Sep 05, 2008  |  By: GREG MARZULLO  | COMMENTS     

These days, it’s hard to escape fundamentalist Islamic rhetoric, which often sounds, if not downright barbaric, at least bewildering.

Seemingly shackled to a patriarchal worldview (what else could explain the identity-obliterating burqa?), radical Islamic clerics and worshipers have used their so-called faith as a means of flushing “undesirables” from their lives — and gays fall under the label of social outcasts.

In the haunting documentary “A Jihad for Love,” opening this week at E Street Cinema, director and writer Parvez Sharma explores the lives of gay and lesbian Muslims from countries around the world, including South Africa, India, Egypt and, perhaps deadliest of all, Iran.   

Muhsin, a gay Islamic scholar living in South Africa, gave heterosexuality the old college try, going so far as to marry a woman and have children, but he eventually left his family and bravely ended up going public with his gay identity. This caused him to lose his job at two schools as well as the rights to visit his children. Yet he still appears on the radio and tries to convince an unsympathetic Muslim audience about the possible interpretations of the Quran’s one anti-gay verse (A segment also found in the Jewish and Christian bibles where the town of Sodom is destroyed partly because of the townsmen’s regular practice of sexually assaulting male passers-by).

Muhsin, in a conversation with another (presumably straight) Islamic scholar, says that the Almighty’s obliteration of Sodom is because of gay rape, not because of what could be a gay, loving relationship. The gay scholar’s opponent retorts, “You can’t interpret when verses are so clear,” pretty much summing up the crux of the film and the damning difficulty for gay Muslims — or any other group worshiping at the altar of a supposedly infallible text.

If the Bible says the supreme divine being wants gays dead — or at the very least calls them an abomination — what then? Where do we go after that? Some would suggest to another religion or stalwart atheism, but others try to find ways around holy hate speech.

THIS JUXTAPOSITION OF personal freedom and the reliance on a textually uncaring divine ear is at the heart of virtually every story presented by Sharma. One member of the Cairo 52, a group of gay men arrested during a police raid on an Egyptian party boat in 2001, tells his story during the film, recounting how he was interrogated, beaten with pipes and belts, forced to say he was “a faggot” and raped during his one-year prison sentence. After being brought up for sentencing a second time, the judge gave him three years, but the man fled to Paris where he still resides.

Yet, he defiantly declares through his tears, “I’m sure God has a reason for all that has happened to me.”

Amir from Iran was captured by authorities during a raid on a gay party in 2004. He was told he could be stoned after he received 100 lashes, a photo of which reveals yet again the brutality of Iran’s regime toward gays. Amir fled the country to protect his mother from the pain, yet he asserts, “God is with me.”

Person after person recounts how their lives were turned upside-down by religious homophobia — exile, violence, shunning, not to mention severe mental and emotional torment — yet at the end of the day, they still declare “Allah is great,” and in the case of the Cairo 52 survivor, he poignantly speaks of how much he misses Egypt during the holy celebration of Ramadan.

Perhaps there is a message of love and tolerance far deeper than the hateful surface words of the Quran’s passages on gay relations. Then again, perhaps everyone in the film drank the Kool Aid.

What is clear is that Sharma has given a strong voice to some of the world’s most culturally, emotionally and spiritually dispossessed people. His film is an insightful window into the lives of courageous, often guilt-ridden gays and lesbians who, despite isolation and the threat of death, keep tilting at that fundamentalist windmill. Let’s hope that one day the entire contraption will crumble under their fervent and, dare I say, sacred advances.