Avuncular American

La mosquée - Daoud Aoulad-Syad

We've seen films-within-films before, usually films about making films.  La mosquée, a little gem featured at the 2011 Moroccan National Film Festival, is different.  It's a sort of "post-production" film: what happens after the film crew leaves a small Moroccan village?

From the director, Daoud Aoulad-Syad, at last November's Damascus International Film Festival:

For the filming of my last movie "Waiting for Pasolini", sets were built on land leased from local villagers.  Among the sets, a mosque was built on the land of Moha, a villager who also appears in the movie.  At the end of filming, the filming team leaves the village.  Villagers demolish all the sets, except the mosque. This mosque became a real place of prayer for the whole village.  For Moha this is a real disaster.

Poor Moha, salt of the earth farmer.  He just wants his land back, and it seems that he's the only one around who realizes that the "mosque" is just a prop, literally propped up from behind like any cardboard Western might create an instant church, saloon, or hotel.

Even the "imam" is fake, but he sees opportunity everywhere: Moha should just get with the plan.  This film has everything: local official who has the power to make Moha's life hell; sleazy political candidate who's not above buying your vote with a goat; authentic imam in jeans, who says "the djellabah does not make the imam."

Physics professor at Rabat University, the director looks a bit like a Moroccan Bob Marley, and plays himself at the outset.  This is a "comedy," but the laughs are all subdued, and not without a melancholy tinge.  I will eagerly await Prof. Aoulad-Syad's next offering.

Aoulad-Syad, interviewed on Radio Médi1, said that the Moroccan National Film Festival's selection of 19 shorts and 19 feature films is out of an annual Moroccan production of some 100 films.  A very respectable Moroccan showing indeed.

The organizers, the CCM - Centre Cinématographique Marocain - couldn't have chosen a better venue.  Tangier's Cinémathèque, a popular cultural attraction in its own right, in the historic Cinéma Rif, has a year-round repertoire of current, classic, and documentary films.  The National Film Festival, in its 12th year, keeps coming back to Tangier.

The turnout, on this rainy, cold Sunday afternoon in January, is testimony to the CCM's - and the Cinémathèque's - quality offerings.  It also helped that entry was absolutely free!

This first appeared on TALIMblog.

Of Gods and Men and Algeria

Des Hommes et des Dieux

Though this film portrays terrorism and its victims, this is not another "post 9/11 film."  In fact, the events it portrays transpired between 1993 and 1996, and had nothing to do with America, George W. Bush, or Iraq.  The victims were French, and the perpetrators Algerian.  But which Algerians?  One of the film's characters even gets to utter the question raised by countless Algerians and outside observers, "Qui tue qui?" (Who is killing who?).

Image: Why Not Productions

For the monks of Tibhirine, that question may never really be answered with certainty.  What is certain, however, is that Xavier Beauvois has given us a unique film - the Cannes 2010 Jury Grand Prize winner.  A film that is very difficult to categorize, neither a "thriller" nor just a film about monks or terrorists. That said, it has plenty of suspense, even if pretty much everyone knows of the eventual fate of the monks.

Our time spent with the monks gives us a sense of their world, before Algeria's decade-plus of bloodshed intervened to change their pastoral idyll forever.  It is the portrayal of the monks' lives, and their anguish over the violence taking over their adopted country, which is so powerfully rendered in Des Hommes et des Dieux.  The spectator is transported to Algeria in the mid-Nineties, and the sigh that a monk utters over the sheer beauty of the landscape of the high steppes and forested hills is something that one can almost feel.  And the sense of impending loss.

Beauvois has given us a beautiful film, and the casting is perfect.  Lambert Wilson as Brother Christian, the Prior of the monastery, has an ascetic intellectual steel behind wire-rimmed glasses beloved of French priests.  He resents the intrusion of the warring factions on the monks' work, though his decision to stick it out in the isolated mountains causes him constant anguish.  Olivier Rabourdin as Christophe is riven with doubt, and closeups of his eyes replace any need for extraneous dialogue.  Brother Luc, played by an avuncular Michel Lonsdale, has seen it all - literally.  During Algeria's war of liberation in the Fifties, Luc was taken prisoner by the FLN, only to be released when they realized that Dr. Luc Dochier was treating Algerians - both FLN fighters and civilians.

Despite the difficulty of treating such a subject, Olivier Beauvois gives us a very subtle film, one that hints at the ambiguities of the record.  The monks recoil at the violence perpetrated by both sides, and their stubborn insistence at staying with the villagers who depend on them for employment, for medical treatment, and for intelligent conversation becomes an annoyance to the combatants.

A hovering helicopter gives a premonition of the fate that may have befallen the monks, the loud, whirling blades audible as they pray in their chapel.  Is it Army protection, or something else?  In 2009, former French military attaché in Algiers General François Buchwalter testified that the monks were in fact killed in a botched attack on what the Army took to be an Islamist group.

Of Gods and Men is an ode to a group of incredibly brave men, beautifully acted and filmed.  A fitting memorial to the monks buried on a hillside in their beloved Algeria.

Saints Preserve Us From "Doctor" Terry Jones

Tangier, Morocco, September 11, 2010

Yesterday, September 10, was the Aid al-Fitr, or the feast day after the Muslim month of fasting and prayer, Ramadan.  The RFI correspondent in Tangier gave a nice image of the place on this festive day, which, according to one interviewee, consisted of "eating all day." Sounds like American Thanksgiving day.

Cut to September 11 in the US, where apparently all the world's media have camped out in front of a 50-person church in Florida, waiting to see if the Bible Koran burner will carry out his act, or not, as he has said of late.  Keep us in suspense, Terry, while you've already done your damage.

You see, there's been enough coverage worldwide - especially in the Muslim world, on its special feast day - to have done more damage to the American image.  The country founded on religious freedom, unable to come to grips with the establishment of a Muslim center in downtown New York.  Tolerance for the Terry Joneses, who already burned his bridges in Germany before he thought about burning holy books, but not for the "Imans" (as he calls imams).  Maybe he was going to see Iman.

So here's the point of this post.  Should the "Reverend" Jones renege on his latest promise and in fact carry out his act, I want to put it in print that I will resent being immolated in return by a mob looking for an easy American target.  It's no secret: the American Legation in Tangier is in the middle of the medina, a labyrinth of alleys that the police rarely frequent.  We are on our own.

And I thought our days of fear-inducing September 11 memorials were over.  Where for years, it would be a chance to ramp the "fear up" campaign to further war plans.  This time, the fear is not emanating from the White House or from Cheney's bunker, but from a small church in Florida.

So Terry, stay away from those matches.  Go back to running your business-cum-"church," in the time honored tradition of American hucksters.  And let the press cover something important, like how it is that the country that has room for the Dove World Outreach Center cannot accomodate the Cordoba Faith Initiative, named after a Spanish city whose reputation under centuries of Muslim rule was as a light of religious tolerance.

As my mother used to say, a souvenir from her old Ireland, "Saints preserve us."  From this man of "religion."

Image: Morocco Board News Service

Journey to Mecca: In the Footsteps of Ibn Battuta

Karma, I believe, doesn't appear in Islam, so maybe it was just fate that I'd be stopped in my tracks by the poster outside one of Washington DC's Smithsonian museums.

It was Ibn Battuta who immediately caught my eye.  I had just completed hours of meetings inside that same museum, discussing future cultural and educational programs to be conducted in Ibn Battuta's birthplace - Tangier, Morocco - and here he was! U-turn back inside, where I got myself not only an IMAX ticket, but also a couple of related books to lug back in my suitcase.

Enough of my patter.  Here's the thing: Journey to Mecca (official website) is an experience I hope more will share, for it is not only a worthy effort, but breathtakingly beautiful and historically accurate.  How in the world do we know that?  After all, "IB" (as author Tim Mackintosh-Smith called him) lived more than 7 centuries ago.

Because he wrote it down. In the Rihla, or Book of Travels, one of the first of that beloved genre.  Writer/director Bruce Neibaur, fellow screenwriters Tahir Shah and Carl Knutson, and the Cosmic/SK producers have expended prodigious efforts - desert location shooting, thousands of extras (people and camels), multilingual cast - to recreate Ibn Battuta's 14th century world.  The result is a unique look at not only Ibn Battuta's initial, epic 5,000 mile journey across the Sahara and into Arabia, but a pilgrim's-eye look at the Haj as it is performed today.

All on the giant IMAX screen, so that you fly over the desert to the Kaaba, as Ibn Battuta dreamed he would as a young man in Tangier.  The casting of the young Moroccan actor Chems Eddine Zinoun, of whom more later, is inspired, as is the murky figure of his bandit protector, played by Hassam Ghancy.  Ben Kingsley narrates, though the voice-over is mostly excerpted from Ibn Battuta's Rihla.  For Muslims and non-Muslims concerned about authenticity, rest assured that the film makers relied on an illustrious collection of consultants and advisers, scholars from the Muslim world to western universities.

We know how it ends, since we have Ibn Battuta's famous Book of Travels resuming his life of exploration.  But when he sets out from Tangier, he has no illusions about the dangers of solo travel in the wilds of North Africa.  Ibn Battuta confides to family and friends that if he dies, at least it will have been on the road to Mecca.  He is soon put to the test, one of the most dramatic moments in the film.  Though brave, Ibn Battuta knows when to use his wits instead of his sword.  It was a winning strategy, and it served him well to Mecca and beyond: over the next three decades, his travels took him as far as China and India.

If Ibn Battuta lived into old age, sadly the same cannot be said of the young actor who portrays him.  Chems Eddine Zinoun passed away in a tragic car accident in Casablanca just as the film was to be released.  The film is dedicated to his memory.

Journey to Mecca is a moving experience, and even the non-religious cannot fail to share some of the emotion that the pilgrims feel when they succeed in what for many is the dream of a lifetime.  That this pillar of Islam - the Haj to Mecca - has been made accessible to world audiences through an historical docudrama is a tribute to its backers.

Now, can we get it shown in Tangier, Ibn Battuta's birthplace?

Little Church In the Wilderness

God is silent, now if only we can get Man to shut up.

Woody Allen*

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No doubt the Pope is wishing his household priest had quoted Woody Allen in his homily instead of the anonymous Jewish friend whose mention of antisemitism has caused such a firestorm within a conflagration.  But then humor is kind of hard to insert into an Easter service at a time of deep humiliation and hurt in the Catholic church.

At least we still have Maureen Dowd writing about "unholy week," keeping up the drumbeat despite the Vatican 's attempt to exorcise her.

The "little church" I'm thinking about is not, obviously, the Vatican, which, despite its loss of the Papal States centuries ago, despite the anachronism of a religion endowed with a Secretary of State and a legion of nuncios (priestly diplomats) and other trappings of temporal power, still invokes the Pope's "head of state" status.  Usually this is good for protocol purposes, though it's unlikely that, as the head of a church of a billion or so people, the Pope would ever get anything less than regal treatment when visiting foreign leaders.  Now, though, the head of state moniker will serve to avoid having to be discomfited by lawsuits.

No, the "little church in the wilderness" is figurative, my way of commiserating with the millions of Catholics out there who would feel rather uncomfortable amidst the gilt, the crimson, the ever-so-worldly ostentation of Vatican City.  I've pictured above, for literal purposes, a church we once found while hiking in the Dolomites, but my "little church" is everywhere and anywhere, with normal people whose good priests and nuns tend to their parishes.

Beyond the current furor over the pedophilia, and whether or not you think that the priestly condition of celibacy has ceased to be viable, there is the general direction of the Vatican under this Pope.  Consider what an eminent Egyptian Jesuit has to say:

The great progress made over the last half century is on hold at this time. Facing this almost devastating situation, the church's leadership... minimize[s] the seriousness of the situation and console[s] themselves by focusing on a resurgence of the most traditionalist factions...

Father Henri Boulad wrote the above in July 2007.  If the situation was already "devastating" then, what would he say now?

The progress he's referring to was the great liberal reform of Vatican II, over which Pope Benedict has the same reaction as right wing cultural warriors in the US over the Sixties.  Just like conservatives in the US would like to erase the Kennedy-Johnson era and start history with Ronald Reagan, so too would Pope Benedict XVI overturn the work of Pope John XXIII (Vatican postage stamp, right).  As Father Boulad wrote, in the early Sixties Pope John XXIII "tried to reverse four centuries of stagnation, but there is an impression that the church is gradually closing the doors that it opened at that time."

When Father Boulad refers to "traditionalist factions" encouraged by Pope Benedict, he's referring to such reactionary organizations as Opus Dei, whose heroes include Spanish fascist leader Francisco Franco; the St. Pius  X Society and its Holocaust deniers; and the Legionaries of Christ, recently caught up in its own sex scandal and whose list of American apologists, according to Tim Rutten's recent article in the Los Angeles Times

reads like a who's who of the conservative Catholic intellectuals who, in recent years, have insisted that Catholicism and membership in the Democratic Party are all but incompatible.

This is the world of "traditionalist factions" beloved of Pope Benedict.  Beyond concerns over tone-deafness on pedophilia, Catholics in "little churches" around the world must be sick in the stomach over where the Pontiff is leading them.  Back to pre-Vatican II?  That's much too recent.  How about back to the Middle Ages?

* Woody Allen in the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations

The Church's Celibacy Crisis

A little thought amidst the furor over responsibility for allowing pedophile priests to continue unchecked for years, whether in the US, Ireland, Germany, or any other place that hasn't yet made it to the growing list of Priests Gone Wild.

The thought is this: can an institution - the Catholic Church, especially the Vatican - governed by men whose entire lives have been ruled by the tradition of celibacy, properly gauge the import of these outrages on children?

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd fulminates

Vulnerable children were not protected by the male hierarchy of the church, which treated sexual abuse as a failure of character rather than a crime. The men were so arrogant it never occurred to them that they should be accountable to the secular world. In their warped thinking, it was better to let children suffer than to call the authorities, embarrass the church and risk diminished power.

I submit that the nature of this imposed celibacy, which was not a feature of early Christianity, has come to warp the human reactions of the Church hierarchy as to the "value" of children.  Compared, that is, to the reputation of priests and the institution they represent.

Talk to parents of children, and you'll hear nothing but rage at the thought of their loved ones suffering at the hands of supposedly chaste priests.   And the majority of celibate priests, nuns, and monks who follow the code, however difficult, and are tainted by the shame of their fellow religious.

I cannot imagine the hurt that this has caused good priests and nuns, which is the only kind of priest or nun I've ever known.  Good name and reputation is essential in any calling, but none more than a religious vocation, which is based on a moral code.

While all priests are not predators, nor all pedophiles celibate (just think of the married monsters like Marc Dutroux who abused and murdered other people's children while his own were at home), there is a danger in imposing celibacy as a job requirement.  Future Church, a liberal Catholic group which calls for Optional Celibacy (image above) and a priesthood open to women, has compiled an interesting "Brief History of Celibacy."

From married apostles at the outset, through enslavement of priests' wives and abandonment of their children in the Middle Ages, Church history regarding celibacy has been a downward spiral of demonization of women, with a subset of obsession over sexual matters.  Priests, once permitted to lead lives that included wives and children, were forced to see them as the Forbidden Fruit.  And we know how hard it is to resist temptation.

Making celibacy optional would not rid the Church of pedophiles, just as liberal modern society has not rid itself of a host of sex crimes.  Predators there will always be, just like cheats, thieves, bullies and all manner of baddies.

But a Church where Children"R"Us - instead of just other peoples' kids - might come to regard women and children with an attitude befitting an inclusive, holy institution.

Tancredo the Tea Party Crusader

We really do have a culture to pass on to our children: it’s based on Judaeo-Christian values.  This is our country.  Let’s take it back!  Cultures are not the same. Some are better. Ours is best!

Former Congressman Tom Tancredo in "Tea Party Turns Nasty," Times of London 6 February 2010

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His 11th century namesake Tancred used to enjoy torturing his Muslim captives.  Today, Tom Tancredo is all for carrying holy war to the Saracens.  Except that Tancred's 21st century flag-bearer sees the war starting at home, fearing "Islamification" in "Barack Hussein Obama's" America, stress on middle name.  Tancredo's anti-Islam shtick dovetails nicely with his trademark anti-immigration nativism.  And he calls the President an "ideologue."

Though the Crusades ended about a millennium ago, Tancredo has found plenty of willing conscripts for his battle with non-Judaeo-Christians among the Tea Partyers gathered in Nashville this weekend.

When their opening speaker's official biography takes pride in being labeled the leader of the "House crazies," you know that the Tea Party has an appetite for red meat.  They were apparently well-served.

So, on to the main course, with Tea Party keynote speaker Sarah Palin, who, among her apocalyptic beliefs, thinks that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was "God's plan."  Fellow Americans, please do not let any of these messianic crazies with a mindset in the Middle Ages get anywhere near the Middle East.  Just remember where Tancred's Crusaders wound up - in the sea.

Image: Project Gutenberg

2010's Bad Beginning: Blasphemy, Bigots, Bullies

When I was a kid going to Catholic school in Pennsylvania, we used to tell puerile religion jokes:

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

John.

John who?

John the Baptist.

At which point you'd get a squirt from a real or imaginary water pistol.  Get it?

Clean, innocent fun, like the one about God's phone number, which you can only "get" if you (1) had been an altar boy (no girls then, sorry) prior to the end of the Latin mass and/or (2) remember when phone numbers in the States went like "Quincy 53-220."

Fun at the expense of religion got a bit more racy in the Seventies, with the likes of Life of Brian (official site, where you can procure the "Immaculate Edition") - an alternative manger tale, so to speak, about a boy named Brian - and one that still shocks the stilted:

Brian: I am NOT the Messiah!
Arthur: I say you are Lord, and I should know. I've followed a few.

One of the 1979 film's memorable quotes from IMDB.  Believers with a sense of humor can enjoy the film too.  As they could R. Crumb's cartoon "Genesis."  God knows there's plenty of material in the Old Testament ("and they proceeded to take their daughters as wives for themselves...") for ridicule.  Sorry for taking the Lord's name in vain in the previous sentence - now you can't even take the Pope's name in vain, according to the Vatican.

Lighten up: religion can be funny too

A sense of humor, apparently, is what is missing somewhere in the following news items from our brand new 2010:

• January 1: Ireland promulgates new anti-blasphemy law, and Atheist Ireland publishes a list of 25 blasphemous quotes, from Life of Brian to Pope Benedict XVI, in protest;
• New Year's Day in Denmark: police shoot an intruder bent on assassinating one of the cartoonists whose drawings in 2005 sparked violent protests among Muslims.

Humor, difficult enough to export across linguistic lines (my attempts at humor at NATO luncheons often fell flat among southern Europeans but were a hit with the Ango-Saxons and Scandinavians), is sometimes deadly when it touches the sensitive boundaries of belief.  Theocratic Ireland now is pitted against a citizenry with a wicked sense of humor.

Stephen Colbert's God Machine (Deus ex Machina) should be whirring into overdrive this week, and Steve Benen's This Week In God needs a post-Christmas wrapup.  But it's harder and harder to poke fun into this all-too-human activity called religion.  What if I want to make fun of some weird cult out there which believes that we're all in a matrix, disembodied thetans or some such gibberish which is more at home in a science fiction film than in a "church?"  But wait a minute: they already exist...

So, school kids in Dublin telling those silly "jokes" about Scientology, watch out.  According to the new Irish law, you might be guilty of

publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion

Come to think of it, so could I, bejeezus.

(Final) Departures

Okuribito - "Departures" in international release - won the 2009 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.  You don't really need my belated commentary (the film only came to Brussels in December 2009) - IMDB has close to 100 links to worldwide blog and newspaper and magazine reviews.  But the film is so good, and its effect so profound, that I can't refrain from enthusing.

"The Gift of Last Memories" is the line that appears on the posters for the US release, and that about sums it up.  This is not a film about (a) morticians or (b) cellists.  Well, not only about "coffiners," a uniquely Japanese institution whose job is to prepare the dead before placement in coffins and eventual cremation.

What Departures is really about is Love.  What it means to stick with someone when their lifelong dream of fame as a concert cellist go the way of the industrial closures rampant throughout Japan.  The love for people who have been part of your life, and who then are suddenly gone.  The love that some people come to have for their chosen occupation, and who approach it as an art.

One of the advantages of the vagaries of international distribution is that this film was released here in time for Christmas.  While Departures isn't a "Christmas movie," it does feature Christmas in Japan, and it is White.  But the feel - despite the subject matter - is definitely one for the Christmas season.  There is humor, but mostly at the outset, as we are brought into the singular world of the coffiners.

There are several vignettes, where the focus is on the families of the deceased, as we come to appreciate the young apprentice's growing mastery of his trade.  The country that has given us kabuki theater and Benihana ("Now Playing") was bound to approach death with a certain amount of stylization.  But you ain't been to a funeral 'til you've been to a Japanese "coffining."

In the West, we tend to be increasingly separated from such rites of passage.  Like the old, the dead are often invisible.  Families divide into open casket versus closed coffin camps, and the "undertaker" is viewed with the same distance or even disdain as shown by the uninformed Japanese in Departures.  Until Death comes close to home.  Which is does to all of us.  As we watched Departures in our comfortable cinema seats, one elderly member of our family passed away...

But rather than shut it out of our minds, embrace Death with a flourish, like our coffiners.  Watching Departures, I even considered a Japanese-style departure in my will.  As one of the admiring relatives says in the film, "she never looked so beautiful."  What a way to go.

Swiss Steeples, Minarets, & the Color of Muslim Money

Muslim communities say the decision will spread deep concern and worry. The Swiss government and businesses are worried too - about whether this controversial but democratic ballot will provoke an international backlash.

Alan Fisher, Al Jazeera English, “Swiss brace for minaret backlash”

What excellent timing: the Swiss schedule their votation on banning minarets for the weekend of one of Islam's holiest - and most joyous - feasts, the Eid al-Kabir.  A real poke in the eye.

What if that backlash that Alan Fisher fears were to include a disinvestment or divestment wave among Muslim countries, selling off Swiss franc securities, withdrawing hidden billions (trillions?) from Swiss bank accounts? It’s not up to me to call for any such thing. After all, the hundreds of thousands of Muslim residents (and probably a certain number of Muslim Swiss citizens) have gotten along somehow with a minimum of minarets all these years - apparently there may be as few as four (4) in all of Switzerland! - while toiling away to help develop the Swiss economy.

But this has as much to do with minarets as the debate over the veil has to do with women’s fashion. The latter may have undercurrents of concern about women’s rights, whereas the Swiss “Oui/Ja” campaign has all to do with Islamophobia. Can't the Swiss just relax a bit and think of their new neighbors as something other than a threat? The great 1973 Italian comedy "Bread and Chocolate" with Nino Manfredi playing an immigrant in pristine Switzerland shows that a current of xenophobia has run in the land of Lindt for some time.  It was only a decade ago that Swiss President Ruth Dreifuss had to apologize for her country's treatment of Jews fleeing the Holocaust - belying the image of refugees struggling to reach safety in the Alps.

In matters of integration (or re-integration), the recent experience of a Swiss Family Robinson (actually Swiss Family Diplomatic is more like it) is instructive.  These friends of ours, a Suisse-Romand from Lausanne and his wife from Bern, returned a few years ago to their capital city after a quarter century roaming the world under the Swiss flag. Settling back into life in their native country, they were immediately taken aback by their neighbors’ attitude. Introducing oneself to the man next door - something our friends did naturally in Africa or Latin America - was greeted with suspicion and worse. “I have been waiting for years to tell you about that bothersome window…” was the way one neighbor helpfully greeted their knock on the door.

When the native Bern wife went to the local municipal office and spoke a rusty form of the local patois, her ignorance of the latest procedures was met with incredulous suspicion - how can you have reached your fifth decade of life and not know these rudimentary rules? The fact that she had spent the better part of the previous three decades helping her husband give Switzerland a good name in diplomatic circles around the world was lost on the local burghers. They just didn’t fit in.

If the above can happen to French-German-Italian speaking Christian native Swiss, then the minaret ban is probably the least of the worries for the poor Muslim Swiss. And they know that.  Ever notice how the Swiss flag itself is a cross, a bit reminiscent of the same thing that Crusaders used to wear?

The question is: do the “Yes” voters on the minaret ban know what they’ve done? Financial flows may begin to tell us in the very near future. And how about all those unofficial, storefront or storage locker mosques, without minarets? Will they make the Swiss feel more secure than a properly constituted, publicly visible mosque with a trained Imam? Who will be leading prayers in the underground mosques, and what will they be preaching?

India at one point had a Ministry of Disinvestment. How long will it be before we see Muslim finance ministers examine their Swiss holdings?

An earlier version of this post appeared in Blogactiv.eu.