Filmmaker Parvez
Sharma gives a first-person account of making his new
documentary, A Jihad for Love, about
homosexuality in the Islamic faith and how his commitment to
his faith and his desire to show the world another
side of Islam brought him to his own jihad.
As the director
of A Jihad for Love -- the world's first
documentary to take a close look at Islam and homosexuality
-- I am coming out as a Muslim man. My gay identity is
secondary. Queer cinema is filled with stories of gays
and lesbians revealing their sexuality, but my film is
about people revealing their religion. With this film,
the story of a 1,428-year-old religion is told by its most
unlikely storytellers -- gay and lesbian Muslims.
Making this film
and finding subjects who would be willing to share their
stories with me was a "jihad" (struggle) in itself. In many
of the cases it took me years to convince the subjects
to participate, and I had to build relationships of
mutual trust with them. What made it easier and
certainly worth the challenge was that I was a Muslim like
my subjects and we had much in common because of the
backgrounds we came from. The entire process took six
years of my life -- and these six years I cherish
dearly for everything they taught me, not just about my own
Islam but of the universal jihad, or struggle, to belong.
This film tries
to construct the first real and comprehensive image of
these unlikely creatures -- to be P.C., gay, lesbian,
bisexual, transgender, and queer Muslims -- and it is
forcing many audiences to realize that these terms are
a Western construct. Let me be clear: None of these
categories means anything to many of my friends living in
Cairo or Islamabad. If anything, the languages they
speak -- Farsi, Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi, and Bengali --
have very few words of affirmation to describe the
"odd" and "unnatural" behaviors, so to speak, that we
indulge in. The cinematic representation of these complex
identities therefore has come with many of the challenges of
almost developing a new language.
Follow us on Twitter. 
Follow us on Facebook.
Page 1 of 3
Parvez
Sharma is blogging his jihad atA Jihad for Love.