Muslims or Heretics

Muslims Or Heretics: My Camera Can Lie starts life in 2003 as a polemical human rights documentary about Ahmadiyyas. The Ahmadiyyas are a disputed sect within Islam. Originating from India, and spreading through proselytization, it became one of the beachheads for conversion of African Americans to Islam (until the rise of the competing Nation of Islam). After years of anti-Ahmadiyya protests, the sect was banned in Pakistan in 1973. In the 1990s, a similar protest movement flared up in Bangladesh. The core controversy revolves around whether their belief in a prophet after Mohammed is heresy. What could be a nuanced, layered conversation around interpretations of/from Arabic (e.g., does khatme nabuwwat mean final prophet or seal of the prophets?) has degenerated into an anarchic mob movement which also serves as a trojan horse for the Political Islam project.

The 2004 screenings of my "finished" film ran into a Dhaka audience that is hyper-aware of other, future audiences. The coincidence of showing the film at the same time as the global media flap over Abu Ghraib turned it into a referendum on the War On Terror (WOT (TM)). Audiences refused to give any approval or "authenticity" blessing..... After my naive opening statement that this was a film for "us" (who exactly is?), one viewer taunted me: "bhaishaab, we all understand Bengali, so tell me, who are those subtitles for? And how many times must we see that Twin Tower footage...that's always designed for a western film festival circuit!"

In this first iteration of the film, there is grainy, out of focus footage of "militant" rallies shot filmed a great distance. Supposedly clandestine work with a subject so "ferocious" they can only be viewed at a distance. But when I returned to the project in 2005, I found rally organizers welcoming the press. Their fierce expressions, funeral white garb and angry signs were all an extended form of performance art, designed to give the BBC-CNN-SKY camera crew exactly the right, ready for prime time visuals. This time, I noticed a camera mounted on the truck of the protesters. It was filming the fiery speeches and filming us. Where was that tape going, who was its audience? Michael Ignatieff once described plane hijacking as auteur filmmaking with real people. Here too, the militant groups are in control of their own image production.

John Gray points out that "projecting a privatized form of organized violence worldwide was impossible in the past. Equally, the belief that a new world can be hastened by spectacular acts of destruction is nowhere to be found in medieval times...." Egyptian radical theorist Sayyid Qutb borrowed from European anarchists like Bakunin ("The passion for destruction is also a creative passion"), especially the idea of a religious vanguard that would bring a world without rulers-- something with little precedence in Islamic thought.

On an individual level, militant groups in Bangladesh have rejected the escalating "modernity" project represented by the mushrooming of an aggressive consumerist culture. The madrasa recruits canŐt afford to drink Coke, download Josh ring tones, buy bar-coded fruit at Agora or wear jeans from Westecs. Within their violent program (what some mistakenly call "Islamo-anarchism") is fury at an economic system that has left them behind. But you could also argue that it is hypercapitalism that has rejected them, because it doesn't know how bracket in communities of intense, rigid faith. Perhaps, those you cannot sell product to cannot be allowed to exist.

[Written for "And Who Are Those Subtitles For..?", a talk at Continental Drift, a project of 16 Beaver]

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