A Jihad for Love

A Jihad for Love
First Run Features poster for A Jihad for Love (US)
Directed by	Parvez Sharma
Produced by	Sandi Simcha DuBowski Parvez Sharma
Cinematography	Parvez Sharma
Edited by	Juliet Weber
Music by	Sussan Deyhim Richard Horowitz supervised by Ramsay Adams Abe Velez
Distributed by	First Run Features (U.S.)
Release dates	September 9, 2007 (2007-09-09) (Toronto International Film Festival) May 21, 2008 (2008-05-21) (United States)
Running time	81 minutes
Country	United States
Languages	English, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, French, Turkish, etc.
Box office	$105,651

A Jihad for Love (also known by the working title In the Name of Allah) is a 2007 documentary film on the coexistence of Islam and homosexuality. A Jihad for Love was the world’s first ever film on Islam and homosexuality. It took a total of seven years to make and the filmmakers -- Director and Producer Parvez Sharma and Producer Sandi Dubowski raised more than a million dollars to make the film.

Many organizations including the Indo-American Arts Council (on March 8, 2009) considered it a “seminal film” because of its historic significance as the world’s first film on this subject.

On May 21, 2008, Filmmaker magazine said the same adding that the film was “Shot in 12 countries over six years, Sharma’s film is an intelligent and eloquent exposition of a taboo subject that not only movingly pays tribute to the strength and integrity of the film’s embattled subjects but – despite its provocative title – maintains a reverent rather than critical attitude towards the Islamic religion. We spoke to Sharma about the difficulties involved in making the film, reclaiming the word “jihad,” and designing his own Bollywood film posters as a child.”

IMDB rates the film at 13 on its list of 58 titles under the category of "Best documentaries on religion, spirituality and cults".

The website of the film offers some of the press around the film when it came out and contains an important resources section for LGBT Muslims who are struggling with their identities.

The film was banned in Singapore and many Muslim and some Arab nations. Press reports about the Singapore ban, for example said “About 14 percent of Singapore's 4.4 million population is Muslim. The film was shown in film festivals in Hong Kong, Tokyo and in Jakarta, Indonesia at the recently concluded Q Film Festival.” They also said that “the film’s sale and broadcast on NDTV, South Asia’s largest network in 2008 would have a “remarkable” impact. “NDTV’s broadcast has in effect made the film available to over one billion viewers in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the UAE, and large portions of the Middle East and Africa – many of which continue to experience tension along religious lines.”

The various distributors and their Total Rating Points in European television, the Indian/ South-Asian sale with its claimed footprint of 15 billion viewers, the theatrical release and the purportedly large numbers of Netflix viewers made the filmmakers and the TRP experts (a term used in South Asia for audience measurement) arrive at a number of eight million total viewers calculated over a period of four years for this documentary. That number was quoted in various books over the years.

Sharma has praised the NDTV for taking the “bold and courageous step” to broadcast the film “in a time when India's draconian Section 377 of the penal code that makes homosexuality illegal has been successfully challenged in the Delhi High Court.”

The film was banned in the entire MENA region and 18 of the 22 countries that comprise the middle-east. Egyptian activist and blogger, Ethar El-Katatney wrote the following from Cairo on February 15, 2008,“HOMOSEXUALITY IS NOT a comfortable, much less a popular, topic among Muslims. Broach the subject in the Middle East, and you’re likely to hear a response like the one Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave US audiences last year: “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals, like in your country.” At best, society adopts a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ approach – do what you will, just don’t advertise it.

A controversial new documentary, A Jihad for Love, is shattering that taboo by interviewing homosexual Muslims, including an Egyptian gay man ‘outed’ by his arrest during the 2001 Queen Boat raid and an Egyptian lesbian still hiding her sexuality from society. Filmmaker Parvez Sharma had dual motivations: first, to challenge the mindset that Muslim and gay are mutually exclusive, and second, to challenge the Western world’s own Islamophobia.

The Arab media including Katatney and Egypt Today then reported “A Jihad for Love has polarized the discussion of homosexuality among Muslims. Critics argue that Sharma portrays homosexual activity as permissible in Islam, while they contend that it clearly isn’t. They also accuse Sharma of bias: “As a gay Muslim man, they argue that he began the project with prejudices and a predefined position on homosexuality.” On a television program which used clips of the film and Sharma, called The Right Way, Masoud said Sharma was not trained in the Muslim practice of Ijtihad, saying “Only around 20 of over 100,000 companions of the prophet were “ahl estembat” (those who considered themselves qualified enough to actually interpret Qur’an and Hadith). But interestingly calling for a more peaceful Islam he praised the title of the film saying, “ I love the title [of the movie] but when defined differently. We need to have jihad against extremism in society so we can learn to love the sinning person that is struggling, even though we hate their sin. And so, I too, call for a jihad for love”.

The work that Sharma started with the film started to become a staple in many books on Islam and at U.S. University libraries.

He wrote the forward for the two part anthology called, “Islam and Homosexuality”

On Amazon the film has a customer review average of four and a half stars out of five. On Amazon A Jihad for Love has a rank of 7,653 in the top 100 documentaries.

Production

A Jihad for Love is produced by Halal Films, in association with the Sundance Documentary Fund, Channel 4 Television (UK), ZDF (Germany), Arte (France-Germany), Logo (US) and SBS (Australia).

The documentary was filmed in 12 different countries and in nine languages. Sharma compiled 400 hours of footage of interviews throughout North America, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Countries included Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, Turkey, France, India, South Africa, the United States and the United Kingdom. He found many of his interviewees online, and received thousands of emails.

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2007, and has been screened to great acclaim at several film festivals around the world. It was the Opening film for the prestigious Panorama Dokumente section of the Berlin Film Festival in February, 2008. The U.S. theatrical release was May 21, 2008 at the IFC Center in New York City. The film screened at the Frameline Film Festival in San Francisco on June 28, 2008, and the Tokyo International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival on July 13, 2008.

Another website puts it at number 9 in a list of LGBT films about faith.

Filmmaker Magazine said,"Shot in 12 countries over six years, Sharma’s film is an intelligent and eloquent exposition of a taboo subject that not only movingly pays tribute to the strength and integrity of the film’s embattled subjects but – despite its provocative title – maintains a reverent rather than critical attitude towards the Islamic religion."

The Guardian said, " Dignity and despair are woven tightly together in A Jihad for Love, a six-year endeavour by Indian film-maker Parvez Sharma that explores Islam and homosexuality. Without a distributor in the US, the film is one of the hottest tickets at the festival, and nobody knows what will happen at the first public screening. "

The filmmaker raised more than a million dollars over a six year period to make the film.

The film was shot in a dozen nations, most with Muslim majorities. Parvez Sharma filmed 400 hours of footage in countries ranging from Iraq to Pakistan. The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper said "After nearly six years, Parvez Sharma will finally show his documentary A Jihad for Love at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday. But the work is far from over for the filmmaker, whose feature film about the lives of gay Muslims who continue to live strongly by their faith is sure to be provocative.

Instead, as audiences get their first glimpse at the 70-minute documentary filmed in 12 countries and nine languages, Sharma and his producer, Sandi Dubowski, who directed 2001's Trembling Before G-d, will be on the hunt for donations to help pay off the film's post-production costs and fund their planned Muslim Dialogue Project." The Muslim Dialogue Project was launched right after the film's theatrical launch around the U.S.

New York magazine said " Making a documentary about gay and lesbian Muslims in twelve countries was not easy. “A white boy from Chelsea could not have made this film,” explains Parvez Sharma, the New York–based director of A Jihad for Love, opening May 21. “Being gay and Muslim myself, I knew that this film had to be about us all coming out— as Muslims. It’s about claiming the Islam that has been denied to us.” As such, Sharma says his ideal audience is faithful Muslims—and not just “gay white men or activists.” To reach them, he’s “smuggled tapes into Iran and Pakistan,” leafleted mosques, blanketed MySpace, and “hosted a screening at a home in Astoria for fifteen key progressive Muslim leaders.” There’s more to do: “Over the last six years, some of the most amazing conversations I’ve had about this film have been with taxi drivers, but I’m stumped about how to reach them again.”

An article about the film explained its methodology.

"Sharma compiled 400 hours of footage from a dozen countries ranging from Iraq to Pakistan to the UK. The nature of the work placed him at considerable personal risk. He adopted hardcore guerrilla film-making tactics, pretending to be a tourist in one country, a worker for an Aids charity in another. Wherever he went, he asked friends to keep copies of footage and destroy the tapes once he had successfully smuggled the masters out of the country."

The film took Parvez Sharma to 12 countries and he filmed in nine languages.

During the making of the film, Sharma always worked undercover without government protection. He would record tourist looking footage at the beginning and end of every tape and check his tapes in, hoping that if they were checked by unfriendly border authorities, they would only see the first couple of minutes and assume it was tourist footage and let it go. He took these extraordinary precautions to not reveal the identity of his subjects and in many cases to save his own life.

In an interview to the German "Der Speigel" Sharma explained the significance of the title

" I'm not looking at jihad as battle -- I'm looking at the greater jihad in Islam, which is the jihad as the struggle with the self. I also thought it was really compelling to take a word that only has one connotation for most -- to take that, reclaim it and put it in the same phrase as love, which is universal. I really think it explains it very well."

In 2004 when the film was still in production the New York Times profiled the filmmaker (it would do so again in 2015) and said

"Given the hostility toward homosexuality in some Islamic factions, Mr. Sharma has gone to great lengths to reassure many of his interview subjects that they will remain anonymous. But this obscuring of identities has led to what the director regards as one of his key challenges: filming people in silhouette or with their faces covered tends to reinforce a sense of shame around homosexuality, precisely countering one of Mr. Sharma's main objectives."

"The Nation" explained the methodology "Sharma" employed to film.

"But shooting the film was no easy task. Sharma was forced to employ guerilla filmmaking tactics in Islamic countries where he knew he would never be granted government permission for his taboo subject matter. “I would shoot touristy footage on the first fifteen minutes and the last fifteen minutes of a tape, hoping that if the tape was actually confiscated at customs…they would not find the key part of the interviews, because they would just scroll through the beginning or the end,” Sharma says. Luckily, Sharma managed to extradite his footage, over 400 hours worth, to the United States, where he whittled the secret lives of his subjects down to an eighty-minute film."

Cinemapolitica in a review said" "A Jihad for Love" is Mr. Sharma’s debut and is the world’s first feature documentary to explore the complex global intersections between Islam and homosexuality."

Significance of the title

The title A Jihad for Love refers to the Islamic concept of jihad, as a religious struggle. The film seeks to reclaim this concept of personal struggle, as it is used by the media and politicians almost exclusively to mean "holy war" and to refer to violent acts perpetrated by extremist Muslims.

The film has gone by several titles, beginning with the official working title, In the Name of Allah.

Among Muslims, the phrase (bismillah in Arabic) may be used before beginning actions, speech, or writing. Its most notable use in Al-Fatiha, the opening passage of the Qur'an, which begins Bismillahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim. All surahs of the Qur'an begin with "Bismillahi r-Rahmani r-Rahim," with the exception of the ninth.

Producer DuBowski's previous film, Trembling Before G-d, on Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, also included the name of God, written with a hyphen as in Jewish tradition. Allah is the name of God in Islam and Arabic, and it is often used among Muslims residing in Muslim countries and monotheists in Arabic speaking countries.

Controversy and problems

Sharma's making of the film has not been without criticism.

About every two weeks I get an e-mail that berates me, condemns me to hell and, if they are nice, asks me to still seek forgiveness while there is still time.

Sharma refuses to associate homosexuality with shame, but recognizes the need to protect the safety and privacy of his sources, by filming them in silhouette or with their faces blurred. In one case, the family of an Afghan woman he interviewed "would undoubtedly kill her" if they found out she was lesbian. In another example, one of the associate producers, an Egyptian gay man, chose not to be listed in the credits for fear of possible consequences.

The film was banned from screening at the 2008 Singapore International Film Festival in view of the sensitive nature of the subject that features Muslim homosexuals in various countries and their struggle to reconcile religion and their lifestyle," Amy Chua, Singapore Board of Film Censors chairwoman was quoted as saying by The Straits Times.

Critical reception

As of April 6, 2015, the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 76% percent of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 32 reviews. Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 55 out of 100, based on six reviews — indicating mixed or average reviews.

Awards

The movie won seven international awards:

• GLAAD Media Award, 2009
• Best Documentary, MIX BRASIL, Sao Paulo, Brasil
• Best Documentary, Image+Nation Film Festival, Montreal, Canada
• Best Documentary, The Tri-Continental Film Festival, India

See also

• Islam and homosexuality
• Homosexuality and religion
• Gay Muslims (2006), a Channel 4 TV documentary about gay and lesbian Muslims in Britain
• Trembling Before G-d (2001), a documentary film directed Jihad for Love producer Sandi Simcha DuBowski, about Orthodox Jews who are gay or lesbian
• Fremde Haut (2005), a film about an Iranian lesbian in Germany
• Love Jihad
• 2007 in film

External links

• Official website
• A Jihad for Love at IMDb
• A Jihad for Love at Rotten Tomatoes
• A Jihad for Love at Metacritic
• A Jihad for Love at AllMovie
• CineSource Article on A Jihad For Love
• Director of Film on Muslim Homosexuals Frets over His Subjects' Safety
• Film of Muslim gays stirs up sentiments
• A Jihad for Love, Hartley Film Foundation
• Hearts and Minds, article in The Guardian