Homosexuality and Islam

A controversial film breaks open the taboo topic of homosexuality and Islam
By Ethar El-Katatney

A controversial new documentary, A Jihad for Love, is shattering that taboo by interviewing homosexual Muslims, including an Egyptian gay man ‘outed’ by his arrest during the 2001 Queen Boat raid and an Egyptian lesbian still hiding her sexuality from society. Filmmaker Parvez Sharma had dual motivations: first, to challenge the mindset that Muslim and gay are mutually exclusive, and second, to challenge the Western world’s own Islamophobia.

As a Muslim and openly admitted homosexual, Sharma had to challenge himself to make the documentary in a way that would neither make Islam look bad nor be apologetic. “Sharing some of the stories of condemnation, isolation, [and] pain would make it easy to issue a blanket critique of Islam,” he explains, “[but] as a Muslim I could not allow myself to join the bandwagon of Islamophobes. I knew that I had to be a defender of the faith as a Muslim filmmaker and at the same time engage in a critique of what I knew was wrong in orthodox Islam’s condemnation of homosexuality.”

A Jihad for Love premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2007, where it received official screening honors. It has also been screened in major festivals including the Festival do Rio in Brazil, and the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in South Africa. Theatrical distribution deals, particularly in North America and Europe, are in the works. Audiences are raving; Sharma and his documentary have been featured in international newspapers The Guardian and The New York Times, Reuters newswire, as well as on the CBC, BBC and Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, just to name a few.

“The reaction has been really positive, to tell you the truth,” says Sharma, adding that Muslims who see the film discover it is “actually a defense of Islam and speaks very respectfully.

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