Cinema in Muslim Societies

Ali Ahmad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138934528
• eBook ISBN: 9781317389606
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book collates a comprehensive range of fascinating essays by leading authors on film from across the Muslim world. Responding to political and theoretical misconceptions about Islam and Muslim culture, it covers North African, Arab and Asian cinemas in a rich series of industry histories, single film studies and detailed analyses of celebrated directors. Cinema in Muslim Societies is innovative and timely in its explicit engagement with vexing questions of Islamic aesthetics, political activism, socialism and the role of women in Muslim contexts.

The authors explore a wide variety of topics, from cinematic art and poetry to religious identity and pornography. Debated extensively at a programme of public talks and screenings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2011, this volume remains supremely relevant in a world of polarising identities and political violence engulfing Muslim societies and the West.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Third Text.

Introduction

Is There a Muslim World?

Ali Nobil Ahmad

On 28 April 2008, Ali Nobil Ahmad wrote:

Dear Professor X,

My name is Ali Ahmad. I’m a researcher/journalist editing a special issue of the journal Third Text on Cinema and the Muslim World as part of a project that hopes to run alongside a film festival.

[A…] was kind enough to alert me to your work on [B…] which I have found very instructive and engaging, and was wondering if I could interest you in submitting an abstract/proposal relating to some aspect of World cinema.

I was hoping you might write a sort of historical piece on the historical contribution of Muslim film-makers to [C…] cinema but feel free to pitch something else…

I’d love to have you on board and look forward to hearing from you soon…

Sincerely

Ali Ahmad

From: Professor X

Sent: Tue 29/04/2008 02:59

To: Ahmad, Ali Nobil

Subject: Re: Third Text special issue

Dear Ali Ahmad,

Thank you for the invitation to contribute to Third Text, which is a journal that I read fairly regularly. I could give you a diplomatic answer, pleading lack of time, other commitments etc. However, genuine as those excuses would be, the real reason why I am less than enthusiastic to contribute to this particular special issue is because the issue’s very frame of reference assumes that there is a cinema specific to the Muslim world, ie that religion plays a determining role in cultural classifications or demarcations. Even if I were to contribute an essay contesting this notion, it would still be appearing within an overall context that overwhelmingly affirms the very thing that I would want to argue against. Just to give you an idea of what I mean: Yussef Shahine’s films or Elia Suleiman’s films or Ousmane Sembène’s films or Yllmaz Güney’s films can hardly be classified helpfully as part of the Muslim world’s cinema. Similarly, I am doubtful that one could devise a category called Judaic cinema (including Hollywood?) or Christian cinema or Shinto cinema. As for the very notions of the Muslim or the Christian world, I find them oppressive definitions: what about the many intellectuals and artists (never mind other people) who live, say, in Egypt or in Palestine and who do not wish to be categorized as part of some Muslim world? And I refuse to give such general, all-encompassing, defining powers to the religious powerbrokers of any denomination.

While these reflections are very much my own, admittedly politically motivated ones, I feel that I have to acknowledge that religions may indeed have an impact on cinematic discourses, and probably do. The problem for me in that respect is that film theory is not, as yet, equipped to analyze exactly which aspects of cinema may be the bearers of that impact: the conceptualization of character? Of causality? The mode of address? Shot-length? Choice of lenses or stock? I have no idea. I DO know, having been socialised within an [D…] family during my early youth, that there may well be some religiously grounded fantasy at work in relation to the very pleasures one expects from a cinematic image: European cinephilia of the 1950s and 1960s was almost certainly marked by such an underlying fantasy about the body of the mother, but that remains, for the time being, an unprovable assumption – besides, some of the precursors of cinephilia were Jewish (Jean Epstein and his theory of photogenie in France in the 1920s).

One could, as you ask me to do, talk about the contributions made by Muslims to a national cinema such as [E…]’s (before and after Independence). I suspect that [F…] was an atheist and that [G…] was not a particularly convinced Muslim, but I do not know in what way or to what an extent that significant [H…] directors were Muslim, so I cannot discuss how precisely some aspect of their relation to Islam might be traceable in the films they made: what exactly would I be tracing other than MY fantasies about both them and Islam? And pretending to talk about Muslim cinematic achievements while in fact elaborating my own fantasies about specific people and about a very varied religion such as Islam would be a dishonourable practice, not worthy of my overall rejection of any form of religious thinking, even within my own ratiocinations…

In spite of my own considerable distance from a project such as a journal-issue devoted to the cinema of a Muslim world, please allow me to wish you the best of luck and a successful (ie intellectually productive and challenging) issue of Third Text.

Dear Professor X,

Thank you for your thoughtful response to my invitation to submit a contribution to this special issue of Third Text. Your frankness allows for acknowledgement of some of the – shall we say – lively debates which have taken place during this project between myself, authors and the editorial team at Third Text who commissioned me to compile and edit this special issue. I have anonymised the above emails to protect your privacy. But their publication is necessary for purposes of transparency. A journal such as this, which is funded by public money and prides itself on intellectual honesty owes its readers the truth: publication of Cinema in Muslim Societies has not been universally welcomed by scholars whose fields of study it encroaches upon.

Your anonymity has the added benefit of preventing personal differences of opinion detracting from the wider position that your objections represent. You were not alone. Indeed your email provides a concise and thorough summary of the reservations I encountered from several academics in the field of film studies. My response is addressed to you but this is really an open letter – an invitation to dialogue with others who broadly share your views.

Let me begin by saying I regard your suspicion of the term ‘Muslim’ and its usage in relation to cultural forms like cinema as healthy. I am myself uncomfortable with many of the attempts that are increasingly made to discuss Islamic and/or Muslim art and literature (the terms Muslim and Islam are often used sloppily and interchangeably). Third Text is a journal that has consistently opposed the imposition of oppressive and unnecessary cultural classifications upon art and visual discourse. This special issue is certainly not intended to initiate a new industry of academic research by ethnographers and sociologists on ‘Islamic cinema’, whatever that might be.

Several of the film-makers you refer to are discussed at length in this collection (Sembène by David Murphy; Suleyman by Rasha Salti). I would have loved to include an essay on Yussef Shahine’s film, Destiny, but alas, there was not space. Contrary to your assumptions about what shape this collection would take, religion as a determinant of cinematic productions barely figures, and remains largely within the background of most of the essays that follow, which are mostly focused on national cinema industries, bodies of work by individual film-makers, genres and in one instance, a single work. None refer to a singular, homogenous Muslim world, and none speak of the industries under discussion as ‘Muslim cinemas’.

I remain convinced that it is politically important to publish these essays in a special issue that ties the stories they tell to the signifier ‘Muslim’, just as firmly as you and others are convinced it is not.

Why?

It seems obvious to me that misconceptions about Islam currently provide Western imperialism with an ideology that facilitates and drives its machinations around the globe, especially in strategically significant domains that, unfortunately for Muslims, happen to be ones in which they reside.

Islamophobia, however, is not just a problem for Muslims. Though it affects them in particularly unpleasant ways, it has devastating implications for all of humanity. Pervasive and irrational fears about Islam have served as the ideological basis of the War on Terror, which has in turn provided states as diverse as Israel, Russia, Britain and China with a justification to fulfil prior strategic objectives and curb all manner of civil liberties and potential sources of dissidence within (and in Israel’s case beyond) their borders. It has also fostered an environment in which opposition to dominant neo-liberal policy agendas is easier to marginalise. Like communism during much of the twentieth century, Islam provides a useful distraction from the ills of global capitalism, no matter how sick and unhappy capitalist societies become. One consequence of this process within Europe, which can already be witnessed in electoral politics, is growing support for far-right parties whose popularity is based on a culturalist neo-racism against Islam that bears a striking resemblance to nineteenth-century anti-Semitism.

What does any of this have to do with cinema?

The purpose of the special issue is to address the kinds of arguments being made in the mainstream media and public sphere in Britain and elsewhere by influential liberal and right-wing voices about large sections of the world’s population now routinely classified as ‘Islamic’, with all the assumptions that epithet now carries. It was decided that the most effective strategy to achieve this for an art journal like Third Text was to discuss some aspect of artistic production in relation to the Muslim world. Cinema was selected.

I think it is a pertinent choice because film-making is a quintessentially modern technology and art form: a focus on film-making in Muslim societies exposes the folly of the prevailing view that the cultural contribution of these societies ended with the Middle Ages – that they remain untouched by, and outside, modernity. To quote Benny Morris in a recent interview: ‘When you look at the Arab world culturally it’s a desert… For the past 700 years, it’s not that easy to find great cultural contributions from the Arab and Islamic world to world civilization…’¹

This kind of claim thrives off images. Internet technology and digital television have reinforced the role of visual discourse in contemporary race-making, blurring distinctions between racial and cultural alterity within a Western imagination bombarded by images of diverse groups positioned as Islamic. These discourses overlap and proliferate through films like Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2009) – a kind of contemporary Western set in Iraq where cowardly faceless moustaches snipe at all-American cowboy soldiers from minarets – and the endless flow of pictures uploaded onto news websites and twenty-four-hour television news coverage of conflict zones which, as Susan Sontag observed, provide photojournalism with its most irresistible and picturesque material.² Whether fictional or not, the visual narratives disseminated by neo-liberal media on cinema, television and computer screens alike are the same,³ as are the chain of associations they reinforce:

Islam = Muslim = Arab = Terrorist

Any attempt to disrupt the logic of this equation requires us to break open at least one of these categories. No amount of praise for ‘Iranian’, ‘Egyptian’, ‘Turkish’ or ‘Indian’ cinemas in isolated studies will have any bearing on the problem of Islamophobia within media and public discourse – not while it remains couched in the language of academic research and restricted to discourse that circulates within a small community of scholars and their students in metropolitan institutions. The misconceptions which lead to the routine conflation of the Arab world with Islam (and the treatment of India as somehow outside it) require direct reference to terms that are used and recognisable in everyday life: terms like ‘Islamic’ and ‘Muslim world’, which need to be theorised, reimagined and reclaimed.

Indeed the difference between Islam as a religion on the one hand, and lived Muslim history, culture and experience on the other, is a basic conceptual distinction worth spelling out in a world that struggles to imagine the existence of secular Arabs let alone Arab Christians, female Palestinian film-makers, or Marxists with Muslim backgrounds etc. The diversity of voices in this issue serves as a timely reminder that the routinely racialised (or Islamicised) populations in question are in fact composed of Muslims and non-Muslims of diverse ideological leanings; and that being Muslim (or not) is in any case just one aspect of the many facets of experience in the Muslim World. For artistic production it might well be irrelevant or even absent as an issue for discussion. It is, in short, the first necessary step towards doing away with the misuse (and overuse) of cultural categorisations such as Muslim in everyday discourse.

Let me now address directly your distaste for the term ‘Muslim World’, which you will have noticed I have been bandying about without inverted commas.

Other scholars who rebuffed my invitation carved out similarly firm ‘secular’ positions to yours, portraying themselves as protectors of art against the grubby reach of those who would ‘cash in’ on Islam’s currency as term being used in the media. One wrote in an email:

I worry about the religious branding of something that has always been refreshingly secular and/or more multi-cultural. The last thing I’d want to be part of is the creation of a religious-cultural category that didn’t actually exist beforehand, especially, for example, in reference to countries like XXX where cinema has very successfully transcended religious factionalism and has often adamantly removed such classification from its modes of being… If the thinking from above is merely to cash in… on a sensationalist stereotype of a region of the world, then I don’t think I’m entirely inclined to join in.

This scholar’s idea of secular ‘transcendence’ accords art from the Muslim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Is There a Muslim World?
• 2. Paradise Delayed: With Hany Abu-Assad in Palestine
• 3. Two Theses on the Afghan Woman: Samira and Hana Makhmalbaf Filming Agheleh Farahmand
• 4. From Resistance and Bearing Witness to the Power of the Fantastical: Icons and Symbols in Palestinian Poetry and Cinema
• 5. Between Socialism and Sufism: Islam in the Films of Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty
• 6. The Poetic Vision of Nacer Khemir
• 7. ‘Framed Patterns of Infinity’: Takva, a Mortal Individual’s Fight for Becoming- Imperceptible
• 8. Women in Turkish Cinema: Their Presence and Absence as Images and as Image-Makers
• 9. Innovation and Tradition in Indonesian Cinema
• 10. I am Crazy about the Lord: The Muslim Devotional Genre in Hindi Film
• 11. Cut-Pieces as Stag Film: Bangladeshi Pornography in Action Cinema
• 12. From Zinda Laash to Zibahkhana: Violence and Horror in Pakistani Cinema
• Index