The Hajj seems to get bigger every year, and more layers of complexity are added by technology and other factors of globalization. It's fascinating to contrast the photo series above with something like these photos of Hajj from a 1953 issue of National Geographic, not just in terms of what has changed but also what hasn't. And speaking of change, we found this video of proposed structural changes to the Grand Mosque (in order to accommodate the ever-increasing numbers of pilgrims) quite impressive. There will probably be a lot of resistance to such changes in certain quarters, but the problem of crowd management must be taken quite seriously. The King of Saudi Arabia and his government have a huge responsibility to both the past and future in developing the area around the Ka'aba (not one we'd personally be eager to shoulder).
And if you go through all these images, and are still hungry for a little more on the Hajj, check out CBC reporter Muhammad Lila's Hajj blog that he's keeping on The Toronto Star website.
A couple of years ago, one of the courses I took in the seemingly endless quest for my degree in religious studies focused on religion and horror films. Most people I mentioned this to were perplexed, thinking that horror cinema and religion have little or nothing to do with each other—with the obvious exception of The Exorcist. Most people perceived the two phenomena as utterly antithetical. But as my professor, Douglas Cowan, explains in Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen, his terrific book on the subject, they actually have everything to do with each other. There is a natural, even inextricable relationship between horror and religion. For one thing, what we fear—or don’t—tells us a great deal about what we believe. For another, as he points out, “[a]ll but ubiquitous in horror cinema, whether tormented, at rest, or the object of supernatural conflict, the soul is an explicitly religious concept, one that makes little sense apart from the various frameworks in which it comes embedded.” (These are just a couple of examples; go read his book for the full picture. It’s very readable; while it is a scholarly book, it’s not the mind-numbing kind.)
Interested, as always, in the cross-cultural dimensions of religion, I found it fascinating when Dr. Cowan explained to us that fear is a social phenomenon, and as such it is not only personal but culturally conditioned. Cultures that believe in reincarnation are going to have a very different response to, or understanding of, zombie films compared to cultures that don’t. This got me wondering about horror films from Muslim countries. Were there any? And if so, what did they say about their respective societies? I’d never encountered any, but I’d also never really looked. It turned out that it really varies according to the country in question, and to a large degree, depends on whether that country has a thriving film industry in the first place. Indonesia apparently produces quite a lot of horror films; Saudi Arabia, not so much (i.e., none that I could find). I found a Turkish film here, a couple of Pakistani films there…and apparently there was a Pashto horror boom in the 1990s. Who knew? There’s a whole dissertation right there, waiting to be written, on the relationship between the rise of the Taliban and the surge in Pashto horror film.
What I remember from my research into Indonesian horror films were claims (which I haven't verified) that horror was actually the predominant film genre in Indonesia, and that a lot of the movies revolve around the theme of Islamic clerics and imams battling the forces of evil. And apparently there’s frequent controversy over these films in Indonesia, with strong opposition from censors, hardline Islamic organizations, and even Muslim vigilante groups. Some of the most recent hullaballoo (halalaballoo?) was over a soft-porn horror flick called Hantu Puncak Datang Bulan' (The Menstruating Ghost of Puncak), which sounds like a classic example of the sociophobics Cowan explores.
However, I couldn’t get hold of any Indonesian films at the time, so I kept looking. I stumbled across the 2007 movie Zibahkhana (“Slaughterhouse” in Urdu, but the English title is Hell’s Ground), billed as Pakistan’s first gore film. It’s a slasher pic featuring five college students from Islamabad who sneak off to a rock concert when naturally, things go awry, and they encounter zombies, a freaky fakir, and eventually, a psychotic, burqa-wearing man named Baby, and pretty soon it’s the Rawalpindi Morningstar Massacre. Omar Khan, the film’s director, is the owner of a popular Islamabad ice cream shop, and a lover of classic horror cinema who was so obsessed with one of Pakistan’s very few other horror films, the 1967 black and white classic Zinda Laash (in English: The Living Corpse—more on which in a minute) that he wanted to make his own contribution to horror cinema in Urdu. Khan says,
Let there be no mistake. Zibahkhana is a scuzzy, rough edged, cheesy little horror film. I call it a midnight movie. If people are expecting the slickness of something like Krrish [a Bollywood blockbuster] or the profundity of some documentary from Iran, they're going to be flabbergasted.
Although the director downplays the film quite a bit, Zibahkhana was quite ambitious in several ways. For one thing, it was completely self-funded. For another, although I don’t think it was the director’s primary intention, the film can be read (without any straining) as a pretty strong commentary on class inequities and social injustice in Pakistan. There’s actually quite a lot going on in this film apart from all the cheese and the blood. If you're interested in more background on the film, read the very long and detailed two-part interview with director Khan and producer Pete Toombs (of Mondo Macabro) on Cinema Strikes Back: Part 1 and Part 2.
Zibahkhana features a cameo by an actor named Rehan—who starred as Dracula in Zinda Laash (1967). Zibahkhana is crammed full of all kinds of sly nods and clever references to Lollywood, Bollywood, and Hollywood cinema history. Rehan’s appearance as a bizarre chai shop owner is just one of these, but it’s the one that leads us most solidly back to Zinda Laash, which is sometimes billed as Dracula in Pakistan as well as The Living Corpse. This film had a somewhat larger budget and higher production values, and it was purportedly the first X-rated Pakistani film (some sources say R-rated; I haven’t been able to ascertain that Pakistani censors actually used this rating system but the film was issued with an “Adults Only” certificate).
There’s an excellent article called “From Zinda Laash to Zibahkhana: Violence and Horror in Pakistani Cinema” by Ali Khan and Ali Nobil Ahmad which appeared earlier this year in Third Text, a scholarly journal of visual culture. In it, they describe the social context for Pakistani filmmakers:
The state’s attitude towards film-making is exemplified by the comments of a Pakistani government Minister of Industry in 1949: “In principle Muslims should not get involved in film-making. Being the work of lust and lure, it should be left to infidels.” Film-making, in other words, is an activity to be tolerated (and taxed) but not celebrated or supported. The Pakistani Censor Board – a wasteful and corrupt body of bureaucrats that justifies its existence by recourse to hypocritical doctrines of social and religious conservatism – has plagued generations of directors and stands accused of taking direct bribes to pass films.
As tame as it looks to Western eyes in the 21st century, Zinda Laash only passed the censor board with several cuts and much resistance. Khan and Ahmad, the authors of this article, note that it’s “ostensibly framed by religious discourse” (with a prologue that warns “the actions of man without God are sinful, and lead to death; only the actions of God will save us” and a conclusion that pleads with God for help) which placated censors. But they see it as a “largely secular tale in which religious symbolism remains marginal.” In contrast, they describe Zibahkhana as “replete with religious symbols and dilemmas about cultural and religious identity conflicts.” I would argue that the absence of obvious and overt religious symbolism isn’t indicative of whether or not the narrative is religious; you have to look at the themes and messages to determine that. Both these films are entertaining morality tales from a particular religious/cultural context. But Zibahkhana is the one that's more identifiably from a Muslim context.
Zinda Laash (which, I promise you, is not nearly as lurid and cheesy as this DVD cover suggests; it's much more German Expressionist in look and feel) contains several of the requisite dance numbers, which are very un-German Expressionist but were probably necessary to ensure some degree of commercial success in its particular context. From my perspective there’s no getting past their incongruity in a horror film. They are curiously engaging, though; you can watch them all on YouTube (here, here, here, and here). The other, far more hilariously incongruous element is the soundtrack: some of the musical choices are truly bizarre, particularly “La Cucaracha,” the overture from the opera The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Rossini’s overture for The Barber of Seville. I can offer no explanation for this.
Both Zibahkhana and Zinda Laash are available on DVD with some good extra features and are worth seeing if you have the chance. Neither is the pinnacle of cinematic artistry, but both have much to recommend them, and they make a great double bill. Grab a big handful of your favourite Hallowe’en snacks and hunker down for some halal-ish horror. Check these trailers if you need more convincing:
How can we NOT love this film? We’re both in it. No, seriously, we are! Okay, just barely: you can see the backs of our heads in some of the scenes of Michael Muhammad Knight’s reading at The Gladstone in Toronto in early 2009. Director Omar Majeed was there, too, showing some scenes from the then-unfinished version of Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, a documentary that was released in late 2009. We were thrilled to see those scenes then and couldn’t wait to see the finished film, which we did last year. It's gotten very strong, even stellar, reviews. It's still making the rounds on the festival circuit and tomorrow night, it premieres on the Documentary Channel.
Almost any discussion of this documentary has to start out by distinguishing this film from the very similarly-titled drama The Taqwacores: The Movie, which came out this year. That movie, directed by Eyad Zahra, is based on the 2003 novel The Taqwacores, by Michael Muhammad Knight, which imagined and then spawned a Muslim punk scene…which is what Canadian director Omar Majeed then made his documentary about. Got that? Good.
Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam looks at the very marginal subculture that sprung to life after Knight self-published his provocative novel, a book he says he wrote “from a place of extreme loneliness,” several years ago. Majeed focuses the film around the experiences of Knight and a band called The Kominas (“scumbags” in Punjabi). The first half of the film follows them as they set out on a old school bus to tour around the US, meeting up with the members of the widely scattered North American Muslim punk movement (Secret Trial Five, Al-Thawra, Diacritical, Vote Hezbollah) and doing shows on what was called The Taqwatour. The climax of the first half is their performance at an Islamic Society of North America annual conference, which is met mostly with the disapprobation of the organizers, although some of the audience members are receptive. The ISNA organizers object primarily to the performance of Secret Trial Five, whose lead singer is a woman, Sena Hussain. Apparently one of the main policies for musical performances at ISNA conferences is “no female singers” (whether or not they’re in hijab). The ISNA people finally call in the police, and the bands choose to leave, chanting “Pigs are haram in Islam!” rather than get arrested.
In the film’s second half, Basim Usmani of the Kominas goes to Pakistan, and eventually Knight and Usmani's bandmate Shahjehan Khan haul themselves to Pakistan, too. Khan and Usmani start a band called Noble Drew and try to unleash their brand of punk in a Muslim country with varying results. They explore some of the many expressions of Islam in Pakistan (specifically, Lahore), visiting Sufi shrines and a Shi’a mosque, taking part in a ritual that I’m fairly sure is connected to the mourning of Ashura. Knight travels by himself back to Islamabad, to revisit the Faisal Mosque where he spent time as a teenage convert, getting enough Wahhabi indoctrination to push him almost completely out of the religion. In Lahore, Noble Drew tries to put on a concert that quickly gets shut down, and they struggle to figure out how to connect with audiences in Pakistan. A local friend explains, “In order to make a difference in someplace, you first have to be absorbed in it. That takes time.”
They finally decide to put on a free show on a rooftop overlooking both the beautiful Badshahi Mosque and Lahore’s red light district—one can hardly think of a more perfect location. It’s not easy to get people interested. Someone in the film describes the way musical appreciation tends to fall along class lines in Pakistan: pop music is for the rich people, traditional music is for the poor. And who even knows what the hell this Muslim punk thing is? Noble Drew and their supporters are trying to reach anybody/everybody, and it’s not easy. But they finally manage to attract a pretty enthusiastic crowd to the free concert, and give a really successful, well-received show, which forms the climax for this half.
The juxtaposition of the two very different cultures and worldviews works well, I think; on some level, it’s kind of amusing how uptight and/or ambivalent the North American ISNA scene is, contrasted with how receptive and open the Pakistani audience is. Everything and everyone in the film underlines how complex, how multifaceted, how diverse Islam really is—and you’re only seeing a small fragment of that diversity in this movie. There isn’t just one kind of Muslim, no matter what certain mullahs and media outlets would have you believe. There isn't only one right or good way to be Muslim. And no matter how much cognitive dissonance the notion of Muslim punk might evoke, it still exists. As Knight says at one point, people should understand that “in the so-called war of civilizations, we’re pointing the middle finger in both directions.” Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam looks at some of the challenges in getting that message out there.
The one criticism I think I would make of the film is that as a Muslim woman I would like to have seen and heard a little bit more from the women in the Muslim punk scene. Sena Hussain, the lead singer of Secret Trial Five, gets to talk and sing a bit, and I realize there aren't a ton of women putting out Muslim punk music, but we could have heard more from the female fans, especially the women at the basement concerts and so on. However transgressive it may be for the men involved in Muslim punk, it’s more transgressive for the women. I think there would have been room for it in the film; it’s certainly not overly long at 79 minutes and it’s consistently engaging.
Anyway. I’ve gone on a bit longer than I meant to, but I really enjoyed this film and I want to encourage you to see it. If you’ve got the Documentary Channel (US version), it’s on Saturday, October 23, at 8 p.m. Join the film’s Facebook page to be kept abreast of festival screenings and other opportunities to see it. As Knight says in the film, “There is a cool Islam. You just have to find it. You have to sift through all the other stuff, but it’s there.”
Eid Mubarak everyone! Since we are taking the day off to celebrate Eid-ul-Fitr, we're just going to share with you a few links to one of our favourite features on the web: the Boston Globe's "The Big Picture" series, a fabulous collection of photojournalism. For the last three years they've covered Ramadan around the world in all its diversity. We always look forward to seeing each year's installment. Most of these are quite stunning and some are simply spectacular. Don't even try to look at these on some teeny-tiny screen on a handheld device: get thee to the biggest monitor you can find, and really savour them.
Recent Comments