In A Jihad for Love, a courageous new documentary about homosexuality in the Islamic world.
We meet a South African imam who, after revealing his sexuality, received death threats and was asked to leave the madrassas where he taught; an Egyptian who spent years in jail for "debauchery"; an Iranian who received 100 lashes and fled the country.
On a hopeful note, we meet Indian homosexuals who enjoy relative freedom to express their identities.
Director Parvez Sharma takes pains to show the wide range of Islam's attitudes toward homosexuality. Filmed in nine languages and 12 countries, the film explodes the idea of Islam as a monolithic entity with a single interpretation of homosexuality.
Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, for example, inherited their antihomosexuality laws from the British, but they have rarely been enforced since decolonization in the 1940s.
A Jihad for Love claims to be the first feature documentary to address the subject of homosexuality in Islam, and it makes an invaluable contribution. But its greatest strength - intimate portraits of individuals - is also its greatest weakness, since it provides only meager context.
A more informative documentary would have gone beyond personal vignettes to explain the history, theology, and sociology behind Islamic attitudes to homosexuality.
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