Among the believers - Religion As Soul-Poison

The 2015 documentary film “Among the believers” by Hemal Trivedi (India) and Mohammed Ali Naqvi (Pakistan) is about a charismatic teacher and his students in a Madrassa (a traditional Islamic school) at a historic mosque, Lal Masjid (Red mosque) of

Islamabad in Pakistan.

The film explores how beliefs about a “pure and true” form of Islam and how teachings of these beliefs in traditional Islamic schools are affecting the society in Pakistan.

Film’s People

“Among the believers” focuses on three stories related to the madrassa of Red Mosque - Abdul Aziz Ghazi, referred to as Maulana Aziz, and two of his students – a 12 year old boy called Talha and a 12 year old girl Zarina.

Maulana Aziz, a kindly looking tall man who speaks smilingly and gently, is convinced about the need for following the teachings of Islam in a pure and true form. For him this means that Pakistan must have Sharia law, ban music and other un-Islamic practices, enforce veils for girls and women and wage Jihad, the sacred fight against the infidels. Thus, in his madrassa school, young children mostly from poor families, must start learning the Muslim sacred book Quran and listen to his sermons about the pious Islamic lives they all must lead.

Talha is a gentle looking boy with a shy smile. He likes cricket and Shahid Afridi and would like to watch the cricket match on TV but he knows that this is against the teachings of Islam as taught in his madrassa. He lacks confidence and during the exam about his skills in remembering and reciting the verses of Quran, he bursts in tears.

Zarina is beautiful looking girl from a poor family in a village. She explains that she was

going to a local branch of Red Mosque madrassa but she was unhappy in the school and thus, ran away and came back to home. She says that girls were kept prisoners in the school, given little to eat and forced to cover themselves in veil. “I am a young girl, why should I cover myself with veil?”, she asks. Her village headman, a man who had not been able to complete his education because of family poverty, has started a school and Zarina starts going to this school.

In contraposition to these three stories is Dr Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani nuclear scientist and activist who had taught in universities abroad and who argues about the harm caused by this kind of conservative Islamic thinking.

Issues raised in the film

The film presents the ideas of Maulana Aziz through his interviews and through observations of the madrassa life, both in Red Mosque as well as, in some branches in the countryside, and how these ideas are leading to a war against ordinary citizens of Pakistan, forcing them to accept increasing Islamisation of their society.

One of the first scenes of the film shows a 5 or 6 years old young boy, whom Maulana Aziz introduces as a child from a poor family, whose father had left them and his mother had brought him to the madrassa. Maulana Aziz asks the child, “What do you want to become when you grow up?” The child hesitates and then with a timid smile says, “Mujahid” (a jihadi fighter).

To show the lessons he has learned in the school, the child slowly stands up and then suddenly changes his expression and the tone of his voice, his hand moving up and down like a knife, cutting the air in front with precise strokes as he recites, “Look at the sacrifices of the martyrs of the Red Mosque. We will destroy you if you will attack us. You are infidel, you cannot enter here. You cannot conquer us. And if you dare to enter here, we will destroy you in the name of Jihad."

The transformation of a shy child into a hard faced fanatic mirroring the expression and voice of his teachers, is one of the most chilling scenes in the film, showing how small children can be indoctrinated till they are filled with hate, willing to destroy themselves and ready to kill all those who are perceived different.

In another scene, in a Madrassa branch school in countryside, the local cleric tells the poor family of a young boy that learning Quran will ensure that 10 members of the family who are in dojakh (hell) can go to jannat (paradise) and that Allah will put a crown full of diamonds and jewels on the heads of his parents.

Zarina’s story presents hope for the attitudes of her father and the village head, who believe in modern education for their girls. When a woman comes to ask for 14 year old Zarina’s hand in marriage with her son, her father says that the girl is too young and he would like her to continue studying for 2-4 more years. However, as Islamist militants force the closure of their village school, Zarina’s father decides to get her married. Zarina tries to say that she is too young but the decision has already been taken. The desolate expressions of young Zarina putting on make up and dressing up for her marriage are haunting. The end credits explain that Zarina is already a mother of a baby girl.

However, it is Talha’s story which despaired me most. As the film moves, the shy, cricket loving gentle boy gets converted into a believer of the pure Islam as taught by Maulana Aziz. After a terrorist attack in December 2014 in a school in Pashawar which killed 136 children, Talha’s father comes to take the boy away from the madrassa. However, Talha refuses to leave. “They call us terrorists, but we are only killing the infidels and safeguarding Islam as asked by Quran, how can we be terrorists?”, he calmly asks. The end credits explain that Talha is continuing his studies in a senior madrassa.

The film explains the origin of conservative islamism through the Mujahideen movement in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s through support from USA to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The film includes some clips showing the American president Ronald Reagan talking and shaking hands with Islamist fighters and thanking them for fighting against the Soviets. After the Soviets left, Americans withdrew their direct support but the Islamists found other supporters and funders and continued their activities. One of these supporters and funders who had also visited Red Mosque was Osama Bin Laden.

The film also touches on the destruction and raid inside the Red Mosque in July 2007, when Maulana Aziz had tried to escape by hiding in a veil. He was jailed for 2 years. Since then he has been out and his groups have been linked to different suicide bombings and terrorist attacks, including the attack on the Peshawar school mentioned above. In one of the final scenes of the film, Maulana Aziz refuses to condemn the attack on the school, “They did it for their religion, how can I condemn it?”

You can watch the trailer of Among the Believers on Youtube.

Film’s team

Both Hemal Trivedi and Mohammed Ali Naqvi deserve congratulations for having succeeded in going inside Red Mosque, talking to Maulana Aziz and giving glimpses of the process used in brain-washing of young impressionable minds who will lay down their lives in suicide and terrorist attacks.

Through the story of Zarina, her parents and her village headman, the film provides a glimpse into the lives of ordinary persons who do not share these ideals. One of the co-producers of the film, Musharraf Shah, had lost four of his nephews in the massacre of the school children in Peshawar, the film is dedicated to their memory.

In an interview to Indie Wire in 2015, Trivedi had explained the genesis of the idea of making this film:

“In 2008, I lost a friend in the Mumbai terror attacks, a series of massacres carried out by Islamic militants. After the attacks, my heart was full of anger and hate for the perpetrators of the crime, who were found to be Pakistanis. To make sense of my anger, I started digging deeper into the root causes of these attacks…

I travelled to Pakistan in 2009 to document the depths of Pakistan’s ideological divide. By then, my lifelong misconceptions about Pakistan had completely unravelled. My co-director on “Among the Believers” is a talented Pakistani Muslim filmmaker, Mohammed Naqvi, and most of our incredible crew are Pakistani Muslims as well…

Protecting our crew’s physical safety was an ongoing challenge. Throughout the five and a half years of production, members of our crew narrowly escaped bomb blasts and experienced several close encounters with gunfights. We also received several death threats and were tracked by intelligence agencies.

As a woman, a Hindu and an Indian, I faced different risks during production. When we first started filming, I visited the Red Mosque several times disguised as a Muslim. A trusted contact warned me that, in doing so, I was risking my life. These realities limited my access to some of our shoots. During those times, my co-director Mohammed Naqvi stood in for the both of us. I was so fortunate to have a local Pakistani crew that was willing to risk their lives to shoot the footage for my film. This is very significant, given the historical mistrust between Indians and Pakistanis.”

"Among the Believers" has been shown in more than 50 film festivals across different continents (including the Goa Film Festival in India in 2015) and has won 12 awards. Making such films is not without its dangers. The directors of the film have received death threats.

Comments

It is a scary film since it makes you understand how difficult it can be to fight against and to the change the mentality of boys and girls who grow up surrounded by ideals of hate, suicide and killings in the name of religion. It is also important to see how the religious fundamentalism is harming the Pakistani society itself and affecting the lives of millions of young girls and boys in that country. Along with feelings of fear and disgust, I could not help feeling pity for those boys and girls in the traditional Islamist madrassas, who have no way to defend themselves against this kind of hateful teachings.

The film glosses over some of the key issues in terms of links between persons coming out of these madrassa and India. For example, the film never mentions the role of Pakistani army and ISI in maintaining and supporting the radical Islamists in Pakistan after the departure of Soviets from Afghanistan and the withdrawal of American support because they were used for waging war against India in Kashmir and elsewhere.

While different persons in the film express their anguish at the havoc wreaked by terrorists in Pakistan, the film also glosses over decades of silent acceptation and support these institutions and persons must have received as long as their targets were in other countries, especially in India.

Now that the religious conservatives nurtured to create terror in India and Afghanistan have turned inwards towards Pakistani society, as well as their spread towards ISIS and other terrorist networks affecting middle east, Europe and US, suddenly the whole world is asking about the role of traditional madrassas in Pakistan. Recent films and novels, often equate Pakistan with terrorism. Would Pakistan government, army and ISI understand the need to eradicate these structures and if yes, would they have the power to do so, are questions that do not have any answers yet.

The one hour and 22 minutes long film is definitely worth a watch, both to understand the kind of persons who come out of the radical Islamist schools, as well as to see how ordinary people in Pakistan are also being affected by it.

Most mainstream media usually try to ignore or down-play anything related to radical Islamists. This is done both, for not promoting Islamophobia and for not provoking negative stereotypes against ordinary Muslims. However, as the film shows, the spread of conservative Islamist ideology is a great danger to the ordinary Muslims themselves. Other countries and people considered infidels risk terrorism and will need to fight the terrorist attacks. However, Muslims themselves risk much more - losing their culture, their arts, their education, their professions, their daily lives and their ordinary freedoms, under the spread of radical Islamist ideology. It does not target only the non-believers, it also creates divisions among Muslims themselves and attacks all those who do not belong to the acceptable forms of Islamic beliefs.

This film has been banned in Pakistan. Please consider signing the petition on Change.org for showing this film in Pakistan. I also think that the film needs to be shown widely in India for promoting a debate about the impact of influencing young vulnerable minds and how to make sure that we do not allow spread of such ideologies, not just among Muslims, but among all the religions.

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Making of a Play - A tyrst with destiny

Jawaharlal Nehru and Gandhi ji were sitting and discussing on a mattress in the living room. Gandhi was spinning on his charkha, the spinning wheel.

I thought I was hallucinating. I was sitting in the corner of the living room of a person that I had never met before. More precisely, at that time, I didn't know whose house was it. It was evening when I had arrived in Washington DC and the actors were already rehearsing.

I knew that it was only a play. Yet, for some moments, I had been transported to a room in India, where Gandhi and Jawaharlal must have sat together more than eighty years ago.

That morning, I had left home in Bologna (Italy), more than 15 hours earlier. From the Dulles international airport, we had come straight to the rehearsal. The play is called "A tryst with destiny". It is about the people involved in events leading to independence and partition of India. It is written and directed by my younger sister, and I had gone to US especially to watch it.

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I was intrigued by Jinnah. The suave, impassioned man played with raw intensity by Subhojit during the rehearsal. Why had he joined the All India Muslim League, when he was a member of congress party? At that time, in 1913, his views were nationalist and about Hindu-Muslim unity? Few years later he had even married a Parsi girl.

Suddenly I remembered the time when Altaf Tyrewala had come to a literary meeting in Turin, a couple of years ago. Altaf, a writer from Mumbai, didn't see himself in religious terms, but during the meeting he was presented as the "Muslim writer" by the organisers. Often others decide to underline our religious identities, for whatever reasons. When it happens again and again, perhaps it changes the way we look at ourselves?

Had something like that happened to Jinnah? Or, was it a quest for power, an understanding that "minority politics" could give him greater role? Or a combination of both?

I don't know much about Jinnah. He was not a welcome figure in our family discussions, because of the friends, lands and homes they had been forced to leave in Pakistan during partition.

"Subodh, how does it feel to play Jinnah?" I had asked Subhojit.

Everybody calls him Subodh. He is a research scientist, a Bengali from Mumbai, with music as his passion.

"Actually Amita wanted someone older to play Jinnah", Subhojit smiled, "but she couldn't find someone who was old and slim, and I got lucky that way. Initially it was a big challenge. I knew about Gandhi and Nehru, but I had no clue about Jinnah. In India, we learned that Jinnah was president of Muslim League and that he wanted Pakistan, but we didn't really study about him as a person. So to prepare for this role, I read a lot about him."

"By that time, we had started doing the play but I was not really feeling the role. Then I talked with my Pakistani friends to understand how they saw him. That changed how I saw him! When I could put myself in their shoes and see him from their eyes, it changed my understanding. After that, when I spoke my dialogues and I spoke about Muslims, I changed 'the Muslims' to 'us Muslims'. It became 'us', 'we' and 'I', then I felt the character", he continued.

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Manoj Singh, a shy and gentle looking person, has a triple role in the play - he plays Motilal, Baba Saheb Ambedkar and Jinnah's Hindu servant. It was his scene as Ambedkar, where he asks Gandhi ji to break the fast, that spiked my interest.

Dalit leaders did not like the word "harijan" that Gandhi ji had proposed for them. How did Ambedkar feel about the word "harijan", I suddenly wondered.

Gandhi ji was sitting on the mattress in the centre of the room, spinning his charkha while Ambedkar was pacing around. I could understand Gandhi's view when he said "Hinduism has a remedy for this evil of untouchability. Hinduism can reform itself, caste system is not about that, Hinduism is an open religion and can transform....". That is the way we often think.

However, Ambedkar was impatient and scathing, "Please don’t lecture me on the glory of Hinduism . You were not born an untouchable in this country. You don’t understand what it is to live life as an untouchable."

Natwar Gandhi, who played Gandhi, imbued him with an air of vulnerability and disarming innocence, "That is why I pray that I am born as an untouchable in my next life."

"No Gandhi ji, we don’t want this problem going into our next lives. We need to end it in our present life times. I am here to discuss the issue of separate electorates for untouchables as agreed by the British", Manoj's Ambedkar was resigned and a little resentful, "I want you to end the fast. This is emotional and political blackmail on your part. If you die, caste Hindus will kill every untouchable in this country, the very people you consider so dear, your harijans."

What word did Baba Saheb use in his head when he thought about his fellow persons from the "low" castes? Harijan? Untouchables in English or Acchuts in Hindi or did he use a Marathi term?

During my time in the school, our history books in India talked about kings and queens of England but they didn't explain the different roles and positions of persons involved in our freedom struggle. Today it is much worse in India. Today talking about our history is treated like some dangerous perversion that must struggle continuously with political and popular censorships!

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Two hours before the show was supposed to start, all preparations were done and the actors went to the green rooms to get ready.

Looking at persons putting on their costumes and getting their make up done was equally fascinating. Deepti Rattan, the production in charge, ran around doing hundred things.

"During my growing up years, I had no knowledge about plays and theater", Deepti explained, "but when I was in college, I met Sushil during a play competition. He was very involved in theater. We started going out together and I became interested in plays." After coming to USA, for many years, Sushil had become busy in his work as a gastroentrologist, and they were not very active in theater. Then one year ago, they had shifted home from Philadelphia and theater had come back into their lives.

Rita was doing the make-up. Putting the foundation and the eyeliners. Accentuating features so that actors' expressions were easier to make out for the audience. Even if Natwar is not thin like Gandhi ji was, still he did look very much like Gandhi ji. Next to him, Subhojit traced dark lines on his neck and face. It did make his face look thinner and more like Jinnah's.

Deepti, Reshma and Sangeeta struggled with Malviya's turban, wrapping and unwrapping it, many times before finding the turn that satisfied him.

Manoj has his hairs dusted with white and a white moustache, transformed into Motilal Nehru. But it was Krish who really surprised me. He looked so much like Jawaharlal Nehru!

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Then it was the time for me to take my seat among the spectators. The theater quickly filled up. The theater staff was amazed. They had not had a houseful like this for some time. Among the audience there was the mayor of DC, who had come especially for Natwar, playing Gandhi.

Scenes of the play are mostly short pieces, presenting a collage of events, passing from one event to another, from one set of persons to others, with three central characters - Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah. In the play, the historical video clips connect the scenes and the point where a video clip stops, is the starting point of the next scene.

During the interval, people were a little cautious and guarded with their comments. There had been some good moments in the play, with occasional exchanges eliciting laughter. However, I think that, the first half of the play had not touched any deep emotions in the audience.

The second half of the play had much more life and passion. Almost from the first scene I could sense the excitement and engagement of the audience around me. The concluding moments of the play with the anger and frustration of Jinnah asking for a separate homeland for the Muslims, the shouting and crying Nehru justifying his decision to accept the partition of India and passionate plea of Azad for not dividing India, were truly magical.

During the rehearsal the evening before, this part had not been very convincing. During the play, Sushil as Azad, brought a lump to my throat with his helpless anger, "And what is the hurry for freedom, this divided freedom? Who decided we should be free on 15th August 1947 anyway? Mr. Radcliffe, Mountbatten? And who agreed? You? Sardar Patel on behalf of Congress? Gandhi ji?"

It was a crescendo. The last scene with parts of independence speeches made by Jinnah and Nehru, and with the wonderful voice of Sajeev singing "Vaishnav Jan to", had the audience give a rousing applause for the play.

The evening had concluded with a discussion that saw two South Asia experts, Teresita C. Schaffer and Walter Anderson, sharing their views about the play and that period of history. Both of them agreed that the play had caught the spirit of those troubled times and presented the events and persons in their complexity, rather than simplifying them to give facile answers about the partition of India and Pakistan.

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Even after more than 60 years, the events around the end of the British India are able to provoke heated debates and anguished discussions. Today, often these discussions take place without a real knowledge of pre-independence era and its events. Rather, these discussions are shaped by deformed versions of our histories taught in the school books and by the events of the past decades such as the wars between India and Pakistan along with nationalistic jingoism.

During the discussions after the play, Altaf Kabeer, had raised up the issue of representations of the partition events by Indians exclusively in tragic terms with use of words like holocaust while for persons like him, it is an event linked to the birth of his country, Pakistan.

I think that Kabeer is right. It does not matter, how objective and neutral we try to be in these discussions. In the end, for most Indians, this part of our history is about death and suffering of so many, coupled with mutilation of our country. On the other hand, across the border, the stories of death and suffering are a means to a noble end, they are linked to birth of their country. This basic difference in the perspectives cannot be erased.

The morning after the play, I and Amita were walking back from a visit to the Potomac falls, when we were stopped by a young woman. She was Shabnam and she had been at the play with her father. They were from Pakistan. "When we had gone to the play, we didn't know what to expect but actually the play presented the different sides in a balanced way. I had not much idea about the events that had led to the birth of Pakistan, so it was learning for me. My father also appreciated the play", she had said.

I think that was great praise for "A tryst with destiny", that a play could give us a greater understanding about a moment of our history.

In the introductory booklet prepared for the play, Amita had explained, "As a psychiatrist, I help people make sense of their history and how it impacts their present. I deeply believe that we as humans carry not only our individual history but also our social, political and cultural histories, the history of our communities and nationalities in us."

The play was a way to look back with sympathy and understanding. Without our minds and eyes clouded by mists of anger. If we can understand our past, may be we can build a better future for us.

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A more extended version of this article is available on Kalpana.it.

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