 A Jihad for Love
The Adelaide Queer Film Festival, running from Friday, September 5 to Sunday, September 7 at the Mercury Cinema, boasts not only a selection of the best queer cinema today, but also a bonus series of short films showing before each feature.
One film creating a buzz before the festival even begins is Parvez Sharma's documentary A Jihad for Love. At a time when Islam is under tremendous attack - from within and without - A Jihad for Love is a daring documentary filmed in 12 countries and nine languages. Muslim gay filmmaker Parvez Sharma has gone where the silence is loudest, filming with great risk in nations where government permission to make this film was not an option.
A Jihad for Love is Parvez Sharma’s debut and is the world’s first feature documentary to explore the complex global intersections between Islam and homosexuality. Parvez enters the many worlds of Islam by illuminating multiple stories as diverse as Islam itself.
The film travels a wide geographic arc, presenting us lives from India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, South Africa and France. Always filming in secret and as a Muslim, Parvez makes the film from within the faith, depicting Islam with the same respect that the film's characters show for it.
In Western media, the concept of ‘jihad’ is often narrowly equated with holy war. But Jihad also has a deeper meaning, its literal Arabic being ‘struggle’ or ‘to strive in the path of God’.
In this film we meet several characters engaged in their personal Jihads for love. The people in this film have a lot to teach us about love. Their pursuit of love has brought them into conflicts with their countries, families, and even themselves. Such is the quandary of being both homosexual and Muslim, a combination so taboo that very little about it has been documented.
A Jihad for Love’s characters each have vastly different personal takes on Islam, some observing a rigorously orthodox regimen, others leading highly secular lifestyles while remaining spiritually devout.
As the camera attentively captures their stories, the film’s gay and lesbian characters emerge in all their human complexity, giving the viewer an honest rendering of their lives while complicating our assumptions about a monolithic Muslim community.
Crucially, this film speaks with a Muslim voice, unlike other documentaries about sexual politics in Islam made by Western directors. In the hope of opening a dialogue that has been mostly non-existent in Islam’s recent history and defining jihad as a “struggle” rather than a “war,” this film presents the struggle for love.
A Jihad for Love screens as part of the Adelaide Queer Film Festival on Saturday 6 September. To purchase tickets to this and other films in the festival, visit: www.aqff.com.au
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