William Kunstler film

"Some kids fear ghosts and monsters," says Emily Kunstler in an interview with The New Yorker. "I feared the police, the President, and the FBI."

Emily and her sister Sarah Kunstler just directed a film titled, "William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe," about their late father, often called the most loved and most hated lawyer in America. William Kunstler's many (in)famous clients included MLK, Angela Davis, the Chicago Seven, the Catonsville Nine, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and the Attica Prison rioters.

I have yet to see the 90-minute film, available for free on PBS. But I am excited about it.

Here's the trailer:



Here's the transcript from the February 1970 speech excerpted in the trailer:

And that is the terrible myth of organized society, that everything that's done through the established system is legal — and that word has a powerful psychological impact. It makes people believe that there is an order to life, and an order to a system, and that a person that goes through this order and is convicted, has gotten all that is due him. And therefore society can turn its conscience off, and look to other things and other times.

And that's the terrible thing about these past trials, is that they have this aura of legitimacy, this aura of legality. I suspect that better men than the world has known and more of them, have gone to their deaths through a legal system than through all the illegalities in the history of man.

Waltz with Bashir

The Oscar-nominated animated documentary Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman was sparse on background but otherwise rich on themes and visuals. If you see it, read about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon against Yassir Arafat's PLO first. Waltz with Bashir was a "theme" movie - more about the "horror of war" than about Lebanon specifically. Set in 2006, the documentary follows a middle-aged former Israeli soldier, the filmmaker, as he grapples with memory loss. What did he do during the war? Was he near the Sabra and Shatila massacre? Lebanon was a war any reasonable person would want to forget.

The documentary, pieced together through interviews and recollections, portrays Israeli kids (ahem, soldiers) more concerned about whether their girlfriends were breaking up with them than about their mission. They're thrown into a conflict they don't understand nor even care to discuss beyond two words: Palestinian terrorists. In scene after scene, the soldiers get shot at, freak out, and indiscriminately shoot back - at one point riddling a car with bullets and then finding that they've slaughtered an innocent family. It was all disturbingly familiar: In Bethlehem in 2005, I heard a Palestinian man with the impressive Bereaved Families Forum discuss the current occupation and describe nearly the exact same scene. He survived, but his daughter beside him was killed.

That basic theme comes across in any decent war movie: Kids clueless about war, as if they had no idea how ugly it could be before they actually started killing people and getting killed. So, I'm a little hesitant to criticize the movie for its soft portrayal of Israel's soldiers, who emerge as if they're innocent of any real wrongdoing. I mean, they were just following orders, right? It's at least how most Israelis like to remember their role in that confused war. I don't want to be unfairly tough on the Israelis. I would imagine that almost all soldiers present with that naivety.

But the current Israeli occupation of the West Bank is very different. We are no longer talking about ignorant 18-year-olds thrown into combat. The matzav ("situation") is inescapable. People are more educated. Organized movements encourage people to refuse to serve.

Hillel Halkin, the Zionist literary critic writing in Commentary (March 2009), doesn't even think the soldiers of the Lebanon War (he doesn't mention the current occupation) were truly naive:

"[I]t is inconceivable that that [the soldiers] did not discuss [the war's justifications] in the summer of 1982. Even units that saw intense combat spent most of their time sitting around and waiting while the war progressed in fits and starts, and while they waited they argued about it. In my own battalion, this started on the night of our call-up. We will still getting into our uniforms when someone expressed anger at being made part of '[Ariel] Sharon's little war,' and someone else retorted that, although a 'little war' like the 1978 Litani campaign would indeed be pointless, Sharon wanted a big war and that was worth fighting" (49). And: "Most of the reservists I was with were for it, though perfectly aware of its costs."

So Halkin doesn't find Folman's portrayal of bewildered soldiers particularly accurate (a critique I'm sympathetic to). But Halkin, ever pro-Israel, mostly criticizes the film for this other reason: He finds it "flagrantly irresponsible" to draw parallels between the Sabra and Shatila massacre - the searing legacy of Sharon's folly in Lebanon - and the experience of the protagonist's parents during the Nazi Holocaust. In his view, the film breaks the cardinal Jewish rule: Never compare anything to the Holocaust. To me, Halkin's criticism seems exaggerated. I hardly noticed that comparison.

The film has two omissions: (1) women, who don't seem to exist except when either naked or dancing. But maybe that's a soldier's authentic experience. And (2), it doesn't mention why the protagonist probably started having flashbacks in the fall of 2006. That 2006 summer, the Israeli army again invaded Southern Lebanon in an unsuccessful attempt to eliminate Hezbollah.



Anyway, the film's music was powerful and the animation was stunning. Recommended.

A titanic loss

I caught the end of Titanic just now on TV. I saw most of it in July on the 22-hour bus ride from Cape Town, South Africa to Windhoek, Namibia. But the last half-hour was cut off - typical African bus ride. Until now, I'd forgotten how powerful that movie is, particularly the ending.

But I have never been able to understand, not now nor 11 years ago (!) in the theaters, how Rose Dawson could throw that precious diamond into the cold Pacific. Sure, it may have brought her some closure, but there seems no good excuse for such selfishness. That diamond could have funded any number of worthy causes. It could have provided some financial stability to the granddaughter who'd become her caretaker. Such myopia toward others, toward the world? Wouldn't donating the diamond's worth have been a better tribute to the venerable Jack Dawson?!

(Of course the movie's fiction, but work with me here. The plot does matter.)

On another note, the movie brings back such great memories of that interminable bus ride, joking with Matt and Alisa (Canadians whom I'd just met) and Christoph (German travel buddy) about Leonardo DiCaprio's predictable lines. Maybe later I'll write about the bribe I negotiated on that ride.

Hotel Rwanda

On Sunday I saw Hotel Rwanda. The movie recounts how Paul Rusesabagina courageously sheltered 1268 Tutsi and Hutu refugees at the Milles Collines Hotel in Kigali during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. For the last few years, the movie’s been on both my must-see list and my must-avoid list. I don’t handle films about genocide very well. But a friend watched it with me and that made it easier. I didn’t find the movie as powerful as I thought I would. I was told I’d be bawling tears. I wasn’t.

Warning: Spoilers follow.

I appreciated the honest portrayal of Paul Rusesabagina (played by Don Cheadle) as a reluctant hero. He was at first more interested in the hotel’s reputation – “it must not become a refugee camp!” – than in saving lives, although I understand that the hotel’s stature was a major reason why the Hutus held off. So his leadership, though clumsy and hesitant, was smart. Still, I was annoyed that Paul Rusesabagina didn’t offer refuge to others, say for example, the families of his Tutsi hotel staff. Did he really expect them to work on the lush hotel grounds while their families and friends were slaughtered in the streets? The movie doesn’t say. In fact, there's a lot the movie doesn't say; many details are left unclear: the source of the radio messages, the relationship between the Hutu army and the Interahamwe militia, the progress of the Tutsi rebels, the apathy of the Western powers, and at one point, how the Belgium owner of the hotel manages to stall a bloodthirsty Hutu death squad by phoning the French prime minister.

Early on, before the genocide gathers horrifying momentum, Paul Rusesabagina and his wife Tatiana watch through a crack as the Hutu militia abducts their Tutsi neighbor. That night, lying in bed, Tatiana begs her husband to use his influence to intervene. “Victor was a good neighbor,” she pleads. Paul demurs, telling her: “All day long I work to please this officer, that diplomat, some tourist to store up favors so if there is a time when we need help I have powerful people I can call upon.” Titiana isn't satisfied. Paul continues: “He is not family. Family is all that matters. … Trust my good judgment.” The look on his face suggests that later, he will change his mind.

He doesn’t really. In the movie's final scene, Paul and Titiana - photographs in their hands - search frantically among the faces at the displaced children's camp for their two lost nieces, both under the age of ten. "Have you seen these two?" Faces and faces and faces. And then there they are! The music is joyous, a family reunited! Tatiana and Paul lift the two kids into their arms over scores of sad orphaned children. I was startled. How callous to wave around those children in front of their peers! Is that the lasting message of this film about the horror of genocide? Family first?

Leila Khaled, Hijacker

I accidentally saw the documentary Leila Khaled, Hijacker, directed by Lina Makboul, at the Syracuse Human Rights Film Festival last night. I meant to arrive for a different film, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire, but the festival organizers switched the schedule after it was printed. I hate when they do that. I stayed anyway. Makboul’s film is a biographical account of Leila Khaled, a Palestinian woman born in Haifa in 1944, who hijacked a plane twenty-four years later for the violent secular leftwing organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. No one died in the hijacking, though people could have. Khaled now lives in Amman, Jordan, where the filmmaker Lina Makboul – a Palestinian raised in Sweden – interviewed her. The film is 58 minutes long; if it were any longer, I’d say it’s not worth it.

The film has a few inaccuracies – like stating (twice) that the massacre of Deir Yassin was carried out by the Stern Gang without mentioning the Irgun and the Palmach. She quotes one Palestinian claiming that “hundreds” were killed on that hilltop and then quotes an Israeli saying the number was 20-40. The inference is that the Israeli is propagandizing, while in truth, they both are. Israeli and Palestinian academics agree that the number slaughtered at Deir Yassin stands between 107 and 120. Also, the documentary states the Palestinians fled their homes in 1948 because they feared other massacres. It doesn’t mention that the conquering Zionist forces sometimes forced Palestinians to migrate or that Palestinian leaders sometimes encouraged them to do so in order to make room for their own invading armies. But these historical slights are fairly insignificant.

The film’s thesis, I would say, is that the difference between ‘terrorist’ and ‘freedom fighter’ is subtle and perhaps non-existent, and depends more on historical memory (particularly who’s remembering) than on anything else. Against the backdrop of a waving Israeli flag, Makboul narrates, “Isn’t terrorism always wrong? Maybe it’s okay to be a terrorist… if you win.” In the last scene of the film, Makboul asks Leila Khaled whether she thought, as she prepared to hijack the plane in 1969 (and another plane the next year) that the hijackings might give the Palestinians a bad reputation. Khaled thinks for a few seconds, and then the credits start to roll.

Makboul answered questions after the showing, so someone asked, What did Khaled say? Did she realize she might mar the Palestinians' reputation? Makboul said Khaled answered, “No.”

Most of the questions were pretty idiotic, like, “how do you think your personality changed as you made this film?” The soft-spoken Makboul skirted around the questions, sometimes just declining to answer. The largely student audience asked repeatedly whether Makboul thought Khaled was a terrorist, and Makboul answered repeatedly that she wanted the audience to decide (finally she admitted she didn’t think so). One student asked why Makboul would bother to show this film at a place with so many Jews. I took the microphone next and told him that that was precisely the point. I also asked about how a young woman like Khaled held up in a rather patriarchal movement. A Palestinian in the audience felt it was necessary to publicly condemn suicide bombings “because we should be alive to claim the homeland,” as if that were the reason suicide missions were wrong. What about the 2002 Hebrew University bombing, where the bomber didn't die? Ugh.

In one scene, Makboul asks Khaled if there’s anything she’d like to say to the captain of the plane she hijacked, whom Makboul also interviews. “Why would I?” she says. “His answers don’t interest me.” Looking back on this century-old conflict, it’s clear that the Zionists have failed because they’ve thought only of themselves. The Palestinians, evidently, are no better.

Movie theater ethics

Is it ethical to steal from the rich to give to the poor?

Well, that's what I just did. I saw Michael Moore's Sicko last weekend. I had planned to review the film, but ya know what, it's been reviewed countless times already. For a positive take, see Krugman; for a negative take, see the National Review; for a sarcastic take, see the blog Paragon). For CNN's fact-checking, go here. I think that covers everything. Now for the juice.

In the theater, Jen and I staked out four seats. We were waiting on Ezra and Logan, who would be coming shortly, though not together. I had a ticket for Logan, as previously agreed, but not for Ezra. I thought maybe he had purchased his own. Logan hadn't arrived yet - so I held his ticket. Ezra, as it turned out, he had not yet purchased a ticket. He was simply running late. When I met Logan at the gate, Ezra informed us that the show had sold out. So there we were, on different sides of the red cord, a chasm between us. Nothing could be done, or so it seemed. Entering the cinema with Logan, I showed my ticket-stub to the ticket-checker. But when Logan tried to hand over his ticket, the checker assumed Logan also had a ticket stub and waved him through. Suddenly there we were, through the gate, with an unripped ticket! Incredible! I sent Logan on, left the gated area once more, and handed Ezra the ticket I had bought for Logan. And on we went.

Ethical?

Well, Ezra may have taken a seat that a paying movie-goer would have taken, especially since the movie was sold out. True, but two comments. First, a theater doesn't actually fill every seat when it "sells out." I'm not sure why, but it doesn't. In fact, there were several other unfilled seats. Second, Jen and I had saved a seat for Ezra since our early arrival. Saving a seat for a friend is surely permissible, especially since I had done so with the understanding that Ezra would actually buy a ticket. I think the ethics deal less with fellow movie-goers and more with the business. Someone might claim that since the movie had sold out, the theater hadn't lost anything. But Ezra may have returned to see the movie and paid the ticket price then. In that case, not only does the theater lose out, so does Michael Moore - each according to their cut of the ticket price.

I would bet that those who think it's okay to enter the theater without paying find the following reason most compelling: "I mean, the movie was playing anyway, right?" That's tempting. But to see how it fails, think of the city bus. Sure it travels even if someone doesn't pay. But the rider is financially accountable to the business, which must sell tickets to sustain itself. Not paying is tantamount to stealing. Of course, it's not so simple. It was the ticket guy, after all, who missed Logan's ticket. It's not like we sneaked in through the back door. Well, no. Our act was intentional, if not premeditated. If the cashier forgets to ring something up, the buyer should speak up - with movie tickets as with milk. Bottom line: taking without paying - nevermind the details - is theft.

We debated this conundrum after the movie. It was an odd conversation, meandering between the ethics of movie tickets and the disaster of our health care system. It felt silly to be worrying about that $7 ticket when there were larger problems to discuss. But I felt at least that this $7 riddle was something we could solve. Both Logan and Ezra acquiesced to my puritanical drive - annoying as it must have been - and forked over the $7 ticket price. With $7 in hand, I got up to purchase a ticket for the Monday morning showing of Sicko - when it was sure not to be sold out - to compensate for our unsanctioned viewing. But in the shadow of the box office, as I stood amidst Harry-Potter-mania, the thought of buying a ticket in order to rip it up, all to enrich the rich and empower the powerful, struck me as nothing short of absurd. Strangely, for once in my life, it was pertinent to say, paraphrasing Voltaire: Don't let the ethical become the enemy of the good.

So we gave that $7 to the Rescue Mission. Yes?

Ratatouille

If Sicko is sold out at your local theater, consider seeing Ratatouille (trailer here) instead.

In this Pixar film, a rat named Rémy dreams of becoming a chef at Gusteau's, a famous bistro in Paris. But the idea isn't palatable to the human chefs - except to a young man named Linguini who by family legacy and a little dumb luck manages to land a job there. Of course Linguini can't cook. In fact, Linguini is a blubbering idiot whose near-permanent deer-in-the-headlights expression is eclipsed only by his inability to do anything right. Linguini is a real Forrest Gump kind of character who somehow despite his idiocy manages to win our affection and sympathy.

Not just a coming-of-age story, Ratatouille is a story about how anyone can achieve great things through hard work and skill. That meritocratic message, however, is complicated by a story of inheritance. Gusteau, the man famous for saying "anyone can cook," leaves his restaurant not to his best chef but to someone with no culinary talent whatsoever: his son Linguini. Linguini, meanwhile, doesn't know he's the legal heir - which begs the question of why the chef who took over is so concerned. I also didn't understand why Colette, the female lead, falls in love with Linguini, though I suppose it's a side-story and therefore doesn't need much explaining. Finally, I wonder if Rémy could have communicated with Linguini by writing to him, given that the rat can read.

Kudos to the film for sticking to its plot, even though it suggests that the amiable chef Gusteau fathered a son out of wedlock. And despite the curious absence of female rats, the film espouses a feminist message. Colette tells Linguini: "How many women do you see in this kitchen? Only me. Why do you think that is? Because high cuisine is an antiquated hierarchy built upon rules by stupid, old men." Questions aside, this film is a delight, with gorgeous animation and perfect voices. And it's hilarious. I was laughing from my belly, such as when a mean-spirited chef tells the novice Linguini: "Let us toast, to your non-idiocy!" I'll finish with this funny exchange:

Mustafa: Someone has asked me what is new!
Horst: What did you tell them?
Mustafa: I told them I would ask!
Skinner: What are you blathering about?
Mustafa: People are asking what is new!
Skinner: What did you tell them?
Mustafa: I told them I would ask!

Sicko

I can't remember ever having been so excited for a movie. Sicko comes out this weekend. I hear it's a rare piece of objective and unbiased journalism, adorned of course with Michael Moore's sex appeal.

Here's the trailer:



At the bioethics center today, we crowded around my computer to watch. As one professor put it: "Sometimes, you don't need angry philosophers clamoring for justice. Satire works much better."

Paradise Now

I recently saw the Golden Globe-winning film Paradise Now (2005). It follows the relationship of two Palestinian men, best friends Said and Khaled of Nablus, over a tough two days as they decided whether to carry out a joint suicide attack in Tel Aviv. We see them drinking tea, smoking hookah, jesting with their families, and discussing life under occupation.

The trailer calls the film “a bold new call for peace,” and in many ways, it is. But the message is never explicit. Khaled’s view, that “the occupation defines the resistance,” features prominently in the film. But Suha, in love with Said for reasons never made clear, has an alternate view, especially regarding her father, a well-known “martyr”: “I'd rather he'd still be alive than be proud of him.” In fact, she’s not proud of him at all. I left the theater hearing the admonition of the film’s moderates: that the Palestinians must wage a moral resistance to the wrongs of the occupation. But the film also brings across the humanity of the radicals. I remember how Khaled interrupts his suicide video, with an AK-47 in one hand, to tell his mother, whom he clearly loves, where we she can get a good price on dish detergent. He’s thinking about the future. And the future is his ultimate aim: He somehow believes that blowing himself up on a Tel Aviv bus will benefit the Palestinian cause.

The film has some weaknesses. All interactions – in auto shops, on street corners, even with little kids in the house – are sad and mournful, as if everyone knows what's going to happen, which is a bit tacky. The film's span of just a day and a half is not long enough to meet Said and Khaled, or to understand why living under occupation makes them think, in Khaled's words, that they are “already dead.” More explanation could help, because checkpoints, unemployment, and dirt roads won’t convince a viewer that the Israeli occupation is a terrible crime. We get a deep sense of Palestinian exasperation, but not much of Palestinian identity. Even with its Palestinian director, the film may cheapen the Palestinian struggle, as if it were all about work permits and road blocks.

In showing disagreements between Said, Khaled, Sula, and others, Paradise Now leaves itself open to interpretation, or perhaps vulnerable to interpretation. I, for example, was utterly disgusted by the terrorist motivations of the protagonists. To me, the message was: Those who fight violence with violence are cowards. But others intent on proving the misery of the occupation may see a very different morale. And that, perhaps, is the genius of the film: its capacity to reflect a spiraling, narrative-ridden conflict where the "facts on the ground" imply no single conclusion.

Invisible Child Soldiers in Uganda

I recently saw the documentary Invisible Children. The film is about child soldiers in Northern Uganda, but it's also a fairly narcissistic look at three 20-something year-old guys who spend the first fifteen minutes of the one-hour film introducing themselves before they then run off to “Africa” - with all its safari-like landscapes and poverty-ridden, “desperate” people – to find a story, any story really, worth telling. Nevermind that Africa is a continent of 54 countries, 900 million people, and 1000 languages. At the outset, the three adventurers plan to investigate the Sudanese civil war but they don’t get far beyond chopping up a snake and setting bushes on fire. So they head south to Uganda where they find their story: child soldiers. I’m cynical about their expedition. When they set out, they are three immature guys out for an adventure, and the whole film is as much as a coming of age story as a documentary. In the end, though, I don’t doubt that they’ll stay involved in the issue and will work for the betterment of Uganda’s children for years to come.

The movie is belabored by technological frivolities such as overly dramatic music and slow-motion camera pans. I think the tackiness is partly intended (it goes along with the we're-three-idiots-exploring-Africa theme), but there's no need to augment the extraordinary. A ten year old kid marching in formation, shooting an AK-47, and seeing his best friend killed as an example is horrible enough as it is. Still, the film does have its powerful moments. It includes candid interviews with parents of slain and abducted children, condemnations of the apathy of the world media, and even a few stirring lines, such as when the movie’s title, “invisible children,” flashes onto the screen, followed by the words: “because their own armies deny they exist.”

The film, unfortunately, has little educational value. Over and over again, it reinforces the magnitude of the problem without really explaining what the problem is, saying little about the political, economic, social, and religious aspects of the conflict. It says that the Lord’s Resistance Army – the primary abductor of children – is a “spiritual” movement. What does that mean? I left with many basic questions unanswered: How many people live in Uganda? How many children are abducted? How long have rebel militias been abducting children? What happens as the children grow older? Do they stay, do they escape? Why is northern Uganda in shambles while the south is apparently fit for Hollywood? What kind of government does Uganda have? Besides dodging the basic questions, the film doesn’t even attempt to examine the structural issues: why so many children are orphans, what’s happening to the exploding orphanages, how HIV/AIDS has affected the country, whether international aid groups are present, etc. I also wonder about the female children. You’d think, watching this movie, that all Ugandan children were boys.

I left the movie as ignorant as when I entered, more agitated than empowered, and utterly pessimistic about the state of world. And the movie offers no hope, except of course, to say that the answer lies in my wallet.

For more, see the film’s official website, the whole one-hour movie on Google Video, background on the Lord’s Resistance Army via Wikipedia, a recent NYT Magazine article by former Sierra Leone child soldier and current Brooklyn resident Ishmael Beah, and the first chapter of his book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. This particular film may not have stirred praise, but its shortcomings don't diminish the issue it addresses. The problem of child soldiers is one of the greatest injustices in the world today. Visit the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (also here) to take a small step toward making the world a better place.

21 Grams

I'm distracted by death again.

Last night, I saw the 2003 movie 21 Grams. It chronicles the relationship between a mathematician desperately in need of a heart transplant and a housewife whose husband and two little girls are killed when an evangelical ex-convict (himself the father of two little children) accidentally runs them over in his pick-up truck. The two little girls die on the scene, but the husband makes it to intensive care. He's declared brain dead, and his wife agrees to donate his organs. The mathematician gets the husband's heart, tracks down the wife, and of course, falls in love. The bulk of the movie focuses on their relationship. It's hard not to sympathize with her as she falls for a man who's very heartbeat must remind her the life she once had. Talk about irony.

The wife was the most complex character in the movie, and the actress (Naomi Watts) plays her well. She's grieving for her lost family and raging at the man who, albeit accidentally, killed them. You can tell that the particular mode of death haunts her. She returns to the scene of the accident; she seeks out people who saw it. People tend to treat accidents and random occurrences as if they meant something, and she's no exception. But the mode of death doesn't always mean something. Sure, it's true that some people die in ways that reflect the way they lived, like a soldier dying while rescuing a comrade. Others, though, die randomly, from a roadside bomb, from a car accident, or in an ER, like the wife's family. This kind of mismatch between the way one lives and the way one dies leaves a terrible sense of dissonance for grievers. It's why some people donate their loved one's organs after a meaningless death, so that they can make some sense of the disaster or remember the dead as leaving a legacy of life.

At the funeral, the wife's sister urges her to press charges against the ex-con, but the wife refuses, asserting that nothing, much less a criminal trial, will bring her family back. But her grief evolves, and she later plots to kill the ex-con, nearly succeeding. The symbols of her grief are ubiquitous (partly because she's constantly crying): She uses old photographs of her husband as bookmarks, replays his voice on the answering machine, and peeks into the girls' room but cannot enter it. Even as she falls in love with another man, she denies that she's moving on, perhaps worried that she'd be slighting her family by abetting her grief. Or by pardoning her guilt: Could she have said goodbye? Why didn't she buy the daughter the new blue shoelaces? In a moment of rage and tears, she screams, "She was wearing the fucking red shoelaces when she was killed!"

The majority of people say they want to die at home, surrounded by loved ones. But that rarely happens. Instead, most of us die as patients, amid tubes and machines, sometimes in shared wards, always on white bedsheets. At least in the movies, we have somber flashbacks and wailful bagpipes to celebrate the life now lost. That's a far cry from the distant pulse of the ER, whose sterility lures us toward the perfidious temptation to judge the worthiness of a life by the dignity of its exit.

Me, the Mosque, and I

A blast from the past.

In April 2006 at Brown, I went to a film screening of Me and the Mosque, followed by a Q&A with the director and producer, a funny and articulate woman named Zarqa Nawaz (pictured, in pink). In the film, Nawaz interviews Muslim women, clerics, and scholars in North America for their views on the recent addition of prayer partitions (or walls) between men and women at mosques. The issue is controversial, even among Brown's relatively liberal Muslim Student Association. An array of Muslim scholars in the film say that the Prophet had no beef with mixed sitting, and that the partition typifies a recent wave of fanatics who think that oppressing women is somehow an act of piety. That seems to be the film's central argument.

In the Q&A, I asked Nawaz how progressive Muslims will cope when this precedent argument fails. And it will fail: The Prophet never authorized women to lead men in prayer, nor did he bless gay unions, or heck, perform an abortion. We mock evangelical Christians for asking themselves WWJD, but really, the Muslims deserve the joke: What would the Prophet do? WWPD. (That's better than What would Muhammed do? WWMD. The last thing we need is to associate Muslims with Weapons of Mass Destruction.)

Nawaz said she'd seek other hermeneutic tools if WWPD fails. The crucial word was "if," because in the pious posturing of even (and perhaps especially) the most progressive Muslims, nobody portends that they have ideas that the Prophet himself did not have. He is, after all, a prophet, and prophets are supposed to know the future. It's almost comical to observe, given these interpretive methods, that people praise religion for fostering imagination and creativity. In any case, for anyone pressing to expand women's status in Islam, I think the WWPD argument is fatal - because for everything the Prophet did, there was something he didn't do, which according to this paradigm, is reason enough to prohibit it.

For all my dire predictions, though, I'm humbled (yes, I can be humble) by the wave of strong-headed hijabi-bearing young women on college campuses. They're an impressive, outgoing bunch, unabashedly feminist (or at least some claim to be) and yet believe in "the tradition." They're capable of poking fun at their predicament (the quality I appreciate most). Just check out the Facebook group, "Yes, I'm bald under my hijab," with its assembly of snippets: "Yes, I shower with this thing on." "Yes, I've worn hijab since birth." "Yes, I sleep in my hijab." "Well, what happens if you accidentally see my hair is that you immediately get hit by lightning." (I can personally attest that you don't get struck by lightning.)

The screening happened on a Friday night, my favorite time of the week. Friday nights have an air of eternity, so I feel little pressure to get back to the library. To top it off, the timing pretty much guarantees that I can avoid the Jews. (At this event, I was the only non-Muslim student present). It was a blast, and we ate tons of caramel-flavored popcorn. I stayed after the Q&A to meet Nawaz and ask her if she had interacted with the Orthodox Jewish feminists, who are similarly trying to carve out a place for feminism in a tradition that regulates everything from the way they dress to their potential for community leadership. Together with Brown's two Muslim chaplains (they're a pair), we spoke for nearly two hours.

In critiquing a religious tradition, nothing is as important as humor. So I am thrilled to see a new comedy-sitcom called "Little Mosque on the Prairie," the brainchild of none other than Zarqa Nawaz. The show, which will air on Canada's CBC starting January 9, was reviewed in the New York Times yesterday. Here's an excerpt from the article: When a Muslim girl flounces into her immigrant father’s presence with her navel showing, he recoils in horror, saying, “You look like a Protestant.” She counters, “Dad, you mean a prostitute?” He responds, “No, I meant a Protestant.”

In a post-9/11 world, laughing Muslims are desperately needed. So I give the show my blessing: May the Prophet be with you.
(Because if he's not, you're screwed.)