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CounterPunch
January
11, 2003
How Muhammad
Migrated to America
On Translating Mythologies
By OMAR AL-QATTAN
Vilified by the now-predictably rabid
Daniel Pipes, criticised by Time Magazine and the New York Times
as too soft on its subject, Muhammad Legacy of a Prophet,
shown on December 18th on PBS, was nonetheless widely praised
by most commentators and has attracted huge support from the
US public. In the essay below, Palestinian-British director Omar
Al-Qattan offers his own account of the making of the film.
My paternal grandfather, an illiterate orange
tradesman, dreamt of building a mosque in his hometown of Jaffa
where his son, my own father, would be the serving sheikh. My
maternal grandfather, on the other hand, the son of bankrupted
Palestinian landowners who had studied in Istanbul after the
First World War, had modernizing ideas about Islam and drank
three whiskies every night.
As a schoolboy in Jerusalem, my father,
whose first name means Slave of the Gracious, was told by his
reforming head master to drop the slave prefix and stick to the
gracious. "You are a slave to no one", he told him.
On the other side of town, a few years later, my mother found
herself quarantined in a convent after the death of her mother
from TB and her father's incarceration by the British colonial
authorities. It was an experience that would mark her deeply:
although a Muslim girl, she adored the rituals despite the cruelty
of some of the sisters and still wears a wistful expression whenever
she happens to hear church music.
With such a varied and eccentric religious
inheritance, I grew up in an atmosphere that was as skeptical
and sarcastic about religion as it was immersed in it. Even
in Beirut, my native city where I lived to the age of eleven,
and where eighteen different religious groups competed for our
attention in a political system that was partly secular partly
confessional, it was difficult to escape the various religious
mythologies. I was enrolled in a French-speaking Protestant
school; our nanny was a Maronite Christian; we had a Muslim Sheikh
appear every Sunday morning for religious instruction, ruining
our weekends; my friends hailed from a variety of eccentric religious
backgrounds: Sunni or Shia Muslim, Druze, Armenian, Greek or
Russian Orthodox and so on.
Then there was my father's hero, a brilliant,
eloquent and brave businessman turned political and religious
leader of the Arabs, the Prophet Muhammad. My father never prayed
or fasted but he clung and still clings to a Muslim identity
that is less to do with ritual or belief and more to do with
language, history and political example. A successful businessman
and exile himself, living in an Arab world in conflict and turmoil,
and having lost his homeland as a young man, it is easy to understand
why a practical and secular man like him identifies so closely
with Muhammad's successful political career, much more so I suspect
than with Muhammad's spiritual message.
My mother always jokes that Muhammad
must invariably crop up at their dinner parties, usually after
the meal. There are my father's set pieces how Muhammad
dealt with the skeptical Bedouins, how he neutralized the Jewish
tribes, how he always made the right strategic decisions and
so on. She sits silently through these anecdotes sometimes
relishing his story-telling talents, sometimes betraying her
skepticism with a wry smile.
But unfortunately, political circumstances
in the Middle East in the last thirty years were to force Muhammad
and Islam out of the imaginary world of my father's stories to
a much harsher, more complex and turbulent reality. First, there
was the Lebanese Civil War, which was to explode both my happy
childhood in Beirut and to dispel any illusions of secular co-existence
in the region. Then the Iranian Revolution, which suddenly pitted
religious and secular groups and regimes against each other and
culminated in the deadly Iran-Iraq War and the rise of modern
political Islam all over the Middle East.
In 1975, I was sent to boarding school
in England following the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon. In
my newly adopted culture, I could of course have gradually shed
my cultural inheritance and disengaged from the Arab and Muslim
world. Indeed, as a teenager in a London school, I did, for
a while, turn my back on all things from back home. I wanted
to be nothing but a normal English public school boy, whatever
that notion meant. But somehow I still don't really know
why I left school and spent my year off studying Arabic
and the Qur'an with a sympathetic sheikh in Cairo. It was 1982
the year of General Sharon's invasion and devastation of
my home town, Beirut, the year also when the Sabra and Shatilla
massacres made it impossible for anyone with the most tenuous
bond to the Arab world to turn away from its people's predicaments.
At home, Muhammad seemed to loom ever
larger. Indeed, never more did we all seem so desperate for
the kind of leadership that Muhammad provided to his people in
the 7th century. At the same time, the prospect of an Iranian
or Afghani-imported political Islam horrified us, stripped, as
it seemed to us at the time, of its cultural or linguistic heritage.
But we were wrong: this had less to do with Iran and Afghanistan,
more to do with the modern world, oil politics and the Cold War.
Muhammad was now an Afghani mujahid, an Iranian mystic,
an Egyptian soldier foolhardy enough to assassinate Anwar Sadat
no longer my childhood hero, but a firmly modern and determined
contemporary. In my mind, he had now entered history as I knew
it.
Around us in Europe, another phenomenon
also began to appear the immigrant mujahid or radical.
My first encounter with one was through an Algerian girl friend
in Paris, in reality a liberated French woman who nonetheless
did not find it strange that her uncle had left France to join
the mujahideen in Afghanistan. I had always found immigrant
Islam uncomfortable. American Muslim converts, even today, are
often looked upon by many Arabs as endearing eccentrics though
this is changing rapidly with the overwhelming majority of them
now originating from the Muslim world. I would call this a kind
of cultural territorialism: if you were not culturally Muslim,
then you could not be Muslim at all. I still marvel at London
girls who wear mini-skirts, speak nothing but English, drink
wine and sleep with men, yet observe the fast during Ramadan,
or their equally promiscuous male counterparts who perform their
Friday prayers and insist on marrying virgins!
But of course, this view is naïve.
Religions and cultures are not unchanging monoliths, but indefinable
masses, volatile waves that rise and shift and fall and usually
drag you along with them. You can duck them, or let them draw
you down, but you cannot avoid them. And strangely, like my
own memories of riding waves as a child, they fill you with a
mixture of panic and elation.
Inevitably, the first film I made for
television was about one woman's struggle with her religious
environment. But little did I ever imagine that I would, ten
years later, be invited to work on a film about Muhammad by a
group of American Muslims.
It happened on a beautiful summer afternoon
by the Californian coast at a small town called Santa Cruz.
Two of the principal producers were there, both white converts
with mystical or hippy pasts of some sort. There was also the
executive producer, a sarcastic New Yorker rediscovering his
Jewishness (a reformed atheist, I joked). A hungry flock of
Sooty Shearwaters was hovering over the ocean, ready to fish
the shoals of anchovy that had drifted to the coast. "But
you realize I am an atheist" I told them. "No matter,
no matter", they exclaimed. I suspected that they were
more interested in finding a director who, as a Muslim, could
enter Mecca than in my artistic talents, but the offer was too
exciting to refuse. So, I said yes.
A couple of months later, I went to Saudi
Arabia with two of the producers for a first scouting trip.
I had already visited Mecca in 1982 and had abhorred its barrenness
and the ugly architecture around the Kaba commissioned by the
Wahabi regime. But this time, we were to travel to all the places
of significance to Muhammad's life, including Medina, Taïf,
and Khaybar.
Saudi Arabia is an astonishingly beautiful
country much of it uninhabited. Apart from the ultra-modern
cities and highway system, it remains primitive, majestic and
awe-inspiring in its vastness. There is also something pagan
about its landscape, which contrasts uncomfortably with the puritanical
but modern, American-built and designed Wahabi cities.
After the Gulf War, the country had an
uncomfortable though heavily dependent relationship with all
things American, but one of my co-producers had covered the Hajj
for ABC Television, the other had appeared the following year
on CNN, so both were instantly recognized and approved by the
authorities (who, needless to say, were keeping a close watch
on us). And though I expected my American colleagues to be curiously
out of place there, it was I, the real Muslim so to speak, who
did not quite fit in! This made me occasionally feel resentful,
but the trip was so interesting that I soon forgot my resentment
and tried to make geographical and historical sense of the Muhammad
story. What I should have instantly realized was not that my
companions were in any way anachronistic but that the country
itself at least on an official level and among the elites
had become strongly Americanized, despite the apparent
religious rigor of its regime.
This alliance of puritanical Wahabism
and liberal American imperialism should, with hindsight, not
be surprising. Anthropologically, the strongest common element
is perhaps to be found in their attitude to history and popular
culture in the case of the Wahabis, a one-dimensional,
moralistic vision of their religious heritage and in the case
of Islam as it is exported to America, a desire to ignore the
history and ethnographic manifestations of alien cultures in
order to better absorb them into the American way of life. There
is also the tendency of all empires to penetrate and overwhelm
the cultures of those countries which they either invade or with
which they have unequal alliances.
The phenomenon I am describing is of
course fraught with danger. There is no single American vision
of the region and there have been many brilliant and nuanced
examples of American scholarship about it. There have also been
many important shifts in American policy in the Middle East in
the last century and a half that have been reflected and have
in turn influenced cultural representations of Islam, the Arabs
and Israel within America. What the experience of this film has
shown me though is the way the American empire at the dawn of
the twenty-first century, and, in parallel, certain cultural
representations within America, are dealing with Islam. The
similarity with Wahabi ideology, I was to find out, is uncanny.
The Wahabi approach to Islam is painfully
evident in the systematic destruction of religious relics. From
the 1920's onwards, when the Wahabi-inspired Al Saud family began
to rule all of modern-day Saudi Arabia, almost every building
related to Muhammad's life was either destroyed or left in ruin,
with the sole exception of the Prophet's Tomb in Medina and of
course the Ka'aba. The ideological justification for this is
simple: no object or building with historical links to the Prophet
or his companions, however old and valuable, should be allowed
the status of shrine, relic, or such symbolic religious value
as to run the risk of being used by the faithful in an idolatrous
way. The word in the Qur'an for this kind of idolatry is "shirk"
or, roughly translated, "partnership or equality with God",
for God the absolute, abstract God of monotheism has no
equal. It is an impressive proposition, but its consequences
are devastating for Islam's historical patrimony.
Today, many people in the Hijaz
the large swathe of western Arabia which includes Mecca and Medina,
harbor considerable resentment about the philistine behavior
of their rulers. One such man was Dr Said (not his real name),
an amiable, aristocratic architect with a deep passion for the
beloved Mecca of his childhood. Said was our guide through the
virtual, invisible geography of Muhammad's life. With him, we
spent an extraordinary day looking at the unseen remains of the
7th century, which have been buried under the vast expansion
of the Ka'aba and its surroundings, undertaken in the last decade
by the Saudi government (and ironically executed by no other
than the Ben Laden contracting empire to which the infamous Ossama
once belonged). We visited a small library just outside the
perimeters of the Ka'aba complex and were told, in whispers,
that this is where the Prophet was born. Later, I used the near-by
toilets and was told that in their place once stood the house
of Khadija, the Prophet's first wife.
But nowhere was this telescopic and devastating
approach to the Prophet's life and to early Islamic history better
illustrated than in Medina. Next to the Prophet's Mosque, there
is a massive graveyard known as the al-Baqi cemetery, where many
of the Prophet's relatives and companions are said to be buried.
In the 1930s, the Saudi authorities ordered the removal of all
the tombstones so that today it looks like an expanse of desert
dotted with thousands of unmarked, pointy stones. The reason?
Again, the fear that the faithful would flock to these graves
and use them as shrines, instead of directing their prayers to
God and God alone.
The only exceptions to this destruction
were the Prophet's tomb as well as those of his two immediate
caliphs, Abu Bakr and Omar, but even these are enclosed in two
dark inaccessible rooms and are guarded by austere religious
policemen who will chide you if they see you involved in any
idolatrous behavior, such as crying or praying to the Prophet,
or lingering for too long.
In a sense, making a film about Muhammad
poses some very difficult visual challenges. There is of course
the ban on representing him or his companions and the general
disapproval of painting people in much of the Muslim especially
Sunni dogma. But the disappearance or complete change
in the architecture of Muhammad's Arabia significantly complicates
the challenge. When we returned to America for our pre-production
meetings, this became very clear. What do we show? How, in
fact, does one translate the 7th century, to an audience in the
21st century, in the virtual absence of visual or pictorial evidence?
The British series producer came up with the wonderful idea
of telling the story through interesting contemporary Muslims,
preferably well-known figures such as the South African jazz
musician Abdullah Ibrahim or singer Salif Keita. I proposed
using the rituals of Islam that have a direct bearing to the
Prophet's life, such as the celebrations of the Night of Power
(laylatul al-qadr), the night in the month of Ramadan when the
Prophet is said to have received the first revelation.
Our Muslim-American producers wanted
"eternal" images deserts, full moons, vast landscapes,
but we persuaded them that these alone would not be enough to
tell the story in two hours. They were also keen not to linger
on any of the thornier issues of Muhammad's life, such as his
many marriages, his unhappy relationship with the Jewish tribes
of Medina, or the story of the Satanic Verses, for fear of offending
their funders who were mostly American Muslims. It was left
to our executive producer to find a compromise.
In the end, a solution was found in which,
to use the series producer's musical metaphor, the bass line
would mark the principal stations of the Prophet's life according
to the most important themes, and the treble line would comprise
of sequences with contemporary Muslims whose work bears a direct
relationship to the Prophet's example.
We filmed during the annual pilgrimage
of the Hajj. Filming in Saudi Arabia was so difficult that we
were later obliged to shoot many sequences in Jordan in places
which could evoke a sense of 7th century western Arabia. And
in the end, the Saudi authorities were so worried about the film
that they didn't even let us return to film in Medina and the
north.
As a result, the treble line or contemporary
elements in the film took on added importance. Then September
11 happened and a new imperative was imposed on the project:
the defense of America's Muslim community, many members of which
appear in the final version a New York fireman convert,
a campaign manager for a black Senator, an Egyptian-American
law professor, and so on.
So we ended up with a film which is more
about American Islam today than about the Prophet's life in 7th
century Arabia. As Walter Benjamin put it, "events in the
past have been recognized by the present as one of its concerns."
Yet you can imagine how strange and disheartening this is to
me, while at the same time how interesting an example it is of
the translation of a centuries-old religious mythology to a new
language. Muhammad is now mostly disembodied, timeless, abstracted
from his 7th century environment and, thanks to Saudi censorship,
the geography and the space in which he moved has disappeared.
Moreover, the ethnographic Muhammad, as he has been inherited
by the Muslim peoples of the East, is also absent. He is now
fully absorbed into an American value system: tolerant, hard
working, sentimental a good father, husband and citizen.
Such overpowering translations are not
new. After all, the Founding Fathers recognized a reflection
of their own struggle in the Book of Exodus. The civil rights
movement saw in modern-day Zionism echoes of its own fight for
independence and freedom. The Black Arts movement claimed Tutankamen
as an "African" king and the Black Panthers completely
appropriated Islam for their struggle. What is important though
is not make counter-claims for a "real" Islam
there is no such thing but to insist on the importance
of a skeptical, scientific and historical reading of mythology.
Of course, the Muhammad of my father's
imagination also virtually disappears in the film. I am left
wondering whether this is really such a bad thing, though I try
to imagine the feelings of those Palestinian or Egyptian peasants
who saw their Christian heritage absorbed by the Byzantine Empire
in the 4th century and changed beyond recognition! But I am
nonetheless left with a strong feeling of cultural bereavement,
and the need to fight for an alternative historical scholarship
of Islam and its history based on research, excavation
and proper enquiry, rather than the abstract, telescopic and
soulless rigor of the Wahabi-American version.
Thanks to Michael Wolfe for the ornithological
tips.
Omar Al-Qattan
is a Palestinian-British filmmaker living in London. He worked
as director on Muhammad Legacy of a Prophet, which
was broadcast on PBS on 18 December 2002. He is currently co-producing
a film, co-directed by an Israeli and a Palestinian, on the disastrous
consequences of the 1947 UN decision to partition Palestine.
sindibad64@hotmail.com
©Omar Al-Qattan2002
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