A Muslim First

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.

An Advocate.com exclusive posted April 23, 2008

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.

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Parvez Sharma is blogging his jihad at A Jihad for Love.

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