New Approaches to Islam in Film

Kristian Petersen, Kristian Petersen

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351189132
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Teología y religión
• Categoria: Teología islámica

Many global film 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 film focused on stereotypes and the politics of representation. This collection of essays, from an international panel of contributors, significantly expands the boundaries of discussion around Muslims in film, 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 films, 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 film 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 five novel trajectories: considering new sources, exploring new communities, probing new perspectives, charting new theoretical directions, and offering new ways of understanding conflict in cinema. As such, it will be of great use to scholars working in Islamic Studies, Film Studies, Religious Studies, and Media.

1 Reframing the study of Muslims and Islam in film

Kristian Petersen

The academic study of Muslims and Islam in film has developed into a rich interdisciplinary subfield. New Approaches to Islam in Film builds on this critical scholarship by offering several chapters that add innovative perspectives on the subject. Our coverage includes the exploration of regional cinemas, detailed analysis of auteurs or individual films, 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 film 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 film. 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 fields. Giving central attention to the ways religious norms, practices, or ideologies structure and define filmmaking and spectatorship occurs at varying degrees by authors, even when analysis concentrates on the depiction of Muslim subjects or in cases where filmmakers 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 five novel analytical trajectories: considering new sources, exploring new communities, probing new perspectives, charting new theoretical directions, and offering new ways of understanding conflict in cinema.

New sources

Film scholarship frequently employs cinema as a “text” to be read. The extensive film 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 film sets, can further enhance the study of film sphere. Several authors in this volume explore novel sources to see how Muslims figure into cinema, film narratives, and production.

Mika’il A. Petin explores a significant but unstudied American film, Five Fingers (Laurence Malkin, 2006), which conforms to many Hollywood stereotypes about Muslims but simultaneously subverts some of them through issues of race. The film takes place in the context of the “War on Terror” and utilizes many of the established tropes about far-off Muslim lands and exotic people. However, the heart of the narrative alters the expected racial configuration 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 justification for U.S. unlawful detention and torture.

Another novel source for thinking about the history of Muslims in film 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 film, Muhammad would be framed within the great hero tradition, embodying a divine intuition, and shown to ardently fight for his beliefs and on behalf of his community of believers. Kazantzakis’ narrative and visuals were influenced 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 differently to particular times, places, or audiences.

Finally, we move from on screen to on the ground to see how Islam informs the filmmaking process. Chihab El Khachab provides a rich ethnographic account of Muslim technical workers on the sets of the Egyptian film industry to consider how religion affects the practical creation of film, the industrial cycle of releases, and the possible social limits for film 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 filmed, and when movies hit screens for audiences. He also explores the ethical grounding for personal engagement that many workers navigate when they find themselves in social dilemmas. For many Egyptians, the production and consumption of film are antithetical to religious sensibilities and public norms. Some film workers find 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 film 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 film.

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 film.⁸ More particularly, reframed outside of the context of previous depictions in prison, Latino Muslims are featured in documentary films about the daily life of Muslims in America. In New Muslim Cool (Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, 2009) and A Son’s Sacrifice (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 effects 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 aspects. While incomplete in presenting the expanse of Latino Muslim life, the films disturb static notions of Muslim identity as being rooted in particular racial and ethnic groups.

Another understudied population in the study of Islam in film is LGBTQ Muslims.⁹ We should not say that the dearth of scholarship is due to the relative absence of feature films 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 films that critique and question heteronormativity within Muslim cultures, specifically Touch of Pink (Ian Iqbal Rashid, 2004) and Shades of Ray (Jaffar Mahmood, 2008). They show how Muslim masculinity disturbs social expectations in the white- dominant spaces of Europe and North America. This disruption is further amplified 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 film.

New perspectives

Other chapters in the volume take new perspectives on subjects that are seemingly familiar within the study of Islam in film, 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 film 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 conflict between Christians and Muslims, DeMille infused his picture with an ecumenical spirit. For the director, the beneficent 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 conflict. Blanke also places the film 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 deficits that are easily noted in order to rethink the filmic archive in nuanced ways.

Emily Jane O’Dell focuses on Sufism not as a neatly defined 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 Sufism as a floating signifier to organize social, political, or religious meanings. Films from Africa, Eurasia, and Southeast Asia often use the potentiality of Sufi practices or principles to disrupt dominant social norms, whether confronting ableism, patriarchy, classism, or other social marginalization. O’Dell argues that Sufi aesthetics and narratives enable communities to form around shared organizing ideals that are denied in broader publics. Some of the filmmakers use Sufism 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 Sufism as a symbolic device serving filmmakers can be applied in future thematic contexts with similar success.

The final chapter in this section addresses the subject of biographical cinema that depicts Muhammad.¹² Instead of placing these films 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 filmmaking 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 film. 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 film.

New directions

Some of our authors have sowed fertile new interpretive ground that will provide future scholars with hearty intellectual nourishment. These chapters offer rich analysis with theoretical sophistication and methodological skill. Collectively, they bring together various strands from feminist scholarship, transnational theory, political theology, and film studies to map out new directions for thinking about the relationships between cinema and Muslims, both on the screen...