egyptian society related to terrorism at the decade of the 20th century. Although the history of the acts by the violent arm of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups (al-Gama’aat al-Islamiyyah) may go back to the frst half of the 20th century, this flm appeared shortly after a particular upturn in violent incidents aimed at police, ofcials, civilians, and tourists starting in the 1990s. In this context, this comedy flm presents social and political commentary on Egyptian society (Neihardt 2011; Fanous 2012) through the story of Ahmed, an employee at the Water Commission, who also holds an evening job to make ends meet, and who wishes to process a school transfer for his children in the central governmental administrative building, al-Mugamma’, located in Tahrir Square. Unable to efect the transfer on his frst visit, due to the inefciencies of government employees, he must return another day. He faces the anger of his boss for taking a second day of to efect this administrative task. After a full day of deepening frustration with the miserable, dizzying bureaucratic nightmare of the Mugamma’ ofces, and employees’ avoidance of fulflling their responsibilities, he refuses to leave the ofce dealing with school transfers that afternoon until his task is complete. Security comes to remove him. In his struggle to stay put, Ahmed grabs the security ofcer’s gun, instantly becoming an accidental terrorist. Four other marginal and oppressed members of society soon join with him to hold the Mugamma’ hostage. Finally, after demanding and winning kebab dinners

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for everyone in the building, to their delight, Ahmed considers this life or death situation, and expresses his one desire for human dignity – to not be humiliated at work, home, or in the street. His comrades add their desire for justice, truth, and fairness, each telling his or her story of complaint against their treatment by the government. They demand the government ministers all resign, to no efect. Faced with imminent attack by security forces, Ahmed releases the hostages, who, now sympathetic to his situation, come back and include him in their midst as they exit the building, leaving no terrorists to be found. In this flm, the terrorism depicted is simply accidental and without ideological or religious underpinnings, for Ahmed is not a radical Islamist, but rather merely a frustrated citizen. The images of Islamic fundamentalism in the flm, while not violent, are, moreover, less than savory: one of the government employees in the ofce where Ahmed seeks to efect the school transfer is never available to do his job because he is constantly praying. He sports the beard, skullcap, and forehead callous often associated with those aligning themselves with the Muslim Brotherhood. His constant expression of piety in the form of continual prostrations on his prayer rug in the ofce seems to be an unassailable means to avoid actually doing any work. The same character ogles an attractive woman who had been arrested and accused as a sex worker, and who now has joined forces with Ahmed. The Muslim Brother suggests that she could live a rich and comfortable life, if she simply decided to put on the veil, and marry one of the Muslim Brothers, and be shut away in her house. The woman, whose life has been negatively impacted by women’s status in Egyptian society, wants none of the piety which, from her perspective, simply disguises lust and a desire to control women. The flm critiques the unwieldy and inhumane inefciencies of government, the unfairness of the justice system, and the unmet needs and daily humiliations of citizens of the state, while also critiquing the behavior of the Muslim Brother character as venal and hypocritical. The seeming terrorist takeover of a government building, and the taking of hostages tragicomically reveals the daily frustrations which Egyptian experience in their society and interactions with the state apparatus.

The Terrorist In contrast, and perhaps in response to the worsening security situation in Egypt in the early 1990’s, The Terrorist, a second flm starring Adel Imam, and directed by Nader Gelal, is a much more serious depiction of a fundamentalist terrorist organization in Egypt, just as the flm also may be seen as a message of support for government campaigns against terrorism (Birnbaum 2013). The main character, Ali Abd el-Zaher, has participated in an attack on a gold jewelry store catering to both Christian and Muslim customers, perhaps to fund the organization, and against a video store, ofering entertainment considered taboo according to the group’s Islamist values.2

184 Clarissa Burt Chased by the police, Ali reports back to Brother Seif, his spiritual leader who calls for the violent overthrow of the “heretical” regime, and bans television, music, dancing, movies, smoking, and the visibility of women to non-relatives. As reward for his fdelity to the group, Brother Seif ofers him engagement to a fully veiled woman, whose melodious voice he hears. Ali learns she is a young widow, whose previous husband died in one of the organization’s operations, and accepts the ofer. As bride-price for the woman, however, Ali must carry out an attack on tourist buses, which he does. Now hunted by the police and security forces, Ali is sent to hide out in Cairo without seeing the promised fancée. Further charged to carry out the assassination of a journalist who rails against Islamic extremist violence, Ali must shave his beard and wear Western style clothing to get near the target. We see the journalist speaking at a public event with slogans written behind him: No to Violence, No to Terrorism, Egypt for all Egyptians (Christian and Muslim), Egypt is a Land of Safety and Security. In contrast to these slogans, Ali and his co-conspirators attempt the assassination of the journalist, who survives the attack. A police ofcer from Tura prison, where detainees and political prisoners from al-Gama’aat al-Islamiyya are held and tortured, however, is shot. Ali alone escapes, only to be hit by a car when he emerges from the metro. The family of the woman whose car struck him take him into their gardened villa and call the father of the family, a doctor, to come care for the injured man. The doctor, who coincidentally is treating the ofcer wounded in the attack, returns home to care for the unknown man whom his daughter struck, in an attempt to avoid legal complications from the accident. While Ali is unconscious from the shock, the family opens the attaché case he had been carrying in search of his identity. They conclude he must be Mustafa Abd elRahman, a philosophy professor from Cairo University, from whom the car containing the attaché case had been stolen for use in the terrorist operation. Much of the flm concerns Ali’s convalescence in their home under this assumed name of Professor Mustafa, during which we observe the huge contrast between the values Ali had been taught by the Islamist group, and the values of the liberal well-to-do Muslim family which has taken him in. When he protests their generosity and hospitality, the mother says, “We know our Lord,” suggesting that their behavior is guided by their religious faith. Yet he is scandalized by the rich folk – their music, television, posters of movies and Che Guevara, and women in Western clothing. Meanwhile, the police have surrounded the district of the city to prevent the escape of the terrorist, whom they know is in the area. The family expresses dismay at the terrorists on the news, doubting their Egyptianness, opining they are mercenaries to foreign interests, or the uneducated poor, manipulated by others. Ali/Mustafa meets their next door neighbor, a Christian whose wife is quite conservative and strict, and mistakes him for a pious Muslim. He enjoys this man’s company, and is much surprised and taken aback to later discover that this man is in fact Christian.

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The wounded ofcer dies, and Ali has now abetted murder of the doctor’s dead patient. Brother Seif comes to visit under the guise of a relative from Mustafa/Ali’s village, and instructs Ali to steal money from the family, and to freely assault the “loose” women, since the women of heretics are booty. While playing cards with the younger daughter, Ali puts his hand on her knee, to her great ofense. That night he tries to steal money and sneak out of the house, but he is felled by a gallbladder attack. The family members take him to hospital for treatment, and bring him home to recover, with the older daughter Susan nursing him. Ali discovers that the journalist, who had been the original target of the unsuccessful attack that had claimed the ofcer’s life, is a close friend of his host family. During a visit at their home during Ali/Mustafa’s recovery, the journalist, the Christian neighbor, Ali/Mustafa and the family all sit around watching the soccer cup fnal. Each prays in his own way for Egypt’s victory in the soccer match. When the Egyptian team wins, Ali/Mustafa spontaneously embraces the Christian neighbor, who leads the communal chant “al-Misriyyina-humma” (Egyptians, They’re the ones!). Ali sees and enjoys this moment of national and confessional unity despite himself. Ali/Mustafa intends to leave the next day, but is clearly impacted by what he has experienced. Susan, the older daughter who had struck him in her car and nursed him, had become drawn to Mustafa based on the personal journal she had read from the attaché case. She asks him to stay one more day to attend her birthday party the next night. She kisses him on the cheek, when she discovers he is not engaged. Ali/Mustafa clearly is falling in love with her. The next day, the younger daughter has determined to fnd out who Ali/ Mustafa really is, due to his touching her inappropriately, and his mysterious behavior. She discovers the pistol hidden in his room, and resolves to fnd out more. That evening, the lavish birthday party begins. The targeted journalist and a General of the Security Forces in attendance talk about the terrorist problem, and its funding from abroad. Ali/Mustafa comments that the Islamists will not go away, as it is ideological warfare. The General of the Security Forces wonders where he has seen him before. Both the general and host family’s younger daughter become more and more suspicious, while Ali/Mustafa drinks, firts with women, declares himself a communist, and dances rowdily in turn, all in attempt to throw them of the scent. He becomes quite inebriated, only to hold forth loudly and tipsily from the stair landing before all the guests in a fre-and-brimstone fundamentalist sermon, condemning all the behaviors before him, when he passes out from excessive alcohol consumption. The next morning, the younger sister goes early to Cairo University where she meets the real Mustafa Abd el-Rahman, whose car and attaché case had been stolen the month before. Meanwhile, back home Ali/Mustafa is taking his leave of the still trusting family members. The mother gives him a neck chain with a protective verse from the Qur’an, to send him on his way.

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The younger daughter arrives home in time to confront him, at which he acknowledges he is the missing terrorist. The mother asks how could he possibly know religion, killing women and children as he had done? He leaves the house to fnd he’s surrounded, his escape route cut of. So he gets out the pistol and fees to the Christian neighbor’s house, where he takes them hostage. When he has yet another gallbladder attack, the decent neighbor gives him an injection to ease the pain, explaining that he had been in the medical corps in the war of ’73. Ali escapes via metro to central Cairo, pointed evidence of the state building infrastructure to the beneft of all Egyptians. He makes it back to Brother Seif, where he fnds his promised fancée has been married to someone else. He requests time to think and recover. The organization decides to send him abroad – perhaps Afghanistan, thus confrming the international ties of the Islamist organization. Ali learns that there is to be a second attempt to assassinate the targeted journalist. As Ali heads toward the border, he calls to warn the journalist of the assassination attempt, to no avail. The journalist is struck down. Ali turns back to Cairo, wishing to express his love for Susan, the older daughter who had nursed him. He is shot from two distinct directions at once by both an Islamist sniper for his betrayal of their cause, and by the security forces as a hunted terrorist, to die in Susan’s arms, knowing he had been wrong, and regretting he could not save the journalist’s life. This flm, then, ofers two radically contrasting images of Muslim piety. The frst is the ideal of the Islamist, which details strict behavioral proscriptions, constraints on women and their use as objects of reward, the repudiation of all who do not identify with the radical Islamist mission, and justifcations for violence and its use by the group to achieve the goal of an Islamic state. The other depicts the common everyday religious sentiments and expressions of the doctor’s rather secular liberal well-to-do Muslim family, who also emphasize Egyptian identity as the great unifer embracing all religious identities. In this fashion, Islamist terrorists are contrasted with upper middle class well-educated and successful people who profess and act out their charity, liberal devotion to Islam, and successfulness in society, in alignment with the projects and policies of the state. All aspects of the argument structure of the flm encourage a critical discrediting of the Islamist group which destroys property, kills innocents, considers women treasure or booty, and despises all others who do not agree with them. The flm clearly outlines the dismay which many mainstream Egyptians feel in the face of terrorist acts – particularly that of the more privileged classes who enjoy decent standards of living, nice places to live, have prospects for the future, do not sufer at the hands of police, and reject religious discrimination. While the doctor’s family and their well-placed friends express sorrow that less privileged Egyptians may be taken in by the Islamists’ discourse, there is no indication what either they or the state can do beyond slogans to counteract the attraction which Islamist organizations may have by way of the support services, community, and pathways to marriage and income they ofer.

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One of the more interesting constructs of the flm is the contradistinction of the Islamist exclusionist identity with a nationalist, Egypt-frst identity, which embraces both Muslims and Christians (Khatib 2006). It is the nationalist Egypt-frst identity which lies behind the mother’s wondering how the terrorists could really be Egyptian – how could they have drunk from the waters of the Nile and still perpetrate such atrocities?! Similarly, it was the Egypt-frst nationalist identity which allowed the neighbors, friends, and dissembling terrorist among them to celebrate Egypt’s win in the soccer fnal, despite their diferences, and their diferent manners of praying. The Terrorist as a flm allows the viewer to fantasize how to change a terrorist’s heart, through love, morality, liberal Islam, and modern, national values. It does not, however, give us insight into how Ali arrived at his recruitment into the Islamist group or the conviction to use violence in the frst place. This is the only flm considered here which suggests it might be possible to change the mind of someone committed to the violent acts for which he has been trained. In the unlikely scenario of The Terrorist, the perpetrator confronts the humanity and kindness of the Egyptians whom his organization has targeted, and comes to identify with the more inclusive nationalist Egyptian identity over strict intolerant sectarianism. It is not a solution for a grander scale.

The Closed Door In The Closed Door (1999) directed by Atef Hatata, we see the cinematic imagination of how a young man is gradually recruited into an Islamist organization, and evolves toward an eruption of violence. Muhammad (nicknamed Hamada) is being raised by his mother alone, as his father divorced her, abandoned them fnancially, remarried, and raised another family. His older brother has been missing in Iraq for the last three years. Fatma, his mother, works as a maid in the home of a well-to-do couple, where the husband eyes her sexually, while Fatma attempts to please and engage the lonely and neglected wife. When Hamada is kicked out of his Arabic class for peeping at the girls’ school next door, he learns that his teacher Ustadh Mansour wishes to give him private lessons, which Fatma can ill aford. Muslim Brother Hassan, who works at the school, kindly suggests he fnd study help at the local mosque. It is through Brother Hassan and the study group at the mosque that Hamada learns the strictures of Islamist discourse. Although Hamada feels confdent in his Arabic and community in the mosque lessons, Ustadh Mansour comes to his house to speak with his mother to insist on outside lessons. Hamada goes to his father’s ofce that sends workers to jobs abroad, to ask for the money for the lessons on which Ustadh Mansour insists. His father refuses to help, despite the fact that Hamada has spied on the father’s new family to see that they enjoy a much higher standard of living than he and Fatma do. Ustadh Mansour, clearly interested in Fatma, ofers the lessons at a discount. Hamada objects, but his mother accepts the kind ofer, hoping for the lad to grow up

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successful and become a pilot, as he dreams. At some point over the course of weeks of lessons, Ustadh Mansour is able to communicate his interest to Fatma. At home, Hamada is uncomfortable with his mother working as a maid, especially when he hears about the employer husband’s behavior. His mother’s friend and next door neighbor, Zainab, is a sex worker, unbeknownst to Hamada. While they chat, Fatma asks her, doesn’t she fear God? At Fatma’s job, the husband asks her to clean his old apartment on her day of (but in secret from the wife), during which he attempts to rape her. She is able to fght him of, and maintain her chastity. When Fatma stays home in bed, ill from the trauma, and considering how to manage the attempted rape, Hamada sees his mother with sexual eyes for the frst time, and later has a wet dream which causes him consternation. He takes his experience to Shaykh Khalid at the mosque who urges chastity, veiling of women, keeping them home, and promises each of the lads at the lesson 4000 virgins, 8000 concubines, and 100 slave girls for those who go to heaven from among the Brotherhood. Infamed by this sexually arousing discourse, Hamada returns home. When Zeinab ofers him tea as he awaits his mother’s return from work, and sits by him on the couch, he fumblingly jumps on her in an abortive sexual assault, which Zeinab easily defects. He runs away in shame, and later uses tapes of Islamist sermons to loudly compete with the television’s romantic musicals, and Zeinab and his mother’s playful makeup session. Shortly thereafter, while chatting with the employer’s wife who drinks alcohol during the day, Fatma inadvertently reveals that she has been to the husband’s apartment, triggering the suspicious and jealous wife to insist on her expulsion from her job. Hamada is glad at this news, for her mother is now away from the harassing employer. Fatma, however, wonders how they will live. Hamada consults with Shaykh Khalid at the mosque, who instructs him to have his mother stay home and veil. He suggests that she should marry a real man from among the Brothers. Ustadh Mansour, on the other hand, promises to help her fnd a new job, and continues the lessons for free. Hamada decides to take on responsibility for the household, however, and peddles fowers in the street with the brazen Awadain, a street youth he had befriended. Despite getting into a street fght over peddling territory, and baring a switchblade, Hamada proudly pays Mansour for his lessons, and funds the household through his activities. Based on this economic power, he instructs his mother to veil and stay at home. Desperate for help with the now self-righteous and overbearing lad, the mother goes to his father, who refuses to take the young man in hand. Despite excelling in his lessons both at the mosque and with Ustadh Mansour, the unexpected difculty of the General High School exam in Arabic take Hamada and his classmates by surprise. His classmates rip up their exam papers in dismay, while Hamada makes his into a paper airplane, spelling the end of the dream of academic success. Peddling once again on

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the street with Awadain, Hamada witnesses his friend being struck by a car and killed, propelling Hamada into crisis. Distraught, he fnds his way to Shaykh Khalid preaching in an outlying town, where the crowds of men call out, “There is no homeland but Islam.”3 Shaykh Khalid allows the boy to mourn, then sends Hamada with a letter to a leader higher in the organization, a Shaykh Abdul-Aziz, for a solution to the boy’s situation. Hamada now begins to peddle religious tracts outside the mosque, and practices fre and brimstone sermons on his bed. The solution arrives soon thereafter, when Shaykh Khalid congratulates Hamada that his mother may marry Shaykh Abdul-Aziz, while Hamada himself may marry Shaykh Khalid’s lovely young daughter Samaa. Shaykh Khalid would visit soon to lay out the proposal. When Shaykh Khalid and Brother Hassan come to propose to Fatma (who would be a joint-wife were she to accept), she rebufs them by falsely claiming she was still married to Hamada’s father. Enraged that he had tried to foist her of on some Islamist so he could marry, Fatma and Hamada fght, and she kicks him out of the house for a few miserable hours overnight. Defying Hamada’s repeated instructions that she stays at home, Fatma soon fnds a job in a nursery school with decent pay. She begins to come home later than expected for she has started meeting Ustadh Mansour as their gentle relationship develops. Under pressure to control his mother, Hamada has Muslim Brothers intimidate Zeinab into leaving her home next door. Hamada follows his mother after work to the apartment where she meets Ustadh Mansour. He breaks in to fnd them together, and stabs Mansour and then his mother multiple times with his switchblade. With his mother lifeless on the foor below him, he looks with horror at what he has done, as people pound on the door to discover what horrible mishap has occurred. As a coming-of-age story gone wrong, the argument structure of the flm suggests that Hamada arrives at his episode of violence through a horrible confuence of factors – abandonment by his father, poverty, the destruction of dreams for future success through standard (academic) pathways, sexual stirrings in confusion and shame, and an experienced afront to his family sexual honor in the form of his mother’s relationship with Ustadh Mansour, combined with the strict moral, religious, and political injunctions of the Islamist brotherhood from whom he received the only support he could accept, and the violent thuggery he had developed on the street. Without a helpful male role model in his life, and faced with pressure to “become a man” from all sides, Hamada chose to align himself with Brother Hassan and Shaykh Khalid, and their strict discourse over Ustadh Mansour and his mother, and her amity with sinners (Zeinab in particular). He chose the moral rigidity of the Islamists over the moral fexibility of his mother, and was entrapped when he was most in need, by the Islamists’ promises of sexual fulfllment, connection, and guiltlessness, if he would only abide by the strictures they laid down. Frantic at the need to control his mother,

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whom he now saw as wayward, and who destroyed his chance to marry Khalid’s lovely daughter, he struck out in rage at what he could justify as her sinful behavior, and destroyed the one closest to him. In this fashion, the flm has made it imaginable how the young man evolved into a killer under the infuence of Islamist discourse.

The Yacoubian Building The Yacoubian Building (‘Imarat Ya’qubyan, 2006) directed by Marwan Hamed in an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Ala’ al-Aswani, exhibits similar argument arcs concerning the origin of Islamic extremist violence on a larger scale. All of the flms suggest that a young man, impeded by poverty, and lack of opportunity to progress toward fulflling ideals for manhood in the form of a sustainable livelihood that would allow him to marry and support a family, may be ripe for recruitment by Islamist organizations and vulnerable to brainwashing for their purposes. In The Yacoubian Building, the story of turning to Islamist fundamentalist violence is but one thread of many which are woven together in the fabric of the flm as a whole, which follows the lives of several residents in the iconic building. Taha El-Shazli is the son of the resident doorman, janitor and guard in the Yacoubian building, whose family lives on the roof in small shacks divided among several other poor families. Taha loves Buthaina, who also lives in a rooftop set of two rooms with her mother and siblings. The two have been close since childhood; and Taha has given Buthaina a silver ring as a sign of his love for her. When Taha is helping his father mop the main staircase and landings of the building, we learn that Taha has scored high on the general high school exams, which would allow him to go into the engineering school for university, when a well-to-do resident and his wife ask about him as they enter their fat. He says he would prefer to enter the police academy and serve his country. He prays his dawn prayers as he prepares for his interview for the police academy. Despite tensions in their relationship, Buthaina heartily wishes Taha success as he goes of in his new suit to his interview for the police academy, calling down prayers and blessing upon him. In the interview, however, despite his excellent grades, and excellent answers to interview questions, he trips up over a question about his father’s profession. Taha stretches the truth and says that his father is a [government] employee. When the interviewer challenges him, saying is not his father a building doorman and guard, Taha replies that that is a type of employee. The interviewer dismisses Taha, either for his lowly origins or for his attempts to hide the socially embarrassing truth of his class. Taha is crushed by the disappointment. When next we see him, Taha is attending his frst college lectures in his new suit, sitting high up in the lecture hall, observing other college men and women from afar. He is approached by another young man in plaid who asks why he is sitting so far away. They fall into conversation, sharing their

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common sense of alienation from the more well-to-do, and their sense of being out of place, as the sons of a doorman and a cobbler. Taha attends prayer at the mosque at the university, and meets a Muslim Brother student named Khalid, who praises his piety, and encourages him to attend Friday prayer at a large congregational mosque. Taha later catches up with Buthaina walking home on the day her new boss had exploited her sexually at her new job. He tells her how discouraged he is by his sense of alienation at college. Tired and downcast, and hiding the harassment, which is the price of continued employment, Buthaina tells Taha to fnish school and go work in the Gulf. He agrees, on the condition that she go with him. Taha notices that Buthaina is depressed and changed. In the subsequent weeks, Taha begins to attend Friday prayer with his schoolmate Khalid at a large congregational mosque, with an increased presence of security personnel. He has let his beard grow for several weeks, emulating those around him. The imam delivers a sermon criticizing the moral bankruptcy of society and the state, advocating for a state which is “not democratic or socialist, but Islamic.” Taha returns home from the mosque to see Buthaina hanging laundry. He ofers her a book calling her to “Veil before the Day of Reckoning.” Buthaina explodes in anger, and resentment at his attempt to control her according to these Islamist teachings. She breaks of their relationship for good, pointing out how he had begun growing his beard like an Islamist, while Buthaina prefers to wear short skirts, in contradistinction to the fundamentalist ideals dictated in his book. Sufering from the loss of Buthaina, Taha goes to consult with the shaykh/ imam of the large mosque, who tries to comfort him for the loss, suggesting that there are lots of good fsh in the sea. The shaykh then challenges Taha to focus on jihad rather than romance, and love of God rather than love of woman. He then asks him to lead a demonstration at the university, which he does. The large student Islamist demonstration clashes with the riot police at the gate of the university. Taha is beaten, and captured. In detention, blindfolded, Taha is tortured and beaten to soften him up for the interrogator. The interrogator arrives with the distinctive sounds of his metallic cigarette lighter, and his voice. Suggesting he knows everything about Taha and all the residents of the Yacoubian building, including the fact that his mother had been married before his father, the interrogator asks to which Islamist organization Taha belongs. When Taha denies everything, the interrogator declares that he will have his subordinates rape Taha to force him to talk. The rape ensues, after which we see Taha naked, alone weeping in detention. A month later, Taha meets the shaykh at Groppi’s for tea, having spent these weeks hiding out at home since his release, attempting to get over his horrible experience in police custody, during which he had never ofered any information. The shaykh wants him back at school; but Taha is way beyond that . . . he wants revenge on the man and system which had raped him, taken his honor, and wounded his manhood. The shaykh then takes

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Taha to the Islamist training camp somewhere in a desert oasis, where he undergoes military style basic training, and studies under another Islamist shaykh. During the extended time at the desert Islamist training camp, Taha marries a beautiful young woman from among the Islamist group, fulflling his sexual dreams and desires. When fnally Taha and two companions go into the city to assassinate the interrogator who had had Taha raped, a terrible gun battle ensues, in which all three Islamists and the interrogator and several of his guards and subordinates are killed. Taha and his target fall near each other, with their dying blood intermingling on the street. While the story of Taha el-Shazli is but one thread of the complex story of The Yacoubian Building, it nonetheless serves to suggest that the combination of class discrimination, the frustration of ambition (to enter the police academy) based on educational and moral merit, lack of pathways for success, alienation from upper middle class peers, the lack and loss of love and sex, and the torture and abuse sufered at the hands of the state investigative apparatus all combine to allow Taha to be swayed by the Islamist group and participate in violent action. Taha’s story is also intimately bound up in gender, and the construction of masculinities in contemporary Egypt. Humiliated and disadvantaged by the social standing of his father in society, Taha fnds relief and strength among the Islamic Brothers who call for equality among men in an Islamic state dedicated to support the poor, ofering pathways to manhood, marriage, sanctioned sexual expression, livelihood in service to God and his polity, and images of everlasting male sexual fulfllment after death in paradise. Humiliated further by the sexual torture he endured at the hands of state security investigators, Taha seeks revenge for the forced violation of his own sexual dignity, and is empowered by the Islamists to do so, for their own purposes. In contrast to the Islamist ideology which draws Taha in, in his vulnerability, there is an alternative image of Muslim piety in “The Yacoubian Building,” which suggests the convenient use of piety as social capital in the personage of Hajj Azzam, a wealthy businessman in his late 50s or 60s, who owns numerous businesses in the downtown area, and who renovates one of the fats in the Yacoubian building for his new second wife. Hajj Azzam constantly presents himself as pious – in dress, behavior, and speech, despite consuming and dealing in hashish, and using and controlling his second wife for his secret pleasure and convenience. When Hajj Azzam fnds that he is experiencing sexual arousal and wet dreams, and fnding his frst wife unattractive and uninterested at this stage, he consults a shaykh, who congratulates him on his good health, and directs him to a second marriage, since Islam allows a man to marry as many as four women, so long as he can provide for them. While on a business trip in Alexandria, Azzam espies Su’ad, a pretty young veiled widow working in the ofces of a business colleague, and determines to marry her, on the condition that she leave her six-year-old son with her

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brother in Alexandria, and that she not conceive. The contract is economically advantageous to the widow Su’ad, who needs to support her son in whatever way she can, so she agrees. Su’ad fnds, however, that the arrangement is less than satisfactory. It is a marriage purely for Hajj Azzam’s pleasure. Hajj Azzam requires her to stay at home. The marriage, legal though it may be, is kept secret from the frst wife; so Hajj Azzam never sleeps in Su’ad’s apartment, after his sexual pleasure. Her son may not come to visit, and she may not visit him. Months later when Su’ad becomes pregnant, and shares the news happily, Azzam fies into a rage, and demands she abort the pregnancy. Su’ad refuses. With all Azzam’s attempts to convince Su’ad and her brother to efect an abortion to comply with the original agreement, only to be told that they fnd it contrary to God’s law, Hajj Azzam hires women to drug Su’ad and kidnap her from her bed and take her to abort the pregnancy. She awakens in hospital recovering from hemorrhage after the abortion. Azzam’s adult son comes to inform her that she is divorced and that all her belongings will be sent to her brother’s house along with the required divorce payment. When Su’ad in her pain says that Azzam does not know God, his son retorts that Azzam knows God very well, and has done everything according to the law. This particular image of Muslim piety is less than attractive, focused on Hajj Azzam as an astute business player who uses the levers of his understanding of Islamic law for his personal advantage and pleasure. Azzam uses (il)legal and social advantages he has as a rich man and husband to control and punish those who resist him, using the facade of piety to get away with assault, kidnapping, and forced medical procedures without consent. The Yacoubian Building, then, presents two powerful yet contrasting images of Islamic piety, one which uses Islamic fundamentalist discourse in attempt to make political, social, moral, and religious change in society through violence, and another in which an individual uses the tools and discourse of piety to his own advantage, at the expense of others. The flm does not focus on mainstream and moderate religious expression and practice, but on these two characters of Taha and Hajj Azzam whose use of Islamic discourse to justify actions is presented as extreme, problematic, even distasteful. For just as the shaykh manipulates Taha into carrying out political actions which escalate to murder, so Hajj Azzam manipulates people and the law in order to take what he wants from Su’ad, and to assault her, and remove her agency and choice from her, and throw her away when she becomes inconvenient. It is remarkable, however, that the argument structure of Taha’s story suggests that issues of class discrimination and the brutality and torture used by police and the security apparatus may also contribute to the recruitment of youths to violence. All of these Egyptian cinematic productions wrestle with the phenomena of Islamic extremist discourse and violence in Egypt, and ofer critical arguments for what factors might contribute to the vulnerability of youths in economic or emotional extremis to being recruited for such violent acts.

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While some of these flms seem to support the state and its response, they also contain social and political critique giving food for thought and posing challenges to the viewing audience. There are no happy endings. Several flms suggest that the interaction between requirements on young men to fulfll prescribed gender roles, the lack of pathways for economic success, and social and economic barriers to socially acceptable sexual expression may contribute to vulnerability to the infuence of extremist doctrine, and Islamist community support structures. At the same time, the flms do hint at dissatisfactions with police brutality, interrogation techniques of torture and abuse, governmental and judicial policies, all of which were factors in the recent revolutionary movements in Egypt. All this begs the question of what solution might be found for such extremist violence, between authoritarian rule based on the military, and authoritarian rule based on the Muslim Brotherhood or fundamentalist doctrine.

Notes 1 It is important to recognize and assert that, contrary to stereotypes in the west, the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not violent, and that among those who espouse fundamentalist piety, only a small minority have espoused violence, while some have repudiated it. 2 The irony is wonderfully unavoidable, that the attack against the video store also apprises those who watch this very flm that they are sinful in the eyes of the Islamist group Ali represents. 3 This fascinating chant is syntactically parallel to the frst line of the confession of faith in Islam: “There is no god but God . . . “This chant, then, sets up Islam at the primary of focus of allegiance, displacing and subordinating allegiance to homeland, tribe, nation state and family.

Works cited Alsultany, Evelyn. 2012. Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representations after 9/11. New York: New York University Press. Alsultany, Evelyn. 2016. “Representations of Arabs, Muslims, and Iranians in an Era of Complex Characters and Storylines.” Film Criticism 40, no. 1. Armes, Roy. 2010. Arab Filmmakers of the Middle East: A Dictionary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Birnbaum, Sariel. 2013. “Egyptian Cinema as a Tool in the Struggle Against Islamic Terrorism.” Terrorism and Political Violence 25, no. 4: 635–639. Fanous, Angelina. 2012. “If Only Egypt Made More Movies about Terrorism and Kebab.” Vice, May  31, 2012. www.vice.com/gr/article/5gw53z/if-only-egyptmade-more-movies-about-terrorism-kebab. Accessed 28 January 2018. Gettl, Robert. 2009. Terrorism in American Cinema: An Analytical Filmography, 1960–2008. Jeferson, NC: McFarland and Company. Jabbour, Nabeel. 1993. The Rumbling Volcano: Islamic Fundamentalism in Egypt. Pasadena: Mandate Press. Kenney, Jefery T. 2006. Muslim Rebels: Kharijites and the Politics of Extremism in Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Khatib, Lina. 2006. “Nationalism and Otherness: The Representation of Islamic Fundamentalism in Egyptian Cinema.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 9: 63–80. Neidhardt, Irit. 2011. “Conformist Provocations: Remarks on Sherif Arafa’s ‘Terrorism and Kebab’.” Qantara, 2011. https://en.qantara.de/node/1642. Accessed 28 January 2018. Semmerling, Tim Jon. 2006. “Evil” Arabs in American Popular Film: Orientalism Fear. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Shafk, Viola. 2007. Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, new revised ed. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Shaheen, Jack G. 2001. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifes a People. New York: Olive Branch Press. Slocum, J. David, ed. 2005. Terrorism, Media and Liberation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Zeidan, David. 1999. “Radical Islam in Egypt: A  Comparison of Two Groups.” Middle East Review of International Afairs 3, no. 3: n.p.

14 Citizenship, ethnicity, and religion Muslim immigrants in German cinematic arts1 Anna Ayse Akasoy When discussing Islam in Europe, sociologist José Casanova sometimes starts with the observation that he frst used to see Turks in Germany, then Turks and Kurds in Germany, and fnally Muslims in Germany. The point is that these are in fact the same people, whose collective identity as immigrant ‘Others’ is constructed by themselves and by others outside of their communities in ever new ways, from citizenship to ethnicity to religion. This development refects larger shifts in global politics, German public discourse, and academic study. In what follows, I survey the extent to which German cinematic arts refect the presumed discursive shift from citizenship to ethnicity to religion, and then explore what might happen next. Given the signifcance of ethnicity and religion for constructions of nationhood and vice versa, these categories naturally overlap to some extent. My primary focus will be on the changing role of religion. I  have selected plots that foreground immigrant identity, which is often the case with protagonists of immigrant origin, but not always. Germany’s largest ethno-cultural minority, individuals of Turkish or Kurdish origin are mostly labor immigrants who entered the country since West Germany’s labor recruitment agreement with Turkey in 1961, or their descendants.2 Muslim labor immigrants in West Germany also came from Morocco, Tunisia, and former Yugoslavia. German cinematic arts have often been at the forefront of critical discourses about ethnic and cultural diversity.3 Progressive flmmakers draw attention to social ills, such as discrimination and exploitation in the work place, housing, education, political rights, and racism. Writers and directors of immigrant origin use the screen to participate in public negotiations of German national identity. Given state funding for the cinematic arts and public broadcasting, flm and television also illustrate ofcial concern with social, cultural, and political developments.

Gender and Muslim otherness In German cinematic arts, gendered female behavior, especially the victimization of women, typically serves as synecdoche of Muslim otherness and

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is a prominent feature in cinematic representations of Turks independent of whether their national or religious identity is foregrounded. Helma SandersBrahms’ Shirin’s Wedding (Shirins Hochzeit; 1976) is the earliest such example. Having grown up in impoverished rural Anatolia, Shirin (Ayten Erten) moves to Germany as a labor immigrant looking for her betrothed Mahmud. She experiences terrible exploitation and even sexual abuse as a worker and then as a prostitute. While Shirin’s Wedding resembles the Turkish village flm in which young women are corrupted by city life, Hark Bohm’s Yasemin (1988) is entirely set in Germany and perpetuates the stereotype of the imprisoned and exoticized Turkish immigrant woman. Journalistic, academic, and feminist treatments of this trope since the early 1980s already frequently identify Islam as the reason for this oppression,4 but in these flms religion hardly enjoys any discursive or narrative presence. It is tradition and masculinity which are evoked rather than the Qur’an. In Feo Aladag’s When We Leave (Die Fremde; 2010), Umay (Sibel Kekilli) leaves her husband in Istanbul and returns with her little son to Berlin. This action brings shame on the family who are shunned by their community. Rather than discussing the situation with local German Muslim authorities, Umay’s father Kader returns to his native Turkish village to consult with an unidentifed elder. Kader’s visit is shown without any dialogue. But we may presume that the elder issued Umay’s death sentence. Her youngest brother is chosen to kill Umay, although it is ultimately her little boy who loses his life during the confrontation. The precise reasons for this violence never emerge fully for the viewer. Because the contents of the consultation with the elder are left to the viewer’s imagination, we remain ignorant of any scruples on the part of Umay’s father or understand why he decides to have his daughter killed. The close parallels between the fctitious case of Umay and the real murder of Hatun Sürücü in 2005 provided German viewers with a context from which they could extrapolate further details. The case gained a high profle in German media and led to debates about ‘honor killings’ as an extreme expression of the failure of Turkish immigrants to integrate into German society. As indicated earlier, it is often Islam that is held responsible in public debates. By assigning religion a critical role in insinuating that the elder’s authority is grounded in religion or allowing viewers to draw this conclusion, Aladag afrms tropes of public discourse, but she does not seriously narrativize its signifcance. She also perpetuates Turkish constructions of ‘honor killings’ as a rural practice since it is in the father’s home village where the decision about Umay’s death is made. In Tevfk Başer’s 40 Square Meters of Germany (40 Quadratmeter Deutschland; 1986), the patriarchal Dursun (Yaman Okay) imprisons his newly arrived wife Turna (Özay Fecht) in their small apartment, ostensibly to protect her from the morally corrupt Germans. Since the flm’s perspective refects that of Turna and never takes the viewer outside of the apartment, we never learn how Turna and Dursun are labeled by others, not even from the Turkish and German newspapers that litter the apartment. While

198 Anna Ayse Akasoy religion mostly enjoys a visual presence, as it does in other flms where objects with pious phrases decorate domestic space, Dursun also brings a religious teacher, a hoca, home to perform a magical fertility treatment on Turna. After the elaborate ritual, Turna indeed and much to her joy becomes pregnant. Likewise, in When We Leave, religious magic is used for the beneft of women when Umay’s mother gives her a talisman. Ultimately, however, this magic is not subversive. It only allows women to survive and function within a patriarchal society. The earliest appearances of Turkish and other labor immigrants as protagonists in German cinematic arts refect the principles of what is regularly referred to as a ‘cinema of duty’ in which immigrant flmmakers, in particular, are expected to produce realistic representations of their social experience. Other flms too were driven by such political concerns. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali. Fear Eats the Soul (Ali. Angst essen Seele auf; 1974) tells the story of the relationship between a Moroccan labor immigrant known by the stereotypical name Ali (El Hedi Ben Salem) and Emmi (Brigitte Mira), a German cleaning lady, 30 years his senior. Emmi’s environment ostracizes the couple, but after they fnally accept them, Emmi too internalizes their exoticization of Ali and the couple drift apart. They reconcile, but Ali ends up in hospital with an ulcer, diagnosed as a typical immigrant condition. While Ali is marked in racial and cultural terms, religion does not feature in his identity, whether constructed by himself or others, or the flm’s director for that matter. He never refers to himself as a Muslim or practices Islamic rituals. He never prays. He drinks and gambles. While Fassbinder also chose gendered relationships in order to portray issues of cultural diference, it is signifcant that the victimized and sexualized immigrant is male. The flm’s aesthetic and narrative priorities, that is, Fassbinder’s homoerotic gaze and his provocative stance refected in Emmi’s advanced age, leave no space for Moroccan women. (Fassbinder himself, however, entertained an exploitative relationship with Ben Salem. This story is the subject of the documentary My Name Is Not Ali, directed by Viola Shafk.)

National and ethnic identities Although Fassbinder’s Ali is called a ‘Southerner’ (‘Südländer’) and forms part of a diverse community of ‘guest workers’, cultural identities of labor immigrants were often defned in national terms in the 1970s and 1980s. Beyond discursive construction, citizenship was critical for the social status and political rights of immigrants. The conditions of their migration were subject to state negotiations, for example, and while some labor immigrants became EU citizens, if only eventually, others did not, which deepened the divide among labor immigrants – this divide largely coincides with that between Christian and Muslim immigrants. Among labor immigrants in West Germany, those who came from predominantly Christian areas (Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, and parts of former Yugoslavia) came to enjoy the

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rights of EU citizens, whereas those who came from predominantly Muslim areas (Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, and parts of former Yugoslavia) were citizens of countries which never joined the EU. How signifcant the religious profle of the Turkish population was for the failed project of the country’s EU membership is subject to debate. Among the flms surveyed here, only 4 Blocks (see later) addresses the precarity which results from a certain immigration status. Ali and other ‘Southern’ labor immigrants were subject to racialized representations as were black characters and actors more regularly in Fassbinder’s flms. This involved a generic exoticization more than specifc ethnic terms. The decade following the end of the Cold War is commonly regarded as the period in which ethnic conficts exploded in Europe and the Middle East, especially in the disintegrating Yugoslavia, but also in Turkey. The early and mid-1990s saw large demonstrations and violent clashes between Kurds and Turks in Germany which culminated in the self-immolation of two young Kurdish women in Mannheim in 1994.5 The relationship between ethnocultural and national Turkish identity, while clearly critical to the population of Germany originally hailing from Turkey, has been mainly perceived as an ‘imported confict’ in German public discourse which needed to be resolved in the region itself.6 Compared to citizenship and the racialized diference between ‘native’ Germans and the recent immigrant population, ethnic diferences among immigrants from a single nation appear to play only a minor role in cinematic arts. A small number of flms by Kurdish German directors addressed the subject in the 2000s. Likewise, Ulusay attests Turkish cinema a ‘growing visibility of the Kurdish identity’.7 The most noteworthy case in Germany is probably Yüksel Yavuz (born 1964 in Karakoçan). Yavuz addressed the predicament of his parents’ generation in My Father, the Guest Worker (Mein Vater, der Gastarbeiter; 1994) and turned to Kurdish issues in Close Up Kurdistan (2007), where he connects his own history as an immigrant to the Turkish-Kurdish confict, and in Hêvî (2014), in which he documents the struggles of four Kurdish women. Yılmaz Arslan (1968 in Kazanlı, since 1975 in Germany) directed Fratricide (Brudermord; 2005) in which young Kurdish refugees in Germany clash violently with local Turkish youth. A more recent example is Soleen Yusef’s House without Roof (Haus ohne Dach; 2016) in which three Kurdish siblings travel from Germany to their deceased mother’s native northern Iraq in order to bury her next to her husband. Yusef also directed episodes 4–6 of the Netfix show Skylines (2019) which is set in Frankfurt’s music business. Mostly known as a fnancial center, the city was critical for the rise of German rap, but has a reputation for drugs and organized crime. Many of the show’s protagonists are Kurdish and some recount experiences of war. Religion never comes up in the show. German flmmakers without any genealogical background in the region have also taken on the Kurdish cause. In her short documentary November (2004), for example, Hito Steyerl remembers her friend Andrea Wolf who

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had died fghting for the PKK in 1998.8 Insofar as they challenge the idea of a homogeneous Turkish nation state, ethnicizing approaches to Turkey and its citizens, whether in Turkey or elsewhere, are more commonly represented among the political left which sympathizes with the left-wing orientation of major Kurdish organizations. Left-wing Germans did not get as invested in ethno-national causes in Yugoslavia, although right-wing Europeans were occasionally found to support Serbs and Croats. Kurdish issues are mostly treated separately from matters of labor immigration, almost as if the two political causes were incommensurable. There is also the tendency of most flms and shows to ofer single- or two-issue narratives. That the Kurdish cause would be expressed in ethno-cultural terms is no surprise. There is no passport-issuing Kurdish state which would ofer an alternative to Turkish citizenship. Given the pronounced left-wing and hence secular orientation of major Kurdish organizations and the increasing Sunnifcation of Turkish nationalism without a comprehensive Kurdish sectarian counterpart it is also not surprising that religion did not become a prominent subject for those who supported the Kurdish cause. If at all, it is a more generic ethno-cultural diversity which is contrasted with Turkish homogenizing eforts.

Colorful Republic of Germany9 and the rise of Muslim German identities The 1990s were also a period in which second-generation, German-Turkish flmmakers frst rose to prominence and became part of a newly united Germany’s public face.10 The most distinguished on an international stage is Fatih Akın, born in 1973 to Turkish parents in Hamburg. His frst fulllength feature flm, Short Sharp Shock (Kurz und schmerzlos; 1998), tells the story of three friends – the Greek Costa (Adam Bousdoukos), the Serb Bobby (Aleksandar Jovanovic), and the Turk Gabriel (Mehmet Kurtuluş) – who return to their youthful days as low-level criminals in Hamburg. The events end in tragedy. Rita Chin describes how in German public discourse, labor immigrants became increasingly synonymous with Turks.11 Greater migration from Turkey because of family reunions and political asylum as well as the integration of other countries of origin into the EU account for this development. In Short Sharp Shock, however, Akın portrays a diverse community of second-generation immigrants, as he does in Soul Kitchen (2009), which again refects the cosmopolitan milieu of Hamburg. His Solino (2002) deals with frst- and second-generation Italian immigrants. While religion does not take center stage in Short Sharp Shock, it is important for the plot since both Costa and Gabriel are brought back to legal life through religion. Costa steals mail and when he fnds a crucifx in an envelope, vows to abandon his criminal ways. In a similar spirit, Gabriel joins his father in prayer.12 This anticipates a representation of religion which might be forward-looking.

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As elsewhere, 9/11 is seen as a watershed moment for the position of Muslims in Germany, although the increased naturalization of Turks too shifted attention from citizenship to religion as a category of otherness.13 The country’s interest in Islamic terrorism is defned by the role of the Hamburg cell in the 9/11 attacks14 and because Germany too became involved in the military mission in Afghanistan. The attacks in Madrid 2004 and London 2005 led to a greater concern about Muslim terrorists, including German converts to Islam such as members of the ‘Sauerland cell’ arrested in 2007. German tourists have been targeted not only in the Djerba Synagogue bombing in 2002 but also in a suicide attack in Istanbul in 2016. Since the rise of the Islamic State, the phenomenon of foreign fghters has attracted attention and concerns about refugees seemed to fnd justifcation in the attack on the Berlin Christmas market in 2016 carried out by a Tunisian asylum seeker. In the course of all these events, immigrants with roots in Turkey, Arab countries and to some extent the Balkans became increasingly marked as Muslims. In German public discourse, they are constructed as religious as opposed to secular and as Muslim as opposed to Christian or Jewish, although this religious framing changed considerably over the years. The high profle of Turkey in regional Middle Eastern politics, its deteriorating diplomatic relationship with Germany, the awareness of conficts between Saudi Arabia and Iran and of the fault lines between the warring factions in Syria and Iraq, as well as the obvious diferences between the descendants of labor immigrants and recent refugees from war have all contributed to a more nuanced representation of Muslims in German public discourse. This is especially obvious in the awareness of sectarian conficts among Muslims and of the sometimes extremely oppressive nature of some Islamic movements and governments vis-à-vis other Muslims. One might distinguish two entangled dimensions, one national, the other transnational. The German discourse of multiculturalism negotiated the space granted for diversity on the levels of social reality and its artistic representations. Developments in the countries of origin have an immediate impact on the experience of the diaspora, but they also inform the representation of immigrants and their descendants. Muslim identities are often put under special scrutiny as a securitized image of Islam endures. Over the last 15  years or so, Islam has gained prominence in cinematic representations of Turkish immigrants and their descendants. Several flms and TV shows seek to explain radicalization and frequently pit secularized, liberal, or ‘traditional’ Muslims against radical Muslims, presumably refecting the idea that successful measures against radicalism require collaboration among the community. The ‘good Muslim’15 is a desirable and socially acceptable alternative which Muslim viewers supposedly identify with more happily or recognize as a role model. Sometimes, these stereotypical opposites clash within one and the same family. In the four-part Second German Television (Zweites Deutsches

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Fernsehen, ZDF) public broadcasting drama Brother – Dark Force (Bruder – Schwarze Macht; 2017), the siblings Melih and Sibel (Sibel Kekilli) represent the two extremes. Sibel, a successful police ofcer, is married to a German man. Melih is involved in minor crime and follows his German convert friend Tobi on his path to radicalization. Melih’s frustration grows out of alienation – the police beat him up in order to punish his sister who had stood up for an abused woman and accused a colleague of excessive use of force. Sibel is also discriminated against in racist and sexist ways, but she remains ideologically unshaken. Such pronounced binaries which contrast the ‘good Muslim’ and the ‘dangerous Muslim’ can be found more widely in stories about immigrant experiences. Peter Kosminsky’s two-part drama Britz (2007) presented a similar constellation among South Asian immigrants in Britain: Sohail joins Britain’s security agency MI5, whereas his sister Nasima becomes a suicide bomber, following her frustrated eforts to become part of British society. (Her friend is arrested because her brother is a radical and Nasima is taken to Pakistan by her family when they discover that she has a black boyfriend.) Likewise, in her contribution to a compilation of short flms concerned with the events of 9/11 (September 11, released 2002), Mira Nair chose the story of a Muslim paramedic who went missing after the attacks. First suspected to be involved as an attacker, he is later revealed to have lost his life as a frst responder. These are merely three examples which illustrate that the relationship to their presumed or actual religious identity is one of life and death for those marked as Muslim. Radicalization stories in the German cinematic arts are often formulaic. Brother – Dark Force is a case in point, as is Züli Aladag’s two-part drama Brothers (Brüder; 2017) shown by the German public broadcasting organization ARD. The broadcaster emphasized the realistic nature of the German convert Jan’s (Edin Hasanovic) career as an Islamist, which ultimately takes him to Syria. The drama was shown alongside a documentary about an actual case (Sebastian becomes a Salaf; compare also ZDF’s Lost Sons). The purpose of the dramas is to visualize or narrativize conventional and consensual explanations for radicalization. German young men, isolated among family and peers, sufer from spiritual and emotional emptiness. They have no purpose in life, are naïve and easily moved by the sense of community among radicalized Muslims as well as by atrocities against their new brothers-in-faith. Critical responses to their conversion push them even further. An interesting variation is the Tatort episode Path to Paradise (Der Weg ins Paradies; 2011) around the undercover agent Cenk Batu (Mehmet Kurtuluş). Tatort (Crime Scene) is a nation-wide mystery series to which individual regions contribute their own detectives. The Hamburg-based Batu investigates a range of crimes by going undercover, but in this episode he is uniquely confronted with his own cultural roots as he infltrates an Islamist cell. The thoroughly secularized Batu never seems confused in his commitments. Although his German colleague regularly and jokingly refers

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to Batu as a Turk in several episodes, he does not identify him as a Muslim. Batu investigates jihadism the same way he uncovers organ trafcking or fnancial crime. A humorous variation of the stereotypical binary defnes the comedy series Turkish for Beginners (2006–2008) about a blended Turkish-German family. Doris, a hippie-ish psychotherapist, with her children Nils and Lena (Josefne Preuß), who have enjoyed her anti-authoritarian parenting, joins Metin, a police ofcer whose comedic obsession with order makes him appear more German than the Germans. His son Cem (Elyas M’Barek) celebrates the ghetto stereotype of the second-generation Turk, whereas his daughter Yagmur (Pegah Ferydoni) is a devout Muslim whose religion defnes her entire life.16 While Cem and Lena eventually become a couple, Yagmur and Cem’s Greek friend Kosta also fall in love. They struggle to reconcile Yagmur’s religious commitments with their bond, but ultimately succeed without compromising her. This turn of events is unconventional in granting traditional Islam a space in German life, but even though Yagmur is a likeable and efective advocate for her cause, the comedic culture-clash format delimits the actual challenge posed to less sympathetic audiences considerably. Cem represents a way in which Muslim immigrants are securitized in local rather than in national terms, that is when they are criminalized. Cem is attracted to gangster-style masculinity and clashes with his father who as an assimilated immigrant has shed traditional Turkish masculinity. When German cinematic arts deal with criminal second-generation immigrants, transgression is usually framed in terms of social status defned by class and race. In Züli Aladag’s controversial Rage (Wut; 2005), the low-level criminal Can forms a sort of abusive friendship with the middle-class Felix who buys drugs from him. Felix’ parents oppose their connection. His father Simon, a stereotypically liberal professor of German literature, challenges his son’s political criticism of immigration after Felix is tortured by Can, but provokes Can himself by reminding him of his socio-economically inferior status. Can for his part taunts Simon by doubting his masculinity. Both Simon and his wife have other partners. At the end of the flm, the confrontation escalates and Simon kills Can. In his Tough Enough (Knallhart; 2006), Detlev Buck presents a similar plot around the young Turkish Erol, also played by Oktay Özdemir. His victim is Michael who has moved with his mother from an afuent to a poor area of Berlin. Unlike Felix, Michael establishes his own agency by joining Arab drug dealers as a courier and mascot. Erol underestimates the connection and at the end of the flm, the Arabs force Michael to shoot his nemesis. References are limited to ethnicity or citizenship. The dealers are referred to as ‘Arabs’ and Erol wears a shirt with a Turkish fag as well as a big Playboy bunny. Here too, masculinity is critical for immigrant characters, whether gangster-style or traditional. Likewise, Michael is frst introduced to the Arab gang at a dinner where genders are segregated.

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While political debates frequently highlight the connections between Islamism and crime, especially drug trafcking, human trafcking and extortion or prisons as places of radicalization, in German flms which feature criminal immigrants, Islam is a marginal concern. If anything, religion is represented by the older generation who are traditional and subservient to the German state. Their religiosity is formulaic and conventionally signaled by ritual prayer.17 Gabriel in Short Sharp Shock illustrates a positive impact of religious practice. Joining his father in prayer signals a return to an orderly life. Religion is thus portrayed as having a disciplining efect which later, however, became a trope of radicalization stories. Parents initially respond positively to their children’s turn toward religion since they stop drinking or taking drugs, but they discover too late the treacherous nature of this development. Audiences and flmmakers have become more attentive to the subject of Islam even in flms which do not foreground religious topics. Feo Aladag’s When We Leave illustrates this well. Scholars of German-Turkish cinematic arts have commented on the increased presence of Islam in representations of Arab and Turkish immigrants, but like the cinematic arts themselves, often subsume religion under the larger category of culture. Religion serves as a marker of otherness and is rarely analyzed as a category in its own right. It seems as if overall when associated with a character, Islam was perceived as a negative feature, mostly as a sign of backwardness or patriarchal masculinity.18 Conversely, characters perceived as positive are religiously neutral. They are neither obviously secular nor do they display an interpretation of Islam which sets them apart as ‘good Muslims’. A rare serious cinematic engagement with Islam in Germany that does not address radicalization is Burhan Qurbani’s Shahada (2010). The Afghan German director presents a uniquely multifaceted picture of diverse Muslims who experience personal crises and deal in diferent ways with their religion. The flm is composed of three separate stories which revolve around a mosque with a liberal Turkish imam. Pregnant from her Turkish boyfriend, his unmarried daughter Maryam (Maryam Zaree) aborts the child illegally. The side efects of the drug and her guilt drive her into a religious frenzy and she denounces her father and the liberal community with apocalyptic sermons. Having almost bled to death, she recovers her physical and mental health in the hospital. Sammi (Jerry Hofmann), a young Nigerian man, lives with his pious mother and struggles with his love for his male German coworker who accompanies him to the mosque for lessons. Ismail (Carlo Ljubek), a German Turkish police ofcer, is consumed by his guilt after having accidentally injured the Bosnian Leyla who lost her unborn child. He leaves his German wife and child for a short-lived love afair with Leyla. Like Maryam and Sammi, Ismail seeks consolation, strength, and guidance in his religion. Qurbani’s characters have been criticized as ‘wooden’, but the flm remains the most thoughtful narrative engagement with Islam which seeks to portray religion as part of the personal lives of complex individuals. The

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story of Ismail and the intricate relationships between parents and children in all three narrative strands add to the more conventional and politicized conficts related to gender and sexuality. Finally, a recent production may signal a serious, nuanced, and normalized narrative engagement with Islam. 4 Blocks, an acclaimed television show which started to air in 2017, is set among a criminal gang in Berlin. The leader, Ali Hamady nicknamed Toni (Kida Khodr Ramadan), belongs to the Lebanese community and, like many others, has a peculiar legal status at the beginning of the show. Many Berliners of Arab and Kurdish origin arrived in Germany as refugees during the Lebanese civil war in the late 1970s. Their citizenship was often unclear and like the fctitious Toni many remain in limbo, depending on the regular extension of their conditional residential status. The production of 4 Blocks followed a national debate about organized crime in Berlin with much attention paid to Arab kinship groups and Islam. The show draws attention to some of the underlying social problems and the many regulations which prevent the community from integration and social ascent. The only means to prosperity seem illegal. Toni and his wife Kalila (Maryam Zaree) illustrate the exasperation, the desire for dignity and economic success. Hamady’s nickname is borrowed from Tony Soprano, and like Soprano, Hamady struggles to reconcile his obligation to his nuclear family, especially his wife and his daughter, and his responsibility and ambition in his criminal family enterprise. He competes with his brother Abbas. While Toni is the ‘head’, Abbas is the ‘fst’. The rule of the Hamady family over Berlin-Neukölln is in jeopardy. A war breaks out with the Cthulhus, an outlaw motorcycle gang of Germans and Turks. At the same time, the Hamady clan is infltrated by an undercover policeman. The German Vince is an old friend of Toni’s. He falls in love with Toni’s sister Amara (Almila Bagriacik) whose husband Latif is in jail, but their plan to elope fails. While identities in 4 Blocks are primarily constructed in national and ethnic terms – Arabs, Germans, Turks – religion too is present.19 Zeki, an underling of the Hamady clan, is confronted by his father who works as a cleaner and urges him to abandon his criminal lifestyle. Zeki responds that as Muslims, they should not do dirty work and serve Germans, although it is unclear whether his attitude is representative and whether religion might be a function of something else. When Ibrahim, the uncle of Toni and Abbas and secret head of the clan, dies, his nephews wash the body and a ritual burial takes place. While burials also serve in other flms to signal Muslim identity, Ibrahim’s funeral is shown in much greater detail than Muslim burials elsewhere. The most important character here, however, is Toni’s wife Kalila. In the frst half of the show, she appears to be fairly secular. Unlike Amara, she does not wear a headscarf, although religion does not play a signifcant role for the character of Amara either. Their young daughter is encouraged to ride a bicycle despite the opposition of boys. Once the conficts around the gang spiral out of control, however, a policeman is

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murdered and Toni arrested, Kalila who sufers from PTSD begins to break under the pressure and seeks solace in religion. Toni and, with him, the viewers, see her reading the Qur’an, performing ritual prayer and donning a headscarf in a careful and confdent manner. To do so is clearly her personal choice and it is a religious choice as well because it is embedded in other private religious activities. Interestingly, Toni virtually never comments on his wife’s transformation. There is no need for explanation either, neither for him nor for the viewer. While religion thus assumes an important narrative function insofar as it defnes Kalila’s response to her husband’s return to crime, discursively and politically it is fairly insignifcant. Kalila is quite obviously not becoming an Islamist. 4 Blocks has been celebrated for its realism and local ‘tonality’, which the show owes in large part to its actors, many of them newcomers and some with frst-hand experience of the depicted milieu. (Veysel Gelin, who plays Abbas, is a well-known rapper and spent three years in jail.) Hanno Hackfort, one of the writers, emphasized that 4 Blocks was not ‘Erklärfernsehen’, that is, television with the primary purpose of explaining social issues. Bob Konrad, another writer, explained, ‘We did not want to tell a story about Muslim Arabs, but rather had a story about gangsters in mind.’20 Alluding to the refugee crisis and debates about criminal refugees, he stressed the preponderance of an internal perspective over stereotypical representations driven by political discourse. In the second season of 4 Blocks (2018), the confict with the German state as represented by the police and immigration services is replaced by a confict with another Lebanese criminal family in Berlin, the al-Safs. Religion plays a role in this season too, although it is a diferent function of religion which is explored here. The spiritual function for the individual in crisis is largely abandoned. Kalila’s headscarf is gone. Her newly naturalized status may provide her with greater resilience, although the kidnapping of her daughter is arguably a greater crisis than the arrest of her husband at the hands of police in the frst season. And yet, Islam is recognizably present in the second season too. The frst words uttered in the frst episode are the frst chapter of the Qur’an as Toni prays at the site of his destroyed family home in Lebanon. Likewise, one of the frst encounters between the rival families takes place during a memorial service at the alSaf home, prayer again being the predominant sound. Religion provides an institutional common ground. The families decide on a marriage alliance, following the recommendation of a religious judge. Bride and groom know each other from their Qur’an school and the marriage ceremony is Islamic. So is the divorce between Amara and Latif. Islam provides a substratum of the Lebanese identity of both families which is taken for granted. A revealing contrast can be made between the motorcycle gang in 4 Blocks, which is composed of Germans and Turks, although the leadership

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appears to be German, and the motorcycle gang in Night of the Wolves (Nacht der Wölfe; 1982). In Rüdiger Nüchtern’s movie about two warring gangs of youths in Munich, one framed as German, the other as Turkish, the German gang includes a meek Italian who works as a waiter in his father’s café where the gang hangs out. The movie also ofers an interesting variation of the gender trope. Much of the plot revolves around Daniela who is abused by her German boyfriend, but fnds solace with the younger brother of the Turkish gang’s leader. Religion is never mentioned, but the division between Germans and Turks appears insurmountable. Forty years later, this is clearly not the case any longer.

Normalizing Islam Much of the scholarship concerned with representations of Turkish immigrants in German literature and flm focuses on cultural identities. These are nowadays widely acknowledged to be heterogeneous and fuid. Although religion is frequently subsumed under culture, it presents unique problems. We commonly assume higher degrees of exclusivity for religious identities. While Turkish or Arab immigrants may be perfectly capable of codeswitching in the area of language or of enjoying both Middle Eastern and German cuisine, combining elements of Islam and Christianity is more unusual and does not correspond to constructions of religious or immigrant identities in public discourse either. There is a striking discrepancy between the wide-ranging signifcance attributed to Islamic identities in German public discourse and the very circumscribed presence of Islam in the cinematic arts. Islam may indeed have gained prominence, as Casanova suggested, but the engagement with it in flm and television is largely formulaic. Islam tends to be present in flms about religiously validated violence and in culture-clash comedies, where it mostly constitutes an obstacle to a successful life in Germany. Elsewhere, Islam is mostly signaled, but not elaborated. The difculties in narrativizing religious identity suggest that while Islam is acknowledged to be an important aspect of the social reality of many Muslim immigrants, the precise nature of its presence remains mostly beyond the imagination or interest of most directors, writers, or actors. In a revealing scene in Rage, Simon tries to stop Can from drinking their wine, arrogantly pointing out that he is a Muslim, to which Can responds, ‘What do you know about Islam?’ This may as well be a challenge to the viewer who may expect religion to play a greater role for Can. The cinematic arts mostly do not fll the gaps left in public discourse by telling more complex stories about Islam. 4 Blocks, however, marks two important changes. Religion does not defne collective identities in a unique and comprehensive way. But neither is it absent. It is normalized as an important and routine part of the lives of individuals and communities.

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Citizenship, ethnicity, and religion: Muslim immigrants in German cinematic arts Filmography Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ali. Fear Eats the Soul (Ali. Angst essen Seele auf; 1974) Helma Sanders-Brahms, Shirin’s Wedding (Shirins Hochzeit; 1976) Hark Bohm, Yasemin (1988) Feo Aladag, When We Leave (Die Fremde; 2010) Tevfk Başer, 40 Square Meters of Germany (40 Quadratmeter Deutschland; 1986) Yüksel Yavuz, My Father, the Guest Worker (Mein Vater, der Gastarbeiter; 1994); Close Up Kurdistan (2007); Hêvî (2014) Yılmaz Arslan, Fratricide (Brudermord; 2005) Soleen Yusef, House without Roof (Haus ohne Dach; 2016) Hito Steyerl, November (2004) Fatih Akın, Short Sharp Shock (Kurz und schmerzlos; 1998); Soul Kitchen (2009); Solino (2002) Randa Chahoud, Brother – Dark Force (Bruder – Schwarze Macht; 2017) Peter Kosminsky, Britz (2007) Züli Aladag, Brothers (Brüder; 2017) Tatort: Path to Paradise (Der Weg ins Paradies; 2011) Turkish for Beginners (Türkisch für Anfänger; 2006–2008) Züli Aladag, Rage (Wut; 2005) Detlev Buck, Tough Enough (Knallhart; 2006) Burhan Qurbani, Shahada (2010) 4 Blocks (2017–2018) Rüdiger Nüchtern, Night of the Wolves (Nacht der Wölfe; 1982)

Notes 1 I would like to thank José Casanova for confrming the quotation, and the participants of the Comparative Literature course “Turkish Immigrants in German Literature and Film” (Spring 2018) and the Committee for the Study of Religion at the Graduate Center for their comments on earlier versions of this article. 2 For the debate about labor immigration in the ‘public sphere’ see Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 17–23. 3 Since flm and television do not constitute a clear binary I use the term ‘cinematic arts.’ 4 Chin, Guest Worker Question, 141–190. 5 Tobias Schwarz, Bedrohung, Gastrecht, Integrationspficht: Diferenzkonstruktionen im deutschen Ausweisungsdiskurs (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2010), 131–159. 6 Thomas Brieden, Konfiktimport durch Immigration: Auswirkungen ethnischer Konfikte im Herkunftsland auf die Integrations- und Identitätsentwicklung von

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Immigranten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovac, 1996). Nejat Ulusay, “A Transformational Experience Within the Context of ‘National’ and ‘Transnational’: The Case of Turkish Cinema,” in Imaginaries Out of Place: Cinema, Transnationalism and Turkey, eds. Gökçen Karanfl and Serkan Şavk (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 6–20, 16–17. Angelica Fenner and Robin Curtis, “ ‘If People Want to Oppress You, They Make You Say ‘I’’: Hito Steyerl in Conversation,” in The Autobiographical Turn in Germanophone Documentary and Experimental Film, eds. Robin Curtin and Angelica Fenner (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014), 37–51. ‘Bunte Republik Deutschland’, a politically inspired pun on ‘Bundesrepublik Deutschland’ (Federal Republic of Germany), is the title of a 1989 song by Udo Lindenberg. Ayça Tunç Cox, “Habitats of Meaning: Turkish-German Cinema and Generational Diferences,” in Imaginaries Out of Place, 37–55. Chin, Guest Worker Question, 11. Akın identifes this as an autobiographical element and the religious practice of Gabriel’s father as that of his own father. Fatih Akın, Im Clinch: Die Geschichte meiner Filme, erweiterte Neuausgabe (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2019), 65–66. Yasemin Yildiz, “Turkish Girls, Allah’s Daughters, and the Contemporary German Subject: Itinerary of a Figure,” German Life and Letters 62, no. 4 (2009): 465–481. Frequently referenced and addressed by Romuald Karmakar in his Hamburger Lektionen (2006). Andrew J. Shryock, “Attack of the Islamophobes: Religious War (and Peace) in Arab/Muslim Detroit,” in Islamophobia in America: The Anatomy of Intolerance, ed. Carl Ernst (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 145–174, 162. Brent Peterson, “ ‘Turkish for Beginners’: Teaching Cosmopolitanism to Germans,” in Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens, eds. Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 96–108. Berghahn describes Can’s father as a ‘devout Muslim’, but ofers as the only evidence his prayer which she takes as representing the ‘principles of Islam’. Daniela Berghahn, “From Turkish Greengrocer to Drag Queen: Reassessing Patriarchy in Recent Turkish-German Coming-of-Age Films,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 7, no. 1 (2009): 55–69, 65–66. Berghahn comments on the ‘Islamization’ of Turks but describes this as the addition of ‘Islam’ to a preexisting negative stereotype of the Turk. Berghahn, “From Turkish Greengrocer to Drag Queen,” 57. Victoria Fincham also subsumes religion under culture. “Violence, Sexuality and the Family: Identity ‘Within and Beyond Turkish-German Parameters’ in Fatih Akın’s ‘Gegen die Wand’, Kutlug Ataman’s ‘Lola + Bilidikid’ and Anno Saul’s ‘Kebab Connection’,” German as a Foreign Language 1 (2008): 39–71. This is an important diference between 4 Blocks and Skylines (2019), codirected by Soleen Yusef. Carolin Ströbele, “Der Pate von Neukölln,” Die Zeit, February 17, 2017. For a similar critique see Marco Abel, The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), 18.

15 Together in the midst of war Muslim and Christian coexistence in Lebanese cinema Sérgio Dias Branco

Popular representations of Lebanon are often framed around its unsettled social, political, and religious history, especially tensions between Muslims and Christians. Several Lebanese flms ofer an alternative vantage point that allows viewers to glimpse at the shape of peace within and between communities. This chapter focuses on depictions of Muslim and Christian coexistence in four flms: Beirut the Encounter (Beyroutou el lika, 1981), West Beirut (Beyrouth Al Gharbiyya, 1998), In the Battlefelds (Maarek hob, 2004), and Where Do We Go Now? (W halla’ la wayn, 2011). I argue that these works provide densely contrasting and complementary perspectives that contribute to a more profound understanding of this conficting and peaceful coexistence. The following analyses of each flm detail how they provide these perspectives and contribute to this understanding. My focus is mainly on how Muslim and Christians characters are represented and their storylines unfold. Lebanon is a country with large Muslim and Christian communities that have been entangled in a history of conficts. Ofcial data is not available, because there has not been a census since 1932. Most of the politicians argue that an ofcial survey of the population could lead to further political crises and social divisions. Be that as it may, even without rigorous fgures there are some valuable estimates (see, in particular, US Department of State  – Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor 2015). About half of the population is Muslim, either Shia or Sunni, with no clear predominance between these two branches of Islam. Around 40% is Christian, mostly Eastern Catholics, either from the larger Maronite Church (or the Syriac Maronite Church of Antioch) or the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, both sui iuris particular churches in communion with Rome. Finally, although of less interest to this study, there is also a small but noteworthy group of Druze faithful. The division between Christians and Muslims has been artifcially constructed around real social and political problems with historical roots in a region that was conquered by the Byzantine Empire and then the Ottoman Empire, and later was under a French mandate after World War I. This division has had negative consequences for the possibility of national unity in

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Lebanon. Indeed, the fact that high-ranking ofces are reserved for members of particular religious groups means that they should defend certain political positions by acting as representatives of a religion. The myth of a Maronite majority becomes evident if we look at the social history of the region. But it was somehow accepted by Muslims in order for Lebanon to achieve stable political institutions in which power was shared across religions (see Fisk 2001, 67), leaving the class structure inherited from French colonialism basically intact. This unwritten national pact that laid the foundation of Lebanon as a multiconfessional state in 1943 was to be tested during the civil war (1975–1990). After the Taif Agreement in 1989, although the privilege of Maronite Christians was abolished, the political system remained based on a balance between the representation of religious communities in Parliament, which is sectarian in essence. The agreement included the end of confessionalism in two steps. The frst has been concluded: the division of power between Christians and Muslims would be kept, but balanced. The second would end the division, creating a secular state, keeping religious representatives in an advisory senate when the deputies are no longer elected on a confessional basis. This last step was never taken. It is perhaps unsurprising that cinema has often refected this religious pluralism and coexistence in Lebanese society. Some of the flms that deal directly with the Lebanese Civil War are exemplary in this regard: Beirut the Encounter, West Beirut, and In the Battlefelds. Each flm depicts the relations between Muslim and Christian communities in three diferent decades, refecting distinct periods of the country’s history. The frst section of this chapter focuses on West Beirut and In the Battlefelds, two movies that chronicle the division of Beirut during the war into two large sectors: East (Christian) and West (Muslim), with a third small zone in the southern suburbs (Shia Muslim) (see Fisk 2001, XXI). The second section looks at Beirut the Encounter whose theme is not the separation between Muslims and Christians but the possibility of communication between them. Finally, the third section analyzes Where Do We Go Now?, which tackles sectarian violence between the two religious communities through a tale set in an isolated village, referring more indirectly to the Lebanese Civil War. These four flms depict Muslims and Christians living together in the midst of war.

Stories of a divided city Najib Hourani follows Samir Khalaf (see 1987, 268) in the claim that the “creation of communally homogenous cantons during the war  .  .  . reinforced a process of ‘re-tribalization’ ” (Hourani 2008, 292). Religious identities were and remain so connected with social strata and political struggles that, as we have seen, Lebanese parliamentary democracy is confessional. Polls indicate that there is overwhelming popular support, particularly among Shiite Muslims, for the abolition of confessionalism and the sectarian quotas in government (see Muhanna 2010). The territorial integrity of

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the country was at risk during the war and the symbol of this division was the bisection of the capital. West Beirut and In the Battlefelds chronicle this separation of Beirut into sectors from diferent perspectives. West Beirut was the frst feature flm directed by Ziad Doueiri. It won the François Chalais Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the International Federation of Film Critics’ Award at the Toronto Film Festival along with other prizes in Europe in 1998. Because of these numerous awards and accolades, it was widely distributed and discussed. Its impact may have had something to do with the fact that the main characters are high school children. The devastating reality of war is seen through the sweet and comic point of view of kids growing up with a sense of adventure that is not erased by the terrible context of their lives. Moreover, the flm takes a fact into account and uses it as a narrative premise: the split of the Lebanese capital was not, and could not have been, clear-cut. There were some Christians in the West sector and vice versa, particularly in the frst months of war. There was also clandestine circulation between sectors. These two elements make this story of two boys and one girl more complex and engaging as a representation of day-to-day life during the armed confict. The action is set in 1975. The opening sequence is set in a school in East Beirut. The next day, after a terrorist attack on a bus, the Christians do not let the residents in West Beirut cross over to the other side of town – not even to drop children at school. Every day begins with the Fajr prayer, the dawn Muslim worship that echoes throughout the western part of Beirut. Tarek Noueri (Rami Doueiri) is a Muslim boy who has a Christian, orphaned friend, May (Rola Al Amin). She wears a cross necklace until about the middle of the flm. The tension in the West streets is palpable and when the kids come across a Muslim roadblock to the East, Omar (Mohamad Chamas), Tarek’s best friend who is upset with May’s presence, calling her “Virgin Mary,” fnally protects her by hiding the Christian symbol that she was publicly displaying. Later, Tarek is able to cross to the other side in the trunk of a car. He takes Omar and May with him for a second visit. The use of archival footage in the middle of West Beirut marks the rift within the flm that basically divides it into two parts, just like the city and Lebanese people. The frst part takes place mainly in West Beirut and the second part in East Beirut. But false documentary images creep into the flm from the start and insert a self-refective quality into the motion picture. Tarek records daily events with an 8mm camera. Indeed, his flmmaking is the reason why he desperately tries to get to the East side, where the photo store he uses is situated. As Lisa Khatib recalls, what disturbs the apparent peace of ordinary life is an incident that really happened on April 13, 1975: a bus carrying Palestinians was attacked by right-wing Christian militants, resulting in 31 killed and 30 wounded (see 2011, 135). Therefore, the flm weaves together fctional and factual elements and visually refects this combination that does not obliterate or mix the identity of each thread. It may

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be read as a kind of image of coexistence and integration that does not entail merging. The kids end up in a brothel in East Beirut. The female pimp Oum Walid (Leïla Karam) makes clear that it is usual for prostitutes to sell their bodies for sex to men of both faiths. But in the current situation, clients begin to fght and bring the war into the house. Walid ends up describing it as hell, as if the uproar and violence belonged outside and should not be brought inside. “Since when does a bed have a religion?,” she asks. Tarek has no answer and slightly shrugs his shoulders. The flm shies away from paying attention to the persistent problem of sex trade, human trafcking, and the sexual exploitation of children in Lebanon (see Committee on the Rights of the Child – Ofce of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights 2015), all of them intensifed in wartime, although it does mention violence against women. The prostitution house in the Christian side is narratively connected with the amused curiosity of the boys with sex and women, even in the intimate space of his Muslim family – an earlier instance of this is the moment when Tarek secretly observes his voluptuous aunt. Although there are some dramatic scenes, these joyful moments set this flm apart from other cinematic representations of the Lebanese Civil War. Khatib recognizes that the flms on this war tend to focus on “issues of social fragmentation, sectarian animosities, class divisions, and individual devastation” and that only West Beirut and In the Battlefelds “represent another side to the war, that of the possibility of having fun under difcult conditions” (2008, p. xx). In the Battlefelds was directed by Danielle Arbid. This female director had made three shorts and two documentaries, Alone with War (Seule avec la guerre, 2001) on post-war Beirut and On Borders (Aux frontières, 2003) on Israel’s frontiers with neighboring countries, before completing this frst fction feature flm. Even though it is not really an answer to West Beirut (see Arbid 2004), In the Battlefelds is a signifcant complement to that flm for two reasons. First, in this case the main characters are not children but adolescents. Both flms concentrate on a time of (re)discovery of the immediate world around characters who are growing up, becoming young persons and adults. Second, the story is set in East Beirut in a Christian household and, as Roy Armes writes, “Muslims are unseen and unknown aliens” (2015, p. 237). The focus of the flm on the Christian community contrasts with West Beirut’s concentration on Muslims and it is arguably a product of the flmmaker’s own knowledge, who has acknowledged that In the Battlefelds includes autobiographical elements (see Arbid 2004). Arbid’s flm begins in a closed space, an apartment, and it is quieter and slower than West Beirut. The story revolves around the relationship between Lina (Marianne Feghali), a young girl in a Christian family, and her aunt’s maid from Syria, Siham (Rawia Elchab). Lina’s father is addicted to gambling and this has become a major family and fnancial problem. A priest is called to talk to him. He is told to swear before God and his daughter that he is going to stop gambling. He later commits suicide. This frst scene

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reveals that Christian clergymen are authority fgures with infuence in the life of this family of believers. This is quite diferent from the daily presence of regular Muslim prayers in West Beirut, which is at the same time more public and seems less personal. Siham, the housemaid, is a crucial character. She connects two worlds in confict: the family and the country, inside and outside the apartment. In fact, the two are paralleled from the beginning. Siham is maltreated while serving the family during lunch in one of the frst scenes that “contains signifcant details that reveal Arbid’s insider critique of a particular class and way of life” (2010, p. 26), as Rebecca Dyer notes. The flm exposes the entrenched “master-servant power dynamic” (Dyer 2010, 25) in Lina’s milieu. After Siham is abused, Lina storms from the table and pulls the table cloth ruining the meal for the entire family. Moments later, there is a bombing and the aggressive behavior in the apartment is mirrored by violent explosions. Be that as it may, Lina’s family tries to maintain an indoor facade that seems to be intended to cut any connections with the crumbling world outside. It is through Siham that Lina is able to get away from the animosity within her family only to see the ongoing war within her country up close. Aseel Sawalha insightfully observes that although the flm is not interested in the root causes of the city battles, it allows the viewers to register “the heavy efects of the war through images of deserted streets along with the sounds of bombs” (Sawalha 2014, 111). In sum, there is more than one battlefeld, as the title makes clear, and tension and confict rule at home and in the street. A discussion in the terrace expresses the violence of speech refecting the bloodshed in this zone controlled by the Christian Phalange militia. One of the boys says that the week before, they burnt foreigners and tore their hearts out calling them “sons-of-bitches.” “If I’d seen them, I’d have fucked and scalped their sisters,” he adds. “I’d have fucked their fathers and mothers,” says Siham’s boyfriend, Marwan (Takla Chamoun). Another boy then says to him in a jocose tone: “Before screwing the family, pass me that joint.” Humor deactivates the atrocity of the acts described in a scene where the incessant sound of gunshots is heard in the background. The flm is successful in exposing the fragility of the Lebanese nation and the tension between a national identity and an Arab pan-national identity in the civil war, which explains how it expanded to involve other countries in the region. These two identity frameworks are often ascribed to Christian and Muslim perspectives, but In the Battlefelds makes it clear that it is not so clear-cut (see Salibi 1976, 2009). The flm has the merit of considering religion alongside other aspects, such as nationality and class. One striking element that begs for analysis is the ending, in particular the outcome of the girls’ relationship. The 18-year-old Siham seems to attract the 12-year-old Lina to her world and away from her family’s. The little girl feels forgotten by her kin and ultimately by her older friend. Yet in the end, Lina reveals Siham’s plan to elope with a Muslim fghter. This betrayal can be interpreted as a way to assert control over the foreigner’s life, preventing

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Siham from gaining the very freedom that Lina lacks by keeping her friend close even against her will. In that sense, by participating in the frst’s adventures, the latter is negotiating her own sexual, social, and class identity (see Mostafa 2014, 279–288). The maid helps her employer’s niece to grow up, for instance, teaching her how to kiss. There is a moment when Lina says in low voice that her and Siham are the same, but the narrative belies this fantasy. They come from diferent worlds and after many incidents, so they remain. Connected with this, there is another feature. In contrast with West Beirut, In the Battlefelds does not use archival footage, but it does have documentary elements throughout, especially in the fnal sequence of images. The marks of war – debris, shattered buildings, and bullet and shell holes – that we glimpse in other moments of the flm in the form of a roadblock, for example, come to the foreground after Lina and Siham’s fght, chase, and separation on the street, when the latter is picked up by a car. Almost 15 years after the armed confict, the wounds produced by the war were still visible. All Arbid had to do was to record them. The characters’ tragic break echoes the disintegrated urban landscape and evokes the split and the frontier between Christians and Muslims in Beirut.

Conversations across the boundary The real dividing line between Muslims and Christians in Beirut and the connection between the two sectors is at the center of Beirut the Encounter, directed by Borhane Alaouié. The flm opens with the information that the action takes place in Beirut in “a day in the year 1977.” The frst images present a city with piles of garbage on the street to the sound of hovering fies and damaged buildings as well as lifting and moving debris, much like the last images from In the Battlefelds. These visual and aural elements express “the inhospitality of Beirut toward the displaced” (Khatib 2011, 134). Within the group of flms analyzed here, this is the closest in time to the actual events because it was produced in 1981. As we have seen, West Beirut takes place mainly in the western side and the few scenes in the eastern side never give an account of daily life, since they take place indoor. In the Battlefelds provides such an account, but the other sector is completely absent. Beirut the Encounter is, therefore, about the city as a whole and the possibility of conversations across its (provisional) boundary, quite distinct from the partial portraits provided by Doueiri’s and Arbid’s flms. For this reason, Alaouié’s work is able to depict the diferent degrees of destruction of each zone and present “a sharp contrast between the chaos of West Beirut and the leafy streets of Achrafeh” (Khatib 2008, 73). We could add the poor blocks of apartments of West Beirut and the rich houses of East Beirut, showing class diferences that have associated Muslims with ordinary citizenship and Christians with the social elite. Historically, this diference has been generally connected with social stratifcation and inequality. Christians had more access than Muslims to education and other basic goods.

216 Sérgio Dias Branco Although daily Muslim prayers are not as present as in West Beirut, the flm opens with the Fajr prayer said by Mustafa, Haidar’s (Haithem El Amine) brother. Haidar, a teacher, is the main Muslim character in the flm. He got up earlier to contemplate the waste that infest the streets and the bullet holes that mar the buildings. While Mustafa is praying, he salutes him, and the fair inference seems to be that he is not a pious Muslim like his brother. They argue over political activity, because Mustafa is helping distribute magazines calling for unifcation and peace and this reminds Haidar about his own activism in the past. Mustafa’s wife, Zamzam, participates in the discussion agreeing with one and the other. All three have come from a small town, taken over by fghting militias, to Beirut and try to keep a low profle. As Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard remark, there is no graphic violence in the flm, but “the backdrop of war shows a society paralyzed by the material signs of disjuncture (sporadic electricity, water, and phone connections, as well as roadblocks and trafc jams)” (2010, p. 53). When phone lines are momentarily operational, Haidar takes the opportunity to call his close friend Zeina (Nadine Acoury), a Catholic student who is on the other side of the city. They try to get together, but her wait for him is futile. It is not possible to predict the time it takes to circulate between sectors. He gets caught in trafc and they never meet face to face. Alternately, they talk on the phone and then record long messages to each other that the other never hears. Haidar and Zeina have diferent views of the confict, but agree that it should stop. They agree to meet at the airport before Zeina leaves for the United States, so that they can say goodbye and exchange their tapes. Haidar arrives early at the airport fearing he might once again be stuck in trafc. He comes across a man who prey on gullible refugees and decides to leave and throw his tape away. It is not clear why he comes to this resolution. His last words after a talk with a guard, Khalil Mourad, a former student of his who helps an old man eager to join his family abroad, are enigmatic. He admits his confusion and does not know what to think anymore. “Looks like the whole world is changing. Maybe I’ll see you again. I’ll stop for a cup of tea,” he says. Zeina is devastated when she realizes Haidar is not waiting for her. Their recorded words addressed to each other will remain unheard. Yet the flm ends with an irreversible separation between them and a feeting promise of reunion between Haidar and Khalil. So what is conveyed is not so much the impossibility of communication, but the way in which cinema can set up conversations between disconnected people. It is the flm that creates the meeting between Haidar and Zeina for the audience, not only switching between them but also between other characters and stories, such as Mustafa and Zamzam’s.

A lonely, peaceful place Where Do We Go Now? portrays a divided country through an undivided, but tense, multireligious community. In the lot of four flms scrutinized in

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this study, it presents the more developed and balanced depiction of Muslims and Christians. Consequently, it warrants a detailed narrative and stylistic analysis. The narrative takes place in an imagined village that is surrounded by land mines. There is a bridge, but it needs to be rebuilt. Muslims and Christians live together in this remote place, where it is difcult to get a radio signal. It is a community made of two groups. The closeness of the women from both groups contrasts with the unstated confict that gradually grows between the men. The flm opens with a succession of shots of empty streets, ravaged landscapes, and also of a church and mosque side by side. Through this sequence of images, we hear the actress and director Nadine Labaki saying: The story I tell here is for all who want to hear. A tale of those who fast, a tale of those who pray. A tale of a lonely town, mines scattered all around. Caught up in a war, split to its very core. Two clans with broken hearts under a burning sun. Their hands stained with blood in the name of a cross or a crescent. From this lonely place, which has chosen peace, whose history is spun of barbed wire and guns. It’s a long tale of women dressed in black. No glittering stars, no dazzling fowers. Their ash-blackened eyes. Women driven by destiny to demonstrate bravery. After this voice-over, we see a group of women on their way to the graveyard where their late husbands and sons are buried. They do a kind of sad dance that expresses their losses: their hands tap their chests and they walk in a pendular movement, swinging from side to side. This “lonely place” has “chosen peace,” and this peace is fragile as we can see in key moments. One such moment is the gathering of the villagers to watch television. As with the radio, the signal is weak and irregular. The priest and the imam are present, they symbolize the communal “unity and coexistence,” as the Mayor recalls. The flm being transmitted is not appropriate for children, so they change to the news. Most of the people look fxedly at the screen, until the women start arguing with the men so as to distract them. It is an attempt among many to protect the community from the infuence of the ongoing confict outside. Women mufe the sound of the radio news and burn newspapers whenever the shadow of violence is about to invade the tranquility of their life together. In spite of these eforts, violence does break out between men. A Christian boy, Roukoz (Ali Haidar), is trying to get a loudspeaker and falls from the ladder inside the church. He hangs on to the cross and ends up breaking it. The priest later says that the church is crumbling so that the Christians do not think Muslims desecrated the cross. Still, retaliation ensues: the next morning, the sound from the speakers are not those of Muslim prayers but of chickens clucking and sheep bleating. Someone had opened the door to the mosque and the animals are inside wrecking the carpets and trashing a place of Islamic worship. Muslim prayers had been mixed with the sounds of

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animals in previous moments. Religious observance is imbued in daily life. But this is felt as a sacrilegious ofense because it violates the sacred space of the mosque. The imam and the priest before him act as “du‘āt salām haqiqiyyīn” (“true advocates for peace”) (see Sinno 2017, 634). He argues that the Christians should not be blamed but is unsuccessful. In response, one Muslim breaks a statue of the Virgin Mary with a stick. Muslim women help to collect the pieces and later put them back together. Nadine Sinno comments that, contrary to men, women “primarily engage in the acts of repair and restoration” (2017, p. 622) in the flm. It only gets worse as Muslims taint the holy water and a Christian attacks a Muslim boy in crutches. Sinno claims that Where Do We Go Now? “demonstrates that while religion itself may be holy, there is nothing natural, predestined, or sacred about people’s religious identities and their enactments of these identities” (2017, p. 636). Women decide to act collectively. Yvonne (Yvonne Maalouf), the Mayor’s wife, pretends that she has visions of Mary and most of the people listen to her, either Christian or Muslim. Despite diferences between Islam and Christianity in regard to how she is seen, Mary or Maryam is an important fgure for both religions. She is the only woman mentioned by name in the Qur’an, which explicitly identifes her as the greatest of all women (3:42). The 19th sura of the Qur’an is dedicated to her, the mother of Isa (Jesus). Mary is also a lady of sorrow who mourns for her son, which is why these women who grieve for the men they lost feel so close to her. In one scene, Amale (the Christian played by Labaki) cradles her young son in a pose that evokes representations of Mary and her child. It is not surprising that the flm is dedicated to their own mothers. Takla (Claude Baz Moussawbaa) discovers that her teenage son, Nassim (Kevin Abboud), has been killed by gunfre while traveling with Roukoz to get supplies for the village. The mother keeps this secret from her older son, Issam (Sasseen Kawzally), because of fear of retaliation. They hide the body and then she storms into the church, throws dirt at the statue of Our Lady and says: “Come down from there. Are you not a mother? You take people’s children without asking? What right do you have to take him from me? What were you doing?” “Give him back to me,” she begs. This is another example of how the sacred is treated as familiar and also how this familiarity is not blasphemous but pious. Her personal pain is interwoven with larger worries. Takla, and the imam and the priest, anticipates a battle in the village once Nassim’s tragic demise is known. The women bake sweet cakes with hashish and sing together with the help of a group of Ukrainian dancers who were hired to distract the men. While they eat and drink and laugh out loud, the women hide their guns. There is a previous musical sequence in which Amale and Rabih (Julian Farhat), a Muslim, sing to each other in her imagination. Evocative voiceover and creative musical sequences are used to expose wounds and reveal dreams; wounds and dreams that bridge the gap between Muslims and Christians. Where Do We Go Now? is a carefully symmetrical fable that

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expresses Labaki’s utopian aspirations, which is strikingly diferent from the other three flms that were flmed in real locations around Beirut. It was a very personal project for the director because she felt that the risk of confict had not fade away. In fact, the flm was “inspired by the May 2008 events in Lebanon where people took to the streets with weapons again” and she and her friends were “frustrated by the absurdity of the situation” (Labaki 2011). Confronted with the likelihood of a more violent clash between the two religious groups, the Muslim and Christian women fnally decide to switch attires and apparently to change religion. Sarah Lennon Galavan contends that this is the climax of the flm. She writes that “[t]he message the women send their husbands through this sartorial switch is a powerful one: attack one of us and you attack us all” (2016). It is perhaps more than that: when Muslim women become Christian and vice-versa, they make the men see that they are hurting themselves and their loved ones, not the “other,” the “enemy.” According to Labaki, the idea of the “fear of the other” is instilled by education and upbringing (2011). An additional aspect worth mentioning is the way Where Do We Go Now? avoids, and indeed contradicts, the propagated image of Muslim women as anti-modern and more traditional in Lebanon. The women in the flm are able to switch places so easily because they are culturally very similar, even though they profess diferent religions. In truth, Christian women seem more puritan than Muslim women: Afaf (Layla Hakim), a Muslim, makes sexual jokes and is the mastermind behind the scandalous plan to hire dancers to distract men from fghting. Sinno reads this choice as strategic in Labaki’s politics of representation, since it complicates expectations about “practicing Muslims who are often judged against their supposedly more ‘open-minded’ and sexually liberated Christian compatriots” (2017, p. 632). In the end, men and women, Muslims and Christians, they all go to bury Nassim and Labaki’s voice returns: My story is now ending for all those who were listening. Of a town where peace was found while fghting continued all around. Of men who slept so deep and woke to fnd new peace. Of women still in black, who fought with fowers and prayers instead of guns and fares. And to protect their sons destiny then drove them to fnd a new way. The men carry the casket in sorrow and at peace with themselves and each other, and then stop, turning to the right and to the left. “Where do we go now?,” they ask. This unanswered question reveals the uncertain future of the country, but it also has a particular context in the flm. The fact that it is raised means that the sectarianism translated into space on opposite sides of the cemetery has been put into question and for the frst time the cemetery (and the village) is viewed as one, even though the two religions bury their dead in diferent ways. Coexistence means existing side by side with

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diferences that are not erased, or even merely tolerated, but acknowledged and respected.

Conclusion: flming war, screening peace These four flms do not ignore the complexities and difculties of violent social confict, particularly the fanaticism and dehumanization it fosters. But they also avoid the facile representation of Lebanon as a country that is inexorably torn apart between two religious groups. They show two worlds as one, depicting how Muslims and Christians live and die together in the midst of war. There are other cinematic works that touch on the subject discussed in this chapter, most notably The Explosion (Al-Infjar, 1982), directed by Rafc Hajjar, but they lack the same kind of connection with the reality of the civil war. The Explosion tells the love story between a Muslim and a Christian in Beirut during the war, but it does not include the partition of the city in the depiction. The frst three flms analyzed are fctions, but they document the war. The last one, Labaki’s flm, even though it takes place in an imagined place and includes fantasy elements, it does tackle the aspect of separation and confict that are not only dramatic but also contextual to Lebanon. Each of them puts forward a depiction of Muslims and Christians living simultaneously separated and connected during the civil war. West Beirut and In the Battlefelds capture the war more directly. Beirut the Encounter and Where Do We Go Now? do it more indirectly and keep it of-screen, especially the latter. Each flm presents dramatic conficts infuenced by the ongoing war, but also the possibility of peaceful coexistence between the two religious communities in divided Beirut and in an isolated village pulled apart by hate. So we can say that they flm war as well as screen peace. War is not looked upon as inescapable or peace as efortless. In the context of this study, it is worth calling attention to the fact that these Lebanese flms explore the intricacies and hardships of living through war and building peace together.

References Arbid, Danielle. 2004. “Domestic Battlefelds: Danielle Arbid on ‘Maarek Hob’.” Interview by A. Jaafar, Bidoun, Vol. 2. http://archive.bidoun.org/magazine/02we-are-old/domestic-battlefields-danielle-arbid-on-maarek-hob-by-ali-jaafar. Accessed 15 June 2017. Armes, Roy. 2015. New Voices in Arab Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Committee on the Rights of the Child – Ofce of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. 2015. Fourth and Fifth Periodic Reports on the Implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Lebanon 2005–2014. https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/treatybodyexternal/Download. aspx?symbolno=CRC/C/LBN/4-5&Lang=en. Accessed 20 January 2018.

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Dyer, Rebecca. 2010. “Representations of the Migrant Domestic Worker in Hoda Barakat’s ‘Harith Al-Miya’ and Danielle Arbid’s ‘Maarek Hob’.” College Literature 37, no. 1: 11–37. https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.0.0101. Accessed 25 June 2017. Fisk, Robert. 2001. Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Galavan, Sarah L. 2016. “Flipping the Script: Nadine Labaki’s ‘Where Do We Go Now’?” Cléo: A  Journal of Film and Feminism 4, no. 2. http://cleojournal. com/2016/08/18/flipping-the-script-nadine-labakis-where-do-we-go-now. Accessed 13 July 2017. Ginsberg, Terri and Chris Lippard. 2010. Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press. Hourani, Najib. 2008. “The Militiaman Icon: Cinema, Memory, and the Lebanese Civil.” CR: The New Centennial Review 8, no. 2: 287–307. Khalaf, Samir. 1987. Lebanon’s Predicament. New York: Columbia University Press. Khatib, Lina. 2008. Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond. London: I.B. Tauris. Khatib, Lina. 2011. “Lebanese Cinema and the Representation of War.” In Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence, edited by J. Guglerp, 134–145. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Labaki, Nadine. 2011. “Interview with Nadine Labaki – Director of ‘Where Do We Go Now?’ ” Interviewed by M. Silverstein, IndieWire, September 13, 2011. www. indiewire.com/2011/09/interview-with-nadine-labaki-director-of-where-do-wego-now-212088. Accessed 11 July 2017. Mostafa, Dalia S. 2014. “The Child Torn Between War and the Adult World: ‘In the Battlefelds’.” In Arab Feminisms: Gender and Equality in the Middle East, edited by Jean S. Makdisi, Noha Bayoumi, and Raff Rida Sidawi, 279–288. London: I.B. Tauris. Muhanna, Elias. 2010. “Abolishing Confessionalism in Lebanon: A Poll by Information International.” Qifa Nabki, February  23, 2010. https://qifanabki.com/ 2010/02/23/abolishing-confessionalism-in-lebanon-a-poll-by-informationinternational. Accessed 12 June 2017. Salibi, Kamal. 1976. Crossroads to Civil War: Lebanon 1958–1976. Delmar, NY: Caravan Books. Salibi, Kamal. 2009. A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered. London: I.B. Tauris. Sawalha, Aseel. 2014. “After Amnesia: Memory and War in Two Lebanese Films.” Visual Anthropology 27, nos. 1–2: 105–116. Sinno, Nadine. 2017. “ ‘May the War Be Remembered but Not Repeated’: Engendering Peace in Nadine Labaki’s ‘Where Do We Go Now?’ ” College Literature 44, no. 4: 615–643. https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2017.0036. Accessed 25 June 2017. United States Department of State – Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. 2015. “Lebanon 2015 International Religious Freedom Report.” International Religious Freedom Report for 2015. https://2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/256489.pdf. Accessed 15 January 2018.

Index

4 Blocks (2017–2019) 199, 205–207, 209 40 Square Meters of Germany (40 Quadratmeter Deutschland) (1986) 197 Afghanistan 6, 116, 149–158, 162–165, 167–171, 175, 186, 201, 204 Akın, Fatih 200, 209 Akkad, Moustapha 5, 35, 123, 127–128, 130–131, 133 Aladağ, Feo 197, 204 Aladağ, Züli 202–203 Alaouie, Borhane 215 Ali. Fear Eats the Soul (Ali. Angst essen Seele auf) (1974) 198 America 2–6, 13–14, 16, 18–22, 24–25, 42, 55–57, 59, 62–63, 65–66, 72, 83, 85–87, 93, 104, 109, 128, 130, 139–141, 143–145, 151, 153, 156, 162, 164, 181 Amirpour, Ana Lily 5–6, 139–145 Arab 2, 14, 19, 23, 27, 29, 32–34, 41, 55–57, 60–64, 78, 93, 97, 99, 101, 103, 111, 127, 148, 158, 166, 181, 201, 203–207, 214 Arabic 3, 21, 41, 57, 60, 63, 100, 103, 109, 124–126, 181, 187–188 Arafa, Sherif 181, 182 Arbid, Danielle 213–215 Arslan, Yılmaz 199 audience 2–4, 6, 14–15, 17, 21, 42, 50, 56, 58, 64, 71, 72, 83–84, 89–91, 102, 108, 112, 128, 130–132, 141– 142, 144, 151, 153–154, 156–157, 161, 172, 194, 203–204, 216 Bab’Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated his Soul (2005) 97–100

Barmak, Siddiq 169–171 BaŞer, Tevfk 197 Beirut the Encounter (Beyroutou el lika) (1981) 210–211, 215, 220 Belyazid, Farida 102, 113 Bergson, Henri 2, 27, 34–35 Black 2, 8, 14–15, 18–22, 24–25, 64–65, 78, 128, 199, 202 Bohm, Hark 197 Britz (2007) 202 Brook, Yoni 3, 55 Brother Bajrangi (Bajrangi Bhaijaan) (2015) 111 Brother – Dark Force (Bruder – Schwarze Macht) (2017) 202 Brothers (Brüder) (2017) 202 Buck, Detlev 203 Canada 74 Carlyle, Thomas 2, 27, 29, 32–34 Christians 3–4, 7–8, 34, 41, 44, 57–59, 62–64, 67, 70, 73–74, 76, 83–93, 117, 131, 145, 158, 171–173, 183– 187, 198, 201, 210–215, 217–220 citizenship 63, 161–163, 173–174, 196–201, 203, 205 Closed Door, The (al-Abwab al-Moghlaka) 181, 187–190 Close Up Kurdistan (2007) 199 comedy 4, 7, 70–71, 76–77, 171, 181– 182, 203 Crusades, The (1935) 4, 83–84, 88–89, 91–93 Al Daradji, Mohamed 104 Day I Became a Woman, The (2000) 162, 166, 168, 173–174 DeMille, Cecil B. 4, 9, 83–85, 87–94 dhikr 97, 101, 103–105, 109, 114, 124 disability 97–98, 111–112

Index documentary 3, 63–67, 97, 108, 112, 114, 116, 148–157, 164, 169, 199, 202, 212–213, 215 Door to the Sky (Bab Al-Sama Maftouh) (1988) 97, 100, 102–103, 113 Doueiri, Ziad 212, 215 drama 7, 16, 43, 71, 89, 93–94, 97, 108, 181, 202, 213, 220 Egypt 3, 7, 28–29, 41–50, 85, 93, 114, 116–117, 127–129, 181–194 England 85, 92 Exiles (Exils) (2006) 97, 100, 103, 114 Explosion, The (Al-Infjar) (1982) 220 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 198–199 feminism 5–6, 97, 102, 112–113, 139– 141, 143, 149–150, 154, 157–158, 197 Five Fingers (2006) 2, 13–21, 25 Fratricide (Brudermord) (2005) 199 Gatlif, Tony 103, 114 Gelal, Nader 181, 183 gender 6–8, 13, 16, 48–49, 61, 67, 70, 72–75, 78–79, 86, 100, 116, 139– 142, 145, 148–152, 155, 157–158, 161–163, 169–171, 173, 176, 181, 194, 196–198, 203, 205, 207 Germany 7, 28–29, 85, 155, 175, 196–209 Ghaem-Maghami, Rokhsareh 6, 149, 152–153, 155–157 Al-Ghazali: The Alchemist of Happiness (2004) 107 Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, A (2014) 5, 139–144 Hajjar, Rafc 220 Hamed, Marwan 181, 190 Hatata, Atef 181, 187 Hevi (2014) 199 Hideous Kinky (1998) 97, 100–103 ḥilye (textual icon) 126, 130–131, 133 House without Roof (Haus ohne Dach) (2016) 199 human rights 6, 23, 86, 154, 161–167, 171, 173–175, 196, 198–199 identity 3–4, 6–7, 14, 18, 21–22, 58–64, 66, 70, 72–78, 96, 103, 114, 142, 148–151, 154–155, 157,

223

181–182, 184, 186–187, 196–199, 202, 205–207, 212, 214–215 illustrated manuscript 123, 125–126 immigrant 7, 57, 62–64, 149, 158, 196–204, 207–208 industry 3, 41–50, 88, 109, 111, 117, 127–128, 158 In the Battlefelds (Maarek hob) (2004) 210–215, 220 Iran 5–6, 98–99, 108, 111–113, 115, 117, 125, 127, 129–130, 139–145, 148–158, 162–164, 167–168, 201 Jodhaa Akbar (2008) 109–110 Journey, The (2017) 103 Kashf: The Lifting of the Veil (2008) 111 Kazantzakis, Nikos 2, 27–35 Khan, Ayesha 111 Khan, Nusrat Fateh Ali 108 Khartoum (1966) 98, 107 Khemir, Nacer 99–100 Kingdom of Heaven (2005) 84–85, 87, 93 Kızıltan, Ozer 104 Kurds 7, 148, 158, 196, 199–200, 205 Labaki, Nadine 162, 171–173, 175, 217–220 Latina/o 3–4, 55–67 Lebanon 29, 127–129, 172–173, 206, 210–211, 213, 219–220 LGBTQ 4, 89, 117, 142, 198 MacKinnon, Gillies 101 Mahmood, Jafar 4, 70, 72, 77 Majidi, Majid 5–6, 35, 98, 127, 129–133, 149 Malkin, Laurence 2, 13 Al-Mansour, Haifaa 162–163, 166–167, 171, 175 masculinity 3–4, 18, 83, 97, 104, 106, 112, 116, 197, 203–204 Meshkini, Marzieh 162–166, 168–170 Message, The (1976) 5, 35, 123, 128–130, 133 military 13, 16–18, 22–23, 85, 116, 143, 192, 194, 201 Muhammad 2, 5, 8–9, 27–35, 37, 76, 102, 123–133 Muhammad: The Messenger of God (2015) 5, 35, 123, 127–131, 133

224

Index

music 6, 23, 56, 63, 96, 98, 101, 103–104, 107–110, 112–113, 117–118, 139, 145, 151–153, 184, 188, 199, 218 My Father, the Guest Worker (Mein Vater, der Gastarbeiter) (1994) 199

130–131, 133, 148, 153, 155, 163, 197–198, 200–201, 204, 206–207, 210, 212–213, 218–220 Rockstar (2011) 110 Rumi, Jalaluddin 98–99, 105, 107, 109–110, 116

Nair, Mira 202 New Muslim Cool (2009) 3, 55–56, 59, 63–65 Night of the Wolves (Nacht der Wölfe) (1982) 207 Nine Holy Men, The (Sembilan Wali) (1985) 97, 104, 106–107 November (2004) 199 Nüchtern, Rüdiger 207

saints 97, 101, 106–108, 110, 114 Sanders-Brahms, Helma 197 Saptohadi, Djun 106 Saudi Arabia 128–130, 157, 162–163, 166–167, 201 screenplay 2, 27–31, 33–35, 37, 99, 105, 128 sexuality 4, 61, 63, 70, 73–78, 86, 89, 103, 142, 205 Shades of Ray (2008) 4, 70–74, 76, 78 Shahada (2010) 204 Shirin’s Wedding (Shirins Hochzeit) (1976) 197 Short Sharp Shock (Kurz und schmerzlos) (1998) 200, 204 Siddik, Khalid 105, 115 Skylines (2019) 199, 209 Slowly, Slowly (Ahista Ahista) (2006) 110 Solino (2002) 200 Sonita (2015) 6, 149–157 Son’s Sacrifce, A (2007) 3, 55, 57, 62, 64 Soul Kitchen (2009) 200 stereotypes 3, 14, 19, 23, 27–28, 55, 63, 71, 77, 100, 105, 144, 157, 194, 203, 209 Steyerl, Hito 199 Stray Dogs (2004) 162–164, 167, 169 Sufsm 5, 96–118, 126 Syeed, Musa 55

orientalism 4, 14–15, 19–21, 24, 27, 32–33, 83–85, 92, 97, 101–102, 127, 141, 143 Osama (2003) 162, 169–171, 173 Pakistan 70–73, 75, 77, 79, 96, 107– 108, 111, 117–118, 158, 202 patriarchy 5–6, 59–61, 63, 76, 96, 102, 112, 152, 197–198, 204 piety 7, 42, 46, 48–50, 97–98, 106, 140, 181–183, 186, 191–194 politics 4–8, 13–18, 23–24, 28, 31, 41, 56, 62, 87–90, 96–98, 100, 102–103, 105, 109, 112, 126, 128, 140–144, 148–153, 156, 161–167, 171, 173– 174, 181–182, 184, 189, 193–194, 196, 198, 200–201, 203–206, 210– 211, 216, 219 Prophet see Muhammad Puerto Rico 3, 55–67 qawwali 108–112, 118 Qurbani, Burhan 204 race 2–4, 7, 13–15, 18–19, 21, 23, 33, 56–57, 60, 63–66, 70, 72–75, 77–78, 86, 150, 152, 156–157, 198–199, 203 Rage (Wut) (2005) 203, 207 Rahman, A. R. 109–110, 117–118, 130 Rashid, Ian Iqbal 4, 70, 73, 77 refugee 6, 74, 149–151, 154, 157–158, 199, 201, 205–206, 216 representation 3, 6–7, 13, 15, 17, 19, 22–23, 41, 55, 57, 66, 70–71, 79, 96–97, 100, 105, 123–124, 126–127,

Takva: A Man’s Fear of God (2006) 98, 104–105, 115 Tatort (Crime Scene) (2011) 202 Taylor, Jennifer Maytorena 3, 55 television 15–16, 18, 43, 116, 129, 184, 188, 196, 201, 205–208, 217 terrorism 2–3, 7, 13, 15–18, 20–24, 55–56, 78, 85, 96, 104, 112, 114, 143, 150, 162, 181–187, 201, 212 Terrorism and Kebab (al-Irhaab wa-lKabaab) (1992) 181–183 Terrorist, The (al-Irhaabi) (1994) 181, 183–187 torture 2, 13–24, 184, 191–194, 203

Index Touch of Pink (2004) 4, 70–73, 76–78 Tough Enough (Knallhart) (2006) 203 Turkey 7, 28, 85, 96, 99, 104–105, 107–108, 112, 115–116, 126–130, 148, 158, 196–201, 203–207, 209 Turkish for Beginners (2006–2008) 203

225

United States 4, 13, 15, 18, 19, 21–23, 25, 87, 107, 143, 155, 216

Wadjda (2012) 162, 166–167, 171, 173 Wedding of Zein, The (Urs Al-Zayn) (1976) 97, 104–106 West Beirut (Beyrouth Al Gharbiyya) (1998) 210–216, 220 When We Leave (Die Fremde) (2010) 197–198, 204 Where Do We Go Now? (W halla’ la wayn) (2011) 210–211, 216–220 Willow Tree, The (2005) 98, 129

violence 7–8, 17, 19, 21, 24, 31, 83, 85–86, 92, 96, 104, 144, 171, 176, 181–182, 184, 186–187, 189–190, 193–194, 197, 207, 211, 213–214, 216–217

Yacoubian Building (‘Imarat Ya’qubyan) (2006) 181, 190–193 Yasemin (1988) 197 Yavuz, Yüksel 199 Yusef, Soleen 199, 209