After years of making contemporary films and soap operas, Bollywood filmmaker Faruq Masudi has a quest — to shatter the negative stereotypes of Islam through film and present the Holy Qur’an in a contemporary manner that will help non-Muslims and a younger generation of Muslims identify and understand Islam’s core values and beliefs.
Just 44 minutes long, the Qur’an Contemporary Connections high-definition movie delves deep into the Qur’an and presents its themes as both clear and uncomplicated. The aim of the film, according to Masudi who is the film’s writer, director and producer, is to correct the “skewed perceptions of Islam by the Islamophobic, and present Muslims in an urban and Western background that helps others recognize their compatibility with American values.”
Masudi spoke to Arab News by phone this week from Kashmir, where he said he is filming “another soap opera for Bollywood. “I’ve been working in the film industry for 35 years,” said Masudi. “I’ve done films, documentaries, commercials, features films, soap operas and a variety of narrative films and musicals — so this has helped me fuse all these techniques to be able to convey what I want to say about the Qur’an.”
Working on the Qur’an film presented many challenges, said the Indian movie director. “The Qur’an film was a very difficult and complex project; quite a bit of it was abstract. To revisit the Qur’an in contemporary times, and to reread it in younger, modern times — and to correlate it for young Muslims and non-Muslims, it was quite a task,” said Masudi, who used a variety of avant-garde film production methods to convey this message to his audience.
The major themes, he said, include “love, mercy, justice, brotherhood, concern for humanity, women’s status, jihad, and the concept of God.”
In order to achieve this, Masudi said, the explanation of a religion must be approached “as a logical and rational endeavor so that faith does not become blind, but rather based on knowledge.”
This brought Masudi to another reason why he made this film: He said people have been using their interpretation of Islam as a method of promoting their own views. “Both Muslims and non-Muslims, have hijacked the Qur’an, and they are associating extremist views with their interpretations of it.”
The movie “is an attempt to wriggle it out of the hands of the extremists’ interpretations of the Qur’an,” said Masudi. “As for Muslims, one shouldn’t follow the Qur’an blindly, but read it and understand it as it is meant to be.” This, he said, is one of the main reasons he decided to make the film.
Masudi’s movie “was not a reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.”
The work had begun much earlier, he said, and even “was mentioned on different websites before that tragic attack.”
“The movie is meant to counter the Islamophobes who have been propagating against Islam and the Qur’an since the birth of Islam,” said Masudi.
“These attacks are nothing new; the only difference is that the attacks have had a much sharper focus because of the media exposure. This movie is my effort to expose those stereotypes, and reshape and rephrase their Islamic concepts.”
What is happening nowadays, especially with uninformed non-Muslims, said Masudi, is that “those who have vested interests have demolished Islam and are scaring the hell out of American and Europeans who view the Muslims as taking over, and that together they will demolish everything that is good about Western society and Western values. This is completely false, as you will see in the film. Allah is the same God that you and I worship together. Our god is no different from the Hebrew god and the Christian god, and this is why I produced this movie — so that non-Muslims could understand the true Islam in its proper perspective, which is non-threatening to non-Muslims.”
Masudi also berated the Western mainstream media for their inability, deliberate or not, to comprehend that Islam is not the enemy, but rather the terrorists are.
“The Western anti-Muslim media handpick a few countries that don’t constitute even 5 percent of the global Muslim community, and make an example of them as being representative of Islamic societies throughout the world. “By the same token, we could equally pick up the few bad examples from Western society, and cancel out the entire history of the civilized, industrial West, to support our own interpretation of Western history. But that would be falsehood, a lie, and that is what Islamophobes are engaged in — falsifying Islam. We are trying to make bridges here, while they are trying to burn them.” Despite this attitude, Masudi admits he encountered problems trying to circulate his movie in the US. “I tried my best to distribute it, specifically in the US, but the distributors there have found one pretext or another; some say it’s propaganda, or they want it to “show the other side of Islam, the other side of the Qur’an which, according to them, is the ugly face of the Qur’an. They want me to do another Satanic Verses in visuals, in cinema, which I refuse to do. They want a controversial film, so that it sells and continues to promote the misunderstanding of Islam.”
Despite his frustration, Masudi hasn’t given up and is still looking for people “engaged in outreach work to fund the free distribution of this film. The film is already made, I have funded myself, but there is a need for it to be distributed in various countries, especially in the US and Europe, because Europe is a place where a lot of Islamophobia and Islam-bashing is taking place.”
His goal is to make Islam, Contemporary Connections available to institutions, “including libraries, Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and those who work in the media — all these places where Muslims get stereotyped, and where there is little understanding of the true face of Islam. We don’t have any major clash of faith between us,” said Masudi.
“If there is a clash of faith then I could understand the adversity. We share the same belief in the same God, and no religion says to kill people and to be cruel to each other, so it is difficult to understand the polarization that has taken place.”
Masudi is currently writing a biographical film about Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). He will not use photos that depict him or his immediate family or his close followers. The result, he said, is that “it’s a big challenge.”
For more information about “Qur’an Contemporary Connections,” and to see a trailer of the movie, log on to www.quranconnections.com.