Parvez Sharma’s documentary depicts their battle to reconcile their sexual orientation with their devotion to a faith that condemns their way of life. From The Los Angeles Times:
Parvez Sharma, director of "A Jihad for Love," addresses a crowd at the Director Guild of America headquarters. / LATimes
Filmed surreptitiously in 12 countries over six years, the movie offers a window into the distraught lives of gay and lesbian Muslims as they struggle to reconcile their sexual orientation with their devotion to a faith that condemns their way of life.
Some are beaten or imprisoned. Others are forced to flee their homelands. Several have their faces obscured in the film to protect their identities and their families from reprisals.
But Sharma, 35, a former print and broadcast journalist in India, said he did not intend to attack Islam but to open a dialogue about a dilemma that forces people to endure lives of quiet desperation.
And therein lies the meaning behind the film’s title: Jihad, often equated with holy war, means “struggle” or “to strive in the path of God,” Sharma said.
“I know there is a deep hunger for this film,” said Sharma, who shot the movie, his first feature documentary, in Egypt, Turkey, India, South Africa, France and other countries.
“There are vast differences among Muslims on how to deal with homosexuality,” he added. “For the most part, they choose to ignore it as long as it is kept private.”
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Homosexuality in India
From Shunya’s Notes [via 3quarksdaily]
As a boy in India, I often heard rumors of “buggering” being commonplace in elite boarding schools for boys. This was partly spoken of as a passing phase of rakishness and fun, the subtext being: they’ll discover what real sex is when they grow up. In their lucid new book, The Indians, Sudhir and Katherina Kakar recount a story about Ashok Row Kavi, a well-known Indian gay activist. Apparently when Ashok was young and being pressured to marry by his family, especially by his aunt, he finally burst out that he liked to fuck men. “I don’t care whether you fuck crocodiles or elephants,” the aunt snapped back. “Why can’t you marry?”
As in many other societies, procreation also underpins the Indian sense of social (and familial) order. Any threat to this social order is instinctively resisted, though the resistance takes many forms. In the Christian West, homosexual acts were persecuted as a sin against God (and less often, seen as a disease). Indians, on the other hand, denied the idea of homosexuality, while tolerating homosexual acts-a trick made possible by regarding these acts not as sex but as a kind of erotic fun, or masti. Sex is only what happens in the context of procreation, usually within marriage. Sex is what makes babies, and truly virile men, of course, produce male babies.
It is no surprise then, that the notion of a homosexual liaison as a proud and equal alternate to a heterosexual one doesn’t exist outside a small set of urban Indians; that would be seen as a threat to the social order. Instead, the Indian response is: As long as men fulfill their traditional obligations to family and progeny, their homosexual acts are (uneasily) tolerated. Notably, according to the Kakars, the vast majority of even those who continue having sex with other men do not see themselves as homosexual. “Even effeminate men who have a strong desire to receive penetrative sex are likely to consider their role as husbands and fathers to be more important in their self-identification than their homosexual behavior.” Lesbian activity is invariably seen as a response to sexually frustrating marriages (as also in Fire, the 1998 movie by Deepa Mehta).
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Why will an estimated 15 lakh pilgrims take a holy dip in the Brahm Sarovar at Kurukshetra tomorrow? It’s because of a a rare (though in India, partial) solar eclipse which will be visible starting 4.03 pm. Read the Indian eclipse story in The Hindu here.
