A Jihad for Love Can your faith really kill you
March 28th, 2008, 4:12 pm Hobbies Ideas
Inevitably, Parvez Sharma filmed some moving testimonies in A Jihad for
Love, a collection of real-life stories that show what it is like to be
gay or lesbian and living within, or in the shadow, of Islam. The stories
come from Iran, Turkey, India, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia and
South Africa.
In one of those quirks of timing, the film will be shown on Sunday at the
London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in the wake of the controversy around
the case of Mehdi Ka-zemi, the gay Iranian whose deportation back to Iran
was halted recently after an indecent, indeed shaming, amount of
prevarication on the part of the Home Office. An Iranian lesbian, Pegah
Emambakhsh, is also seeking asylum in this country.
But Sharma isn%26rsquo;t your typical campaigning film-maker. He shows how tough life
can be for his subjects though he believes strongly that gay activists have
behaved arrogantly in their condemnation of Iran which is symptomatic of a
larger phenomenon of Iran-bashing. He adds: Around 70 per cent of Iran%26rsquo;s
population is under 30: issues are being talked about, it%26rsquo;s a vibrant
society. And don%26rsquo;t forget history: a long time ago the West looked to the
East as a place where homosexuality was tolerated, sometimes celebrated.
He doesn%26rsquo;t believe that the Iranian authorities are conducting an antigay
witch-hunt (this despite the widely distributed pictures of two young,
allegedly gay, men who were supposedly executed) and %26ndash; as his film makes
clear %26ndash; despite the difficulty of their lives, many Islamic gay men and
women hold their faith dear.
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