Screening

About A Jihad For Love

Year Released:

2007

Genres:

Documentary

Metadata:

Directed by Parvez Sharma

Fourteen centuries after the revelation of the holy Qur’an to the Prophet Muhammad, Islam today is the world’s second largest and fastest growing religion. Muslim gay filmmaker Parvez Sharma travels the many worlds of this dynamic faith, discovering the stories of its most unlikely storytellers: lesbian and gay Muslims. A Jihad for Love looks beyond a war-torn present to reclaim the Islamic concept of a greater Jihad, whose true meaning is akin to ‘strive in the path of God’ - allowing its subjects to move beyond the narrow concept of Jihad as holy war. (HD Cam presentation)

Director Parvez Sharma is no longer scheduled to be present at this screening. He will now be presenting a Jorgensen Guest Filmmaker Lecture in the IU Cinema on Thursday, January 31 at 3:00 pm.

The screening is sponsored by the Islamic Studies Program, Madhusudan and Kiran C. Dhar India Studies Program, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Student Support Services (GLBTSSS), The Kinsey Institute, and IU Cinema. Special thanks to Wafa Amayreh.

Click here for information on the Jorgensen Guest Filmmaker Lecture with Parvez Sharma.

Parvez Sharma is an award-winning, New York-based writer and filmmaker. His first feature, A Jihad for Love, is an international phenomenon with more than 8 million viewers in 49 countries within the first year of its release. Looking at the difficult themes of Islam and homosexuality in a post-September 11 world, the film has won numerous awards and and generated an international media blitz. Utne Reader named Sharma as one of its "50 Visionaries Who are Changing Your World" in a list led by the Dalai Lama.

Hailed as a "gifted filmmaker" by the Wall Street Journal, "frankly brave" by NPR, "provocative" by the San Francisco Chronicle, and "an apostate" by South Africa's Muslim Judicial Council, Sharma is a leading commentator on Islamic, racial and political issues. He has been a featured speaker at more than 40 college campuses, including Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Columbia, NYU, Harvard and Northwestern. His writings appear frequently on The Huffington Post, Daily Beast, The Guardian and CNN-IBN.

In early 2011 Sharma blogged about the revolution in Eqypt, providing a local perspective on international events. His commentary and interviews with friends on the streets of Cairo provided an intimate, detailed view of history, as the events unfolded.