I am distressed by this news report in today’s Detroit Free Press.  The first four paragraphs:

A group of metro Detroiters visiting Saudi Arabia for the annual Muslim pilgrimage said they were attacked and threatened with death last week by a group of Sunni men from Australia because they are Shias, a minority sect within Islam.

One of the members of the group was strangled until his face turned blue and women in the group were threatened with rape, according to people who witnessed the attack last week. They allege that authorities in Saudi Arabia did not take their complaints seriously and deleted a video one of them had made of the incident.

A U.S. State Department official told the Free Press on Monday: “We are concerned by reports that a group of U.S. citizens was attacked … at a campsite for Hajj pilgrims located outside of Mecca. We take these reports seriously and are committed to the protection of U.S. citizens traveling and residing abroad.”

The Embassy of Saudi Arabia did not return a reporter’s calls or an e-mail seeking comment. The State Department official said the hajj and interior ministries in Saudi Arabia “have confirmed that they are investigating” the incident.

In this instance, my distress is more than a matter of principle.  I have been a guest of Imam Qazwini and the Islamic Center of America (the largest mosque in North America), and admire their openness, their warmth, their calm devotion, and their civic involvement.  I have made dear friends there, people with whom I can talk deeply across all so-called divides of religion/affiliation/belief.

And this distress is only further deepened by the language used in the Detroit Free Press article:  the “say they were” in the headline, and the repeated use of the word “allege” in the body of the piece, as though there were some doubt on the veracity of Imam Qazwini and his group of pilgrims.  Such language only adds insult to the injury of what actually happened.

In principle, the hajj is when all Muslims come together, when all distinctions of class, ethnicity, denomination, and even gender fall away.  But the ultra-conservative and intellectually primitive Salafis — a movement very close to Saudi wahhabism — will have none of this.  It’s their way or no way.  Their Islam or no Islam.  Like all fundamentalist extremists, of all faiths, they see open minds and open hearts as a threat.  And respond with violence.

Expect a far more moderate response from the Islamic Center of North America than I am capable of.  And expect nothing from the Saudi “investigation.”  Year by year, as glitzy multi-million-dollar high-rises go up around the Kaaba itself, the Saudis bear ever greater resemblance to the seventh-century elite who profited from pilgrimage in the pre-Islamic years, charging exorbitant fees for everything from water to access to holy sites.  In fact an essential part of Muhammad’s Quranic message protested exactly this.

But even that pre-Islamic elite insisted on preserving the pilgrimage as a time of absolute non-violence.

What, then, does the Saudi tolerance of Salafi intolerance make them?

Coming soon to a screen near you:  not one but two biopics about the life of Muhammad.  One from Iran, one from Qatar.  In other words:  one Shia, one Sunni.

Oy.

And double oy.  Because how do you make a movie about someone you can’t show on the screen?  Images of Muhammad are a no-no in Islam.  Though a few medieval Persian miniatures do show his cloaked figure, his face is blanked out — a white oval in the otherwise vividly colored painting.

No surprise, then, that there hasn’t been a feature movie about Muhammad since 1976, when Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi — yes, that Qaddafi — funded “The Message,” starring Anthony Quinn (shown here at left) as Muhammad’s uncle Hamza.

Who played Muhammad?  Nobody.  The solution was not to show him at all.  Instead, the camera acted as his eyes.  When the camera panned, you were supposed to think that this was what Muhammad was seeing.  The result was… less than convincing.

What was all too convincing was the violence surrounding the movie’s planned US debut in 1977.  Twelve Nation of Islam extremists not given to fact-checking heard a rumor that Quinn had played not Hamza, but Muhammad himself.  They laid siege to three buildings in Washington DC, where they held 149 hostages and killed a journalist and a police officer until they were persuaded by the combined efforts of the Egyptian, Pakistani, and Iranian ambassadors to surrender.  (The whole miserable story is here.)

Of course the hostage-takers hadn’t seen the movie.  If they had, they might have been amazed by its stereotypical blandness.  And they’d never be aware of their ironic role in ensuring that the director, Moustapha Akkad, gave up on religious-themed movies after “The Message,” made a small fortune directing Jamie Lee Curtis in the famed “Halloween” sequels, and then in 2005 went to a wedding in Jordan and got blown up by a suicide bomber.

If it seems way past time that a better film about Muhammad be made, the question remains how it can be done without violence.  And the problem remains of how to do it without showing him.

The highly regarded Iranian director Majid Majidi (“Children of Heaven,” “Color of Paradise”) began work on his $30-million movie last October, and reportedly intends to show Muhammad’s cloaked figure, but not his face.  In short order, an outraged denunciation came from Cairo’s al-Azhar University, followed by the announcement of plans for a rival movie from Sunni-majority Qatar,  with the blessing of a top Muslim Brotherhood theologian and a budget ranging, in various reports, from $200 million to $1 billion.

So how will the two movies differ, aside from the obvious lavishness of production moola and the issue of cloaked figure or no figure?  If you’ve read After the Prophet, you’ll know that the Iranian movie will likely give a far greater role to Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali, whom Shia believe Muhammad designated as his successor — his first khalifa, or caliph.  The Qatari movie will just as likely give a heftier role to Muhammad’s father-in-law abu-Bakr, who in fact became the first caliph of Sunni Islam.  In other words, the two movies are likely to act out the Sunni-Shia split.

I guess acting it out with cameras is far preferable to doing so with guns, but the risk of course is that angry denunciations such as that of al-Azhar will only encourage the latter.

Meanwhile, Hollywood seems determined not to be left out of the prophets (and, of course, the profits).  Two biopics of Moses are reportedly in the works, with names like Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, and Ang Lee being bandied around with Hollywood abandon and zero confirmation.  And gird your loins for a biopic of Noah due for release next year, with the ark-builder being played by the star of “The Gladiator,” Russell Crowe.

Somehow I can’t quite imagine Russell Crowe with an olive branch…

The movie to watch tomorrow after Obama’s speech:  James Longley’s documentary Iraq in Fragments, more timely than ever and yet timeless.

I saw it when it first came out in 2006, but maybe I was too focused then on the ‘now-ness’ of documentaries, or I was blinded by my own imagined ‘expertise’ on Iraq as I worked on After the Prophet. I  remember thinking it a good movie, but somehow it didn’t imprint itself on my over-researched brain.

But now the President’s about to declare an end to the American combat mission in Iraq – and to do it even as the violence ramps up again, despite strangely other-worldly assurances from D.C. that it‘s lessened.   Now everyone’s breathing easier because we’re “getting out” of Iraq (we aren’t, of course — we’re just rebranding some combat troops as support-and-assist troops, adding a huge number of Blackwater/Xe-type mercenaries paid by the State Department instead of the Pentagon (as though that will make all the difference), and moving other combat units out of the Iraqi frying pan into the Afghanistan fire).  So it seemed a good time to rent the DVD of Longley’s movie and take a second look.

And this time it both took my breath away and just about broke my heart.

Where was my head in 2006?  How was I not haunted as I now am by the fear and desperate hope in the eyes of Muhammad, the eleven-year-old Sunni boy living a Dickensian working life in a filthy auto-parts repair shop in Baghdad as American helicopters thunder overhead?

How did the pleas of the blindfolded and beaten men accused by Muqtada al-Sadr’s fired-up Shia followers of selling alcohol in the southern city of Nasariya not echo in my ears?

How did I blank out the elderly father dreaming of an independent Kurdistan in a small village in the north, even as his son surrenders his dreams of medical school for work at the local brick oven, shown belching huge plumes of oily smoke into a Ken-Burns-gorgeous sunset?

These are the real lives and dreams affected by America’s war in Iraq, though there’s no attempt to push that point in the three parts of this movie.  In fact there’s no omniscient narrator at all. The only voice-over narration is that of the Iraqis Longley follows with his camera, and they speak about themselves from a place deep inside.  They let him in, trusting him to not to judge, and he doesn’t.  Instead, he makes their stories both utterly of the place and yet universal.

‘Iraq in Fragments’ has been called – rightly – a documentary masterpiece (acknowledged by, among others, Sundance awards for directing, cinematography, and editing, and a nomination for best documentary at the Oscars, where the young Muhammad lost out to Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth).  But its power is all the greater by contrast with the best-known “Iraq war movie” – best-picture Oscar winner The Hurt Locker, which presented itself as a fictionalized documentary.

Trouble is, ‘The Hurt Locker’ wasn’t really about Iraq.  It was  yet another in the long series of American movies where “the meaning of war” is seen entirely through American eyes.  Iraq was all but incidental to ‘The Hurt Locker,’ as were Iraqis.   The place and the people were merely a stage on which Americans played their drama.  ‘Iraq in Fragments,’ by contrast, takes you behind the stage, and quietly and devastatingly shows the effect on those who were merely ‘The Hurt Locker’s’ scenery.

So by all means watch the President’s speech tomorrow, but then be a mensch, and watch this movie.

———————————————————

By way of a coda to both Obama’s speech and ‘Iraq in Fragments,’ you could do worse than consider what General Ray Odierno, the departing commander of American forces in Iraq, said in the NYT today:

“We came in very naïve about what the problems were in Iraq; I don’t think we understood what I call the societal devastation that occurred,” he said, citing the Iran-Iraq war, the Persian Gulf war and the international sanctions from 1990 to 2003 that wiped out the middle class. “And then we attacked to overthrow the government,” he said.

The same went for the country’s ethnic and sectarian divisions, he said: “We just didn’t understand it.”

To advocates of the counterinsurgency strategy that General Odierno has, in part, come to symbolize, the learning curve might highlight the military’s adaptiveness. Critics of a conflict that killed an estimated 100,000 Iraqis, perhaps far more, and more than 4,400 American soldiers might see the acknowledgment as evidence of the war’s folly.

Asked if the United States had made the country’s divisions worse, General Odierno said, “I don’t know.”

“There’s all these issues that we didn’t understand and that we had to work our way through,” he said. “And did maybe that cause it to get worse? Maybe.”

What art can do:

gently, provocatively, and in its own way reverently — recreate the sacred.

The image on the right is a devotional poster of Imam Hussein, Muhammad’s grandson, whose death in Iraq in the year 680 became the crystallizing point of the Shia-Sunni split.   While Islam formally frowns on figurative art,  popular Islam throughout the Middle East revels in it.   Markets, kiosks, pavement stores, homes are full of such brightly colored posters.  They show everything from popular shrines to the revered Shia Imams to the horse Muhammad rode on his night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem.

The deliberate mirror image on the left is of a contemporary Iranian woman.  What you see here is just a still:   the actual piece is a video portrait, and the woman moves slightly and breathes as the camera runs.  The five-foot high portrait, called “Icon #3.” is part of an exhibit by Iranian-born filmmaker Shoja Azari, running in New York through Friday (details and more info here).

In making this particular image, Azari — the partner of Shirin Neshat, director of the movie “Women Without Men” — was thinking of Neda Soltan, the student killed last June in Tehran during the protests following Iran’s disputed election.  Her image as she lay dying, blood streaming from one eye, from her nose, and from the corner of her mouth, became an instant icon in itself.

I am stunned by Icon #3.   I love the traditional posters and would have included them in “After the Prophet” if Doubleday hadn’t gasped at the expense (you can see a few here), but what Azari has done is give them fresh meaning and relevance.  He honors the iconic images even as he adapts them.

And no, there’s no question of sacrilege.  In fact Azari is solidly in the tradition of Islamic protest.  Iconic images were similarly adapted during the 1979-80 Iranian Revolution, and are still being used in posters of such contemporary political figures as Muqtada al-Sadr, head of Iraq’s Mahdi Army, and Hassan Nasrallah, the Lebanese head of Hizbollah.

If you can make it to the “Icons” exhibit, which for some reason is only up through this coming Friday, I am incredibly envious — for once I wish I was in New York!   And if you go, do please report back here to this envious Accidental Theologist.