“I think I have tried really hard in the media to portray this as not…Irshad Manji, not Hirsi Ali, not any of those, not an attempt to provoke, but an attempt to understand a difficult discussion…”
Parvez Sharma is a gay Muslim filmmaker whose award-winning documentary, “A Jihad for Love,” was screened across the U.S. and is still being shown underground in a number of Muslim countries.
The film, which took six years to complete, chronicles the struggles of gay and lesbian Muslims across several Muslim countries, focusing on subjects’ insistence on upholding their identity as Muslims despite hostility from local communities and governments.
Below is the full transcript of our interview, in which Sharma touched upon a variety of topics, including the hurdles of getting the film made as a man of color and new immigrant to the U.S., the challenge of defending Islam from external vilification while insisting on internal reform, the trauma involved for some of the film’s participants, and the film’s overall impact.
[Regular readers may recall that some months ago, I mentioned that the progressive magazine on race, Colorlines, agreed to publish a 1,200-word condensed version of some of the interview. However, this never materialized. The editors have inexplicably declined to tell me why--even though they already paid me for the piece. Such are the frustrations of a minor writer. At any rate, I have permission to use the full transcript, so here it is.]
LEVESQUE-ALAM: I wanted to start out by asking you by about the length of the filming process. It was about six years during which you filmed your subjects, gay and lesbian Muslims, across several Muslim countries. What were the hurdles involved in that kind of time span? Was it logistical or financial?
SHARMA: I think it’s really everything. At the end of the day, I mean, if you commit six years of your life to just one project where you do not necessarily see an end in sight, you have to maintain a kind of focus and kind of determination that is pretty extraordinary in my opinion.
Because of course there is a tremendous hurdle for funding. The biggest one in my opinion was me being an immigrant in this country, being a proud Muslim filmmaker. I have spoken often, even in the press, of the gatekeepers in the industry being mostly Caucasian men with a particular set of principles, or a worldview, that [that identity] often comes with.
Certainly post-September 11th, while there has been a tremendous interest in funders wanting to fund films about Islam, at the same time you’re negotiating minefields because the films that they’re usually interested are films that fall into the popular narrative of dissing Islam.
LEVESQUE-ALAM: Right. There seems to be a similar case with films and popular media representation, which brings me to another point. As you noted, there are very few non-white filmmakers in the U.S. and it’s very difficult to get funded from this vantage point.
Were you worried that in the course of trying to find funding from your film that the people who were backing you ultimately were hoping for an exoticized product or some kind of anti-Islamic manifesto?
SHARMA: Absolutely, absolutely. Now listen, even when you talk about the demographic of the film industry, you have to understand that it’s the product of the country itself. I’m writing about this right now, that’s why I’m speaking about this. In this election year you very starkly realize that up to 74% of people in the last US census identify themselves as white, whatever that concept means now, and that includes about 14% Hispanics, maybe 24%, who would see themselves as white as well.
Now, is there a white worldview, and is there an understanding of white privilege, and is there as a result of that, a limited understanding of Islam? It’s not an easy general statement to make. In my case in particular, I took a lot of Jewish funding for this film. So I was acutely conscious of different political agendas that might operate within that.
The biggest ideological challenges as a filmmaker was to retain, for one, my complete creative control over the film, and many, many long contracts were signed in order to do that, and then to build a team of people around me who would not interfere in what I was setting out to do, which was to make a film about Islam with as much honesty as I thought was possible, because clearly I saw myself and see myself as a defender of faith, but at the same time I did not want to not be able to criticize what I saw as wrong.
LEVESQUE-ALAM: Were you concerned – you had mentioned that some of funders were themselves Jewish – were you concerned in light of the aggravated tensions and the pall that’s been cast over Jewish-Muslim relations because of the Israel-Palestine conflict and Iran-Israel conflict, that there was a political agenda? Were there specific points where you had to say, “look, my film is not ‘Fitna.’ My film is a different kind of film, my film is not meant to be taken as a cheap shot against the religion.”
SHARMA: I was concerned about those kinds of agendas, I remain concerned about those kinds of agendas. I see sometimes, you know, the debate of the film being used in other discourses where I do not necessary feel the film occupies a place. And yes, I had to put my foot down, I mean, it was a tremendous ideological battle, as I said, where I really was fighting for something that had not quite yet been defined.
A lot of people who have made films about Islam post-Sept. 11 have been non-Muslim. There is a new genre of documentary film-making, such as the Iraq films that have emerged, which I find deeply problematic and troubling, because you know, you go in and invade and occupy a country, and you end up filming the spoils of war with very little knowledge of what really going on in that particular ancient culture. The same with Afghanistan.
And then Muslims who have made films have often acted as apologists for the faith and kind of fallen into the trap of just trying to fit into the mainstream discourse about Islam right now.
So yes, I felt that there were different forces operating, I still feel that way. I still try as much as is possible to keep Muslim ownership of the film. I try as much as possible to allow spaces for Muslims to stand in front of the film and mediate it for audiences. And that’s not just myself, but other people, and many many, Muslims have stepped forward to do this in the last year.
And I feel that’s really important, it’s really this political climate, this climate where Islam has been demonized, where we are perhaps unfairly characterized as people of violence in very narrow terms, that we are required to kind of stand up and somehow take charge of that discussion on Islam so that we are the ones who are setting the agenda, we are the ones who are setting the talking points, because I think that’s critically important.
LEVESQUE-ALAM: During the period of filming, certainly you must have faced some of your own struggles as a man of color, a relatively new immigrant to the U.S., in post Sept.-11th America, and at the same time, as a gay Muslim at a time of increasing Islamic extremism. How did your personal experience inform your vision for the film and your relationship with the people who you interviewed for it?
SHARMA: It informed it deeply. I think I’ve been quoted as saying this before, that if, let’s say, if I’d not been a Muslim filmmaker, I do not think I would have had the amount of access and the depth of interpersonal relationship that I was able to develop really with everyone in the film. I think they trusted me the most primarily because I was Muslim, and primarily because I was gay and Muslim, and in many cases spoke the language and in many cases understood a lot of the circumstances that people are coming from and a lot of the challenges that they were facing. So being Muslim in the West post Sept.11th – which is not necessary the best thing that can happen to you at the airport – is also a blessing in other ways when you try to go into “Islamic territory” and make a film as a Muslim.
I’ve said before that the very same Islam that makes me so miserable sometimes here in America in how I look or what I speak to, gave me a degree of protection and the ability in some of the countries I went to, because I kind of did look like everybody else, and was able to kind of just melt into the crowd many times.
LEVESQUE-ALAM: In the process of making the film, were there particularly poignant or memorable moments that stuck out for you?
SHARMA: There were way too many, very hard to be able to [pinpoint].
LEVESQUE-ALAM: Were you able to develop strong bonds with people given the timespan -
SHARMA: I talk about the Mazen, the Egyptian refugee during the film. Now, here’s a man who in his early 20s was arrested by Hosni Mubarak’s government in Egypt. Hosni Mubarak for all purposes being “secular” and “anti-Islamic,” whipped up this entire frenzy about being a defender of public morality, and this is something that this government and other Muslim governments have done in the past, to win brownie points with the extremist political parties, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, for example.
So Mazen and 52 other men were arrested in 2001 in Egypt. They were locked up in prison, some were locked up for more than 2 years. Mazen was imprisoned for over a year. The newspaper headlines at that time had said that a cult of satanists that was developing a new religion had been arrested, and were amongst other vices indulging in sodomy.
So this was the kind of climate that this man came from, and he was tortured in prison, he was even raped, as he mentions in the film, and while he was out on bail, he fled Egypt and got asylum in France. And I became almost an elder brother to him; I became his closest confidante for the first two years, affirming with him.
I even shared the same bed with him as he cried all night and I held him because I realized that this was also a victim of some pretty intense trauma who I was asking to relive that trauma for the camera. So I had to be there to hold him and take care of him, make him feel that his reliving of this trauma was worthwhile. So you know, that was poignant and that actually led to a transformation in the film itself where after about two years of filming he was able o turn around and say to the camera “enough is enough and I really need to show my face to tell this story.”
LEVESQUE-ALAM: You mention the incidence of rape, and it also seems similar acts have taken place under the auspices of the Sadrist militias in Iraq where gay men, or men who have just been accused of being gay, are rounded up, and then raped by these militants who themselves claim to be so anti-gay, I mean, is there something you see in that? What is this blatant contradiction here where they’re condemning these men and then rape them themselves?
SHARMA: This is – I get your question – pretty tricky territory. Look at Abu Ghraib for example: a lot of the images that were supplied had to do with the sexual subjugation and humiliation of supposedly heterosexual Iraqi Muslim men, in which you know, the sexual act, the forbidden sexual act if you will - forbidden equally in Christianity, if this war is indeed fought in the name of Christianity, and also in Islam - [takes place]. And so, you know, this is as old as history itself. I mean, you have to be clear about that: this kind of dichotomy has existed in wartime in pretty much every society where the sexual act of penetrative anal intercourse has been used to humiliate and to subjugate and to establish dominant position.
There is a dichotomy, definitely, but I want to say is that it’s existed forever, and yes, there are some reports of militia that roam the streets in Iraq using similar tactics, and I’m not surprised at all. Also, I mean, look at the [U.S.] prison system, where anal rape occurs very frequently, so that’s pretty interesting, and a lot of people have commented and written about this who are scholars in these matters.
LEVESQUE-ALAM: Another question I wanted to ask you, and you can correct me if I’m wrong of course, but my understand is that throughout Islamic history there has been a gay subculture that is not out in the open but was “tolerated” throughout a great portion of Muslim history, as long as it wasn’t out in the open. Do you think that there is a specific reason that this has taken a turn for the worse, or do these subcultures still exist with some tolerance by some regimes, or that in the case of Egypt they staged these crackdowns for a dog and pony show, for political benefit?
SHARMA: That’s true, all of the above. That’s a great question. I mean first of all, I would use the word “gay” with some trepidation, because one of the arguments made successfully in the film is that this crazy business of labeling that goes on in the U.S. and the West around sexuality and GLBTQI, or whatever, does not necessarily apply in the “east”.
LEVESQUE-ALAM: Can you elaborate on that?
SHARMA: Well it just doesn’t work, you know, this process of labeling everything in America in order to be able to recognize it, mark it, and identify it, is sometimes not necessary in other places. The gay rights movement here happened in a particular way due to a particular set of circumstances, and definitely after the 60s when the boundaries between the public and the private had been increasingly blurred. Now when you go into the “East” or Islam, or whatever you want to call it, you find that those traditional cultural boundaries between what’s acceptable privately and what’s acceptably publicly are very clearly defined for the most part. And you know, gay pride in Tehran, for example, is not- [that']s not the language, and in many instances, in Urdu or Punjabi or Hindi, you will not find words of affirmation [interruption].
What I was saying was that…the language is also absent in many of these languages, I mean there isn’t a word for “gay” in Urdu as we understand gay to be. So that said, now, if you look at Islamic history, you’re absolutely right, I think we’re now entering, or finishing, 1428 [the Islamic lunar calendar], so that’s 1428 years of history, and if you look at the Ottomans, if you look at the Persian empire, if you look at the Mughal empire in India, there has been a strong tradition of homosexual or homoerotic desire expressed and celebrated and definitely tolerated; sometimes celebrated in the courts, in the arts; there’s been a lot written about the idolized form of the young man and how older men would idolize and look up to that. There are even passages in the Quran that talk about the beauty of the young man.
So you know, that’s been going on, relationships between older men and younger men have sometimes even been seen as a rite of passage and acceptable, and continue to be even in parts of Pakistan, for example, in a lot of Pathan tribes in the NWFP [North West Frontier Province] to this day, and parts of Afghanistan.
So that said, all of that has been going and has been tacitly approved. I think the problem happens after colonialism, after the Middle East was pretty much carved out into all these different countries [after World War II], and similarly the British were departing India/Pakistan/Bangladesh, leaving in many countries penal codes that came out of Victorian morality and spoke very strongly against the act of sodomy. This was in some ways their way of restricting the kind of sodomy that had gone on in many of these places. And many of these laws remain to this day; not all Muslims are living under Sharia law.
But after colonialism ended, there was also a rise in freedom movements that is increasingly connected to religion, and in some ways religion and politics get mixed up tremendously in many Muslim countries during these freedom movements, and some led to events many years after colonialism, of course, like the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. And certainly there has been greater stridency, if you will, in embracing puritanical extreme orthodox interpretations of the Quran once again. A lot of moral policing has gone on. Vice squads have been set up in many countries and morality is policed. So all of these things are definitely interconnected in history.
LEVESQUE-ALAM: This brings me to another question here that I think is related. With wars raging in two, perhaps now three, Muslim countries, and a ceaseless barrage of anti-Muslim invective that one finds in some sector of the U.S. Media, many Muslims take the view that, you know, any criticism of Muslims or Muslim society – from within or without – is part of this design to malign Islam. Do you think that genuine social progress is going to be possible in the Muslim world as long as bombs are being dropped on the Muslim world in the name of that same social progress?
SHARMA: I think times of catastrophic events like wars are certainly challenging to try and create social change. When the general Islamic sentiment, speaking very broadly, is one of having been victimized by [an idea] that characterizes every Muslim as a terrorist, then…the discussion about social change definitely becomes more difficult because, first and foremost, you become a Muslim – as I have become and many others become – and you come out as Muslim, if you will. Especially if you’re living in the West, you feel a need to defend your faith, first and foremost, and to try and correct many of the misperceptions that float around.
And I question this, I mean, I question the legitimacy myself, of whether a debate around homosexuality is necessary in 2008, when, as you point out, there are possibly three wars raging, Islam is contested, the soul of Islam is contested, and when this kind of climate prevails, and then I – even I – wonder about the necessity of that debate. But I feel that the debate needs to continue. This idea of ijtihad of Islam – many will say the doors were closed in the 7th century, I believe, but that needs to continue, it’s very important. How much is that actually going to impact people’s lives in these difficult times is hard to say.
But let me just say that entering the 21st century now, there is a profound churning in Islam, and it’s going to impact several generations to come, and we do not know the outcome of that churning yet.
LEVESQUE-ALAM: Yeah, the closing of the gates you mentioned, if I’m thinking correctly, might have been in the 13th century after the Mongol invasion swept through and devastated large swaths of the Muslim community, the Sunni community, which decided to, much as it has in the current context of war, close its doors and rally together or try to maintain a monolithic bloc.
But moving along from that question, one of the common threads threads of your film is that far from rejecting Islam, the people you’re interviewing proudly consider themselves Muslim or try to defend their identity as Muslim despite the hostility they face from other Muslims. Some have just said, you know, throwing their hands up in exasperation, “Well why don’t you just get out of the religion. Why don’t you just switch religions?” What is your response to that sentiment – how do you maintain your faith, and how do you think some of your interviewees maintained their faith against these kinds of pressures?
SHARMA: It’s really hard, and I don’t have any real answer to this question. Even I now, after a year [Oct. 2008] of the film being out, wonder about the necessity of faith sometimes in a world where extremisms are increasingly controlling all faiths, be it Christianity or Judaism or Islam. I also wonder about the legitimacy of clinging to faith. But I realize that faith is something that is way more profound, and deeply, if you will, personal.
I feel that for a lot of the people in the film Islamic religiosity is not something that comes in isolation. Our religion is a religion of community, and leaving the religion is not really the easiest thing to do when you have extended families, when you have all your culture, your art, your way of looking at the culture, determined in some ways by your religiosity, it’s not easy to leave that.
LEVESQUE-ALAM: You said at one point during the SAJA [South Asian Journalists Association] conference, and correct me if I’m wrong, that at one time you had either converted or you had embraced Islam after your mother died. Is that at all connected to this issue or was some specific circumstance around that – what was it that appealed to you in Islam that made you embrace it?
SHARMA: I grew up with a mixed family. I grew up half-Muslim, but my mother was the most dominant force in my life if you, will. In a formal way, when she passed away, I felt the need to be more Muslim. This was 13 years ago now. But again, it was a very personal decision. And I certainly would not have necessarily taken on the discussion of Islam to the extent I have if I had not felt deeply and profoundly troubled after Sept. 11th.
It was something, my Muslim identity, that I always took for granted, right? Then it suddenly became the defining piece of me in other people’s lives, and therefore I had to kind of stand up and speak for it, and take ownership.
LEVESQUE-ALAM: Do you think that when you do take ownership and when you point out to for instance, in the middle of the rhetoric and the hyperbole, “Why aren’t all these wars and occupations themselves considered terrorism?” and you have these conversations, do you think your Western peers actually take you more seriously than they would a non-gay Muslim because you have that identity that lends you a certain credibility to your argument on say, terrorism?
SHARMA: Not really, no.
LEVESQUE-ALAM: Your film now has been screened in many major cities across the country, most recently, I believe, in Washington, D.C. What is your assessment of its reception and its impact?
SHARMA: It’s doing very well. I think the impact has been tremendous. I mean, it even screened in Houston, where - you know, everyone in this election cycle talks about the “American people,” right…whatever that might constitute. But we use it as singular. So one of the characteristics of the “American people” seem to be white, middle-class, Republican families. So exactly such a family came to see the film in Houston, with their two sons, who did not seem to be gay. And I asked them, “What are you doing here?”
And they said they are trying to educate themselves about Islam. They saw it in the papers and they see it as a sense of their own responsibility. And everyone is constantly surrounded by this debate about Islam, to try and see what trickles down in poor little Houston, which is not much, by way of films about Islam. After they saw the film, they said, “the film’s amazing, we’re going to be talking about this at our breakfast table for months to come and you have made a seismic shift of our perception of what the religion is and we don’t quite know what it is yet.”
So that’s amazing, you know, in this climate. And I think American audiences for the most part - I mean of course there’s an assumption that this is a deeply anti-intellectual society, and Americans for the most part are stupid and do not understand what is really going on in the outside world, and I think it can be a fair generalization in some circumstances - but as I’ve traveled I’ve realized that people who are engaging with the film are questioning a lot and learning a lot, it’s like an Islam 101 for them, and that’s very exciting to me. I mean, I set out to create a debate about Islam, and I think that’s exactly what this film has done.
LEVESQUE-ALAM: What has the reception been like in the Muslim community? I know that you personally have received some angry notes and even some death threats, but how would you characterize the general, broad response from at least the American Muslim community?
SHARMA: Even outside the American Muslim community, the response has been overwhelmingly positive in the Muslim community. People, especially straight Muslims, have embraced this film, even in Turkey, even in India, and certainly in all the underground screenings that are going on in Tehran, Karachi, Lahore, Palestine, elsewhere. People are really engaging with this film. Some of my biggest allies in America have been straight Muslims, straight Muslim couples, friends of mine in Chicago, going to mosque after Jummah [Friday] prayers, distributing fliers, talking to the imam directly, asking him to engage in this discussion.
So it’s been really positive. I think I have tried really hard in the media to portray this as not – not Irshad Manji, not Hirsi Ali, not any of those, not an attempt to provoke, but an attempt to understand a difficult discussion, and an attempt that works within the Hudood [Islamic context of restrictions].
So the Hudood we Muslims set for ourselves - one of the principles as Muslims is to remain good Muslims, and to not attack our faith, and I think the film [adheres to] this. I think that, for the most part, is the widespread perception out there about the film. Therefore, there has not been violence around this film.
LEVESQUE-ALAM: One of my questions was actually going to be whether you thought this film would make its way to Muslim countries in bootlegged form, but you’ve said there have already been film underground screenings. So how is that -
SHARMA: There will be more, Inshallah [God willing].
LEVESQUE-ALAM: So this is something that’s taking place in that covert way, or that clandestine way, within the subculture?
SHARMA: Yeah.
LEVESQUE-ALAM: My final question is really that, after seeing the ongoing impact of this film, what is your next project or next endeavor, if there is one, in the way of films?
SHARMA: I’m not going to make a gay film again. So I’m definitely post-gay at this point.
LEVESQUE-ALAM: [Laughs]
SHARMA: Now, I remain deeply interested in Islam, so I want to make a subversive Bollywood musical, if I really can, with a Muslim theme. So that’s one of the options I’m looking at. And at this point, I need to also somehow move out from the last six, seven years of my life, and getting to creating something else, and that’s very daunting.