My Jihad, in America and Beyond
(A necessary follow-up to the feature on The Huffington Post)
By Parvez Sharma
“Ah! Daneshju Park! The smells that waft from across the street! And the forbidden delights that await inside!”
Talking about a life left behind in Iran, my friend had tears in his
eyes. But also a steely resolve that one day he would be back. He also
reminded me that a Basij—a member of the volunteer force of religious
vigilantes or guardians of morality, thoughtfully supplied by the
powers that are--had openly expressed a desire to be with him and they
had gone home together, not too far from Vali Asr Avenue, and spent a
night of passion, the likes of which he has never had since, in each
other’s arms.
Given the national obsession with Hafez and his poetry, whose
homoeroticism many have claimed and studied, I have always felt that
the young gentleman who found passion in the park speaks to me in
beautiful Farsi, almost in haiku. His language gives him the facility
to always sound like he is speaking in poetry. I also assume that
President Ahmadi Nejad has probably not wandered into those dark
corners of Danishju Park, a park not that different from the Rambles in
the heart of New York, or Nehru Park in Delhi, where I grew up. All of
these hidden spaces have been the dark and often depressing settings
for so many of us seeking to meet others like us: “homosexuals,” in any
of the contexts we have existed in.
Many that speak about Ahmadi Nejad and his histrionics have
unfortunately not studied Iran’s complex, post-1979 history. Vali Asr,
a religiously appropriate name chosen for the longest avenue in all of
Iran, used to be called Pahlavi Avenue. It was renamed as quickly as
the despotic Pahlavi family, Iran’s ill-fated ruling dynasty of the
time, was consigned to the dustbin of history. This expeditious
renaming continued for a generation as the Islamic Republic we know
today came to be. On that fateful day of February 1st, 1979, the
Ayatollah with the penetrating eyes, the marja al-taqlid (source of
imitation) arrived on a plane. He, like the British, the Russians and
indeed many before them, laid claim to the soul of an ancient
civilization that had been coveted by so many, for so long. This latest
invader, however, came from within.
I remember corresponding with Salam Pax, the “gay’ blogger” in Baghdad
who enjoyed a certain fame a few years ago as bombs fell around him.
Pax was one of about fifty bloggers in Iraq. As the proximate and
ancient capital of Baghdad was burning, the Iranians, who were clearly
used to revolutions, were declaring battle against oppression in
enormous numbers on the frontlines of the internet. For a few years
now, I have held the Iranian blogosphere in high esteem. Through rough
Web-based translation software and benefiting from Farsi’s similarities
with Urdu, my mother’s language, I pored over every word Mr. Hossein
Derakshan would write. I watched with wonder and pride as his initial
posts laid the foundations for a culture where there were some 70,000
blogs in Iran operating in 2004. In that year, while I was still
filming A Jihad for Love, Farsi was the fourth most popular language in
the blogosphere, a world that was just being discovered. Mr. Derakshan
is my hero. (http://www.hoder.com/weblog/)
At that time I also started immersing myself in the work of Abu Nuwas,
for many the greatest Arab poet of all time, and whose homoerotic
poetry would undoubtedly make Presidents Bush, Ahmadi Nejad and Mubarak
blush. All three of these presidents have been equally vocal about
their opinions and policies regarding us “homosexuals,” whose very
existence is apparently now in question. Nuwas was born in the eighth
century in Ahvaz, Persia, and lived most of his life in Baghdad, where
he died. His grave has no doubt been reduced to rubble by eager teen
Marines, whose figures and youthful beauty are probably similar to the
young men Nuwas admired in his risqué verse. This kind of “NC-17”
poetry would not be easily made available for public consumption in the
America we live in today. Abu Nuwas, who sadly does not have a weblog,
is also my hero.
I wonder if the rabid critics of Iran and its democratically, if
questionably, elected President have experienced the richness, the
texture, the intellect, and indeed the audacity of what I consider the
greatest cinema in the world: the Iranian cinema, poetic within its
censorship. The lenses of Kiarostami, Tabrizi and Panahi shaped my
early knowledge of the cinematic form, while I was still a student in
Calcutta.
In Qom, the religious elite clearly distinguishes between the khawass
(the elite) and the awaam (the masses). The awaam in Iran today
comprise a demographic that would be startling to Mr. O’Reilly and
other media demagogues like him; seventy percent of the population is
under the age of 30 and more than ninety percent of them are literate
and certainly computer-savvy. Millions of them are undertaking digital
and electronic jihads in one of the world’s richest Web communities.
The language of dissent is alive and well in Iran.
Ijtihad, or independent reasoning, as old as Islam itself, has taken on
a new form in the digital age. We must not forget that In Shia Islam,
ijtihad has thrived for long and, in fact, it was the very same ijtihad
that allowed the Ayatollah of all Ayatollahs to justify velayat-e-faqih
(rule by the clerics) in 1979 and after.
Clearly, in these times of the slickly packaged and devastatingly
ignorant “War on Terror,” the desire for nuance, for understanding, has
been lost. Knowledge and intellectual curiosity are clearly
undervalued; to vilify and demonize Mr. Ahmadi Nejad in the absence of
any real understanding of the context from which he comes is all too
easy. The kind of “Evil Satan” rhetoric that has been drummed up for a
quarter of a century in Iran finds its perfect mirror in America today.
The religious extremism found in parts of Iran is no different than the
kind that has crept into the American psyche.
I must, however, thank the Iranian President profusely. He has
unintentionally, and probably through some hurried, bungled
translation, given me the perfect platform to get audiences to engage
with A Jihad for Love. I have always known that this documentary would
be presenting Islam’s unlikeliest storytellers: gay and lesbian
Muslims. I also now have in him an unlikely spokesperson/ publicist to
kick-start many new discussions about homosexuality within our
communities. In the last 48 hours, after I published a feature for The
Huffington Post, I have been deluged by emails from both Iranian and
non-Iranian friends and strangers alike. We have hotly debated the
semantics of what the President actually said. The consensus at this
point seems to lie on his denial of the existence of openly gay people
in Iran.
As I have filmed A Jihad for Love, I have struggled to explain the
difficulties of language to many, including the mostly American
production team I have worked with in New York. Iranian culture
resembles India’s, where I grew up, in many ways; Persian was in fact
the language of the Mughal courts only a few hundred years ago. As I
have taken my camera to many parts of the many different worlds of
Islam, I have only been able to confirm what I always knew. The
terminologies of “liberation theology” or even identity constructs,
social or political, like “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual,” “transgender,”
“intersex,” “queer,” etc., that seem to inform so much of the endless
debates in the air-conditioned corridors of Western academia or the
endless conferences organized by diasporic Muslims and their friends,
are of little if any consequence on the streets of Delhi, Lahore,
Dhaka, Cairo, Shiraz, or Jeddah. Homosexuality has not only been
tolerated but sometimes even openly celebrated in Islamic societies for
more than 1,400 years. This is not the kind of homosexual persona that
we adopt in the West. A language of affirmation is woefully absent.
Marriage--and let’s be clear: marriage of the heterosexual kind--is not
a choice, but a societal and familial obligation. Marching down Main
Street holding banners of identity politics and affirmation is
certainly not a desirable outcome of any so-called “liberation.”
Invisibility is the identity often preferred by the majority and I have
examined that very “jihad” by taking my camera into that world of
“invisibility.” This film took six years to make for a reason. The fact
that the lives of diasporic Muslims are absent from my film was a clear
but difficult choice. And indeed that would be a different, equally
worthy project.
What is critical, however, is that we as Muslims not allow the
mediators in the Western media and, indeed, our Islamic extremist
brothers--certainly a minority in my opinion--to define our Islams for
us. I usually shun the simplifications of terms like “terrorist” and
“fundamentalist.” For me, the violent minority that claims to speak for
my religion does not adhere to the fundamentals of my faith. The
ridicule that the elected President of a nation of more than seventy
million, branded a “cruel and petty dictator,” has been subjected to by
the smallest minority of arrogant opinion makers is appalling. Clearly
the war drums are beating again and in the sadly black-and-white
American mindscape of today, this nation’s overextended troops continue
the ill-informed crusades of their leaders. These are troubling times,
yet for artists, as in all times of dissent and repression, the
atmosphere is rich and full of possibility. My struggle, my jihad as I
define it for myself, keeping all Qur’anic tenets in mind, grows
stronger. That jihad is to continue to avoid the easy trap of being an
apologist for my faith, and to also rightfully criticize what I know is
deeply wrong within it. We Muslims are members of the world’s fastest
growing religion, indeed the second largest. Many of us have been
misunderstood and unheard for too long, and many of us will need to
wage critical jihads within ourselves and our own communities to decide
who will speak for all of our different Islams.
As always, I wonder if we in America, given the censorship that is
steadily defining our lives as well, will be encouraged to seek the
knowledge that is being denied us and will begin to even try and
comprehend the complexities of these distant Islamic lands that are
packaged for us everyday on the front pages of our newspapers and in
all our television headlines. I also wonder if the leaders of this
nation, which is great but so young, can learn humility. They claim to
teach ancient civilizations that precede theirs by centuries and even
millennia the rules of civility, the values of tolerance, of democracy,
of free speech. These hard-won freedoms were present centuries ago in
many of the nations I have visited and certainly in the one I was born
in, today the world’s largest democracy.
Still having not lost hope in the promise of America, I choose to live
here. The Department of Homeland Security kindly granted me the status
of an “Alien of Extraordinary Abilities” three years ago. As I now work
towards getting that magic card--not actually green, by the way--I hope
that I will be allowed to keep on celebrating the values of free speech
of the America I came to in 2000. This is certainly not the America I
find myself in today.
Meanwhile, I continue to celebrate and hold on to my precious freedom at www.ajihadforlove.blogspot.com
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