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In Indonesia, the trope of the Arab Muslim has long served as a counterpoint to the Indonesian Muslim, who is imagined as more tolerant and peaceful. The enduring force of this trope is evident in the important role it continues to play in 21st-century Indonesian cinema. This article discusses two films in which the contrast between Arab and Indonesian Muslims plays a prominent role: Ayat-ayat Cinta (Verses of Love) and the Ketika Cinta Bertasbih (When Love Glorifies God) duology. It considers the films' place in an Indonesian Muslim middle-class cultural politics that has evolved post 9/11. By depicting Indonesian Islam as more tolerant of, yet also distinct from, Western gender norms, the films work to distance Indonesian Muslims from the stereotypes of violence and misogyny amplified by 9/11 and reassure middle-class Muslims in Indonesia that their interpretations of the faith are somehow superior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article delves into the phenomenon of Islamic-themed films produced by pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) in post-reformasi Indonesia, focusing on the collaboration between conservative Islamic groups like Forum Lingkar Pena (FLP) and film companies like MD Pictures. It explores how pesantren, once regarding films as incompatible with Islamic values, have now embraced filmmaking as a form of worship, rooted in traditional values like morals, worship, and barokah (divine blessing).

Migration to the Arabian Gulf as the experience of the state of Kerala has mostly been elided in mainstream Malayalam cinema. The digital revolution towards the end of the last century has spurred a local film practice in northern Kerala, usually called 'Home Cinema'/'home video'/'home film' and so on. Home Cinema of Kerala is locally produced low-quality CD/DVD video productions which are full-length feature films distributed through video shops, stationeries, bookstores and so on. Home Cinema, synonymous in its beginning with the films of Salam Kodiyathur, began as an attempt to oppose what was perceived as the immoral qualities of mainstream cinema, both global and regional. As a counter to the mainstream, Kodiyathur attempted to formulate Islamic cinema but in the idiom of a strand of mainstream Malayalam cinema. This article looks at the constitution of the Islamic subjects of these cinemas as negotiating the figure of the migrant Muslim in the dominant idiom of Malayalam cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on African cinema has expanded the discourse's historical focus on Francophone West Africa to address other regions, transnational cinemas, and film media on the Continent and in its diasporas. Other African cinemas, however, continue to be overlooked. Through formal and narrative analysis of several films by Somali film-maker Abdisalam Aato, especially Xaaskaayga Araweelo (My Wife Araweelo, 2006), this article examines the recent phenomenon of Somali narrative cinema as a nationalist cinema in the post-conflict Somali diaspora. Special focus on myth, masculinity, and Islamic morality demonstrates these films' renegotiation of traditional Somali culture, gender roles, and identity after the fall of the Somali nation-state. This article argues Aato's films constitute a destabilised discourse of Somali masculinity in the diaspora. It also argues that these films distinctly engage diasporic crises of identity through their exploration of misandry, expanding discourses on African cinema and diaspora aesthetics, in turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defined by some critics as the ultimate national cinema movement piece, Halit Refiğ's I Lost My Heart to a Turk (1969), the love story of a German woman and a Turkish worker in the ancient town of Kayseri becomes an allegory for the Turkish nation's identity crisis. This paper identifies the parameters used by Refiğ to position the Turkish identity in his film and emphasize the special role of women in Turkish modernization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dutch right-wing politician Geert Wilders has already been prosecuted once for incitement to hatred and group defamation over remarks and a film criticizing Islam and comparing the Quran to Hitler's Mein Kampf. He was acquitted in that earlier trial but, in December 2016, he was convicted of similar charges concerning remarks he made in March 2014 about 'fewer Moroccans' in the Netherlands. This article examines Wilders' expressions in his speeches and in the film which led to the prosecutions. The case law of the European Court of Human Rights on freedom of expression and freedom of religion will be used as a yardstick and the article analyses what would happen if these expressions were to come before that Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the African film "Timbuktu" during a roundtable conference of the African Studies Association held during May and August, 2016 titled "Timbuktu: The Controversy," wherein speakers included Phyllis Taoua, Alioune Sow, Odile Cazenave and Kenneth Harrow. Topics discussed include ethical and political issues that became the cause for its controversial reception, humanizing depictions of Islamists by the director Abderrahmane Sissako, and animal violence shown in the film.

This article focuses on Birleşen Yollar/Crossroads (Yücel Çakmaklı, 1970), which pioneered the Islamic National Cinema Movement in Turkey. The film discursively constructed Turkish secularist modernization as cosmetic Westernization and promoted the Islamic way of life as the only means to true happiness—a popular theme of Islamic cinema in the late 1980s and 1990s. Although the film-makers discursively posited it as an ‘alternative’ film, they followed the narrative conventions of melodrama, the most popular genre of the time. Moreover, they worked with famous mainstream stars. In other words, the film-makers chose to communicate the then marginal message of Islamism by reconfiguring and Islamicizing the mainstream rather than rejecting it all together. In this respect, Crossroads was an early example of the Islamist project to Islamicize modernity in Turkey that would gain momentum in the 1990s. The article attempts to reconstruct the film’s historical and continuing significance by locating it within a broader discursive context and by exploring its historical development from its production through to its passage through censorship and public reception. The article also discusses the continuities between the film’s discourse and current debates on secularism and Islamism in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Majid Majidi is a famous Iranian director who has won many awards around the world. However, although he has won many awards, what makes Majidi a particularly interesting and important Iranian filmmaker is his presentation of Islam in his movies. Unlike other Iranian filmmakers, Majidi does not tell his audience about Islamic values; nor does he quote the Qur'an or include the sayings of the Prophet (Hadith). Nevertheless, Islam penetrates all of his films in a subtle way and to such an extent that watching a Majidi movie is like reading theQur'an. This essay will show the view of Islam Majid Majidi represents in his films and how he represents that view of Islam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tarr analyses the representation of Islam in five feature films made since 2006 that centre on the changing identities of Muslims in contemporary France. She locates the films within the context of the rise in Islamophobia in France following 9/11 and anxieties about immigration and terrorism, but also in relation to France's troubled postcolonial history and French republican ideology. In particular, the French notion of laïcité (secularism) has given rise to active hostility to any public expression of religious or cultural difference, particularly on the part of Muslims. Cinematic representations of Muslims, and particularly of the children of migrants from the Maghreb, have, therefore, since the mid-1980s, been treated with caution in order not to alienate mainstream Franco-French audiences and to facilitate the second generation's integration into French society. However, the five feature films addressed here—two mainstream popular comedies, Mauvaise foi/Bad Faith (2006) and L'Italien/The Italian (2010), and three independent, low budget, auteur-led, realist films, Dans la vie/Two Ladies (2008), Dernier maquis (2008) and La Désintégration/Disintegration (2012)—offer new narratives that challenge fears of Islam by foregrounding the protagonists' negotiation of their Muslim identities in a French context and, by implication, argue for the integration of Islam as a legitimate referent of French identity. However, their construction of Islam does not extend to positive representations of young veiled women, and they thus still risk confirming the oppressive majority view that certain practices associated with Islam, such as the wearing of the veil, are incompatible with the secularism of the French Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to explore the idea of versions and subversions of narrative constructions and reinterpretation of Islamness or Muslim cultures from an analysis of the filmThe Stoning of Soraya M. This will be done by focusing on the narratives authorised by men in comparison to those narratives of Islam created by women in the film. It will be demonstrated that male-authored narratives are anchored in the dastardly law of the stoning/lapidation of women as found in the Hadith. In the fictional world of the filmThe Stoning of Soraya M, the stoning/lapidation of women is depicted as a gross distortion of the Qur'an. In short, it will be revealed that women can create their own narratives that shun and complicate the Qur'an and critique men, most of whom are the interpreters of the Qur'an. If male narratives in the film incline towards violent actions against women, women's response to these forms of violent narrative of Islamness is uneven. The film benefits narrative versions of women who reinterpret the Sunnah and its support of the practice of the stoning/lapidation of women. Through the character of Zahra, women in the film create alternative frameworks for self-help and the call to stop the abhorrent practices of the physical and spiritual stoning/lapidation of women. The film suggests that this action by women in the film, as in real life, is fundamental to the survival of the most democratic versions of Islam that are threatened by orthodox and inflexible interpretation of the Qur'an. The attempt at retrieving contesting narrative versions of Islamness means engaging with multiple re-evaluations of received histories of Islam imagined from a privileged cultural site of the film. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After the 1979 revolution, the education system in Iran was reformed. In order to create a "new individual integrated in the Islamic society" (Paivandi, 14), at the beginning of the 1980s, the Iranian regime put the issue of learning at the center of the construction of a new society with a strong Islamic identity. The implications of the reformed school in the aesthetic field, and in particular in actresses' performances, created very tight meshes, linking together the active and the passive learning of the Iranian population. Nevertheless, it is possible to understand its complexity through the observation and analysis of actresses' performances in the theater and cinema, considering it as a laboratory of life that gives us access to the realm of the senses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Angelina Maccarone's 2005 feature film Fremde Haut dramatizes the perceived incoherence between homosexuality and Islam through visual iconographies of desire and faith. This article studies the film's protagonist Fariba, an Iranian refugee seeking asylum in Germany, with emphasis on the ambiguous, shifting, and entangled representations of various facets of her identity as a gay Muslim woman. The encoding and decoding of Fariba's identity symbolically suggest a problematic coexistence for faith and queer desire, which become lost in translation between the Middle East and Western Europe. I investigate the film's polysemic codes for gender, sexuality, religion, and ethnicity, with an eye to the Iranian and German sociopolitical climates of the 2000s. Through Fremde Haut's topographies and embodiments, director Maccarone interrogates the high stakes of migration and translation and their implications for human rights and survival at the start of the third millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970s Egyptian cinema has grappled with two closely related issues. First, filmmakers sought to neutralize the occurrence of Islamically marked bodies through visual conventions that either carefully excised them from the urban fabric, or alternatively, cast them as a political challenge to the state's modernist project. Secondly, filmmakers struggled to digest the material decline of urban space that had, in earlier eras, functioned as the aspirationat site of modern life. Starting in the mid 1990s, as the ideology of economic liberalism gained traction in Egypt, new visual conventions for representing both piety and urban space began to emerge. In this article I examine these emerging conventions, instantiated in two films from the late Mubarak era: The Yacoubian Building (2006) and I Am Not With Them (2007). I argue that the apparent novelty of these emergent visual conventions--the depiction of Islamically marked bodies, and the displacement of location from the old urban center to the new suburbs--should be understood as cultural naturalizations of neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yamina Benguigui's films have often been praised for 'giving a voice' to the Maghrebi population in France and bringing to the fore experiences that have been overlooked or under-represented in cultural productions and the media in France. Closer analysis of her cinematic corpus reveals, however, that there are much more selective and complex processes at work in her films when it comes to giving a voice -- or not giving a voice -- to certain members of the Maghrebi population. This article highlights the ways in which, especially through the aesthetic illusions generated through the formal conventions of the documentary, Benguigui's films construct a misleading vision of Islam as it is practised by the Maghrebi population in France -- and in particular by first-generation Maghrebis -- as a moderate form of Islam that does not constitute a barrier to integration in France, while silencing the voices of young Franco-Maghrebi women who wear the Islamic headscarf and casting them in a consistently negative light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the depiction of the Kashmiri protagonist in three popular Indian films, Roja (1992), Mission Kashmir (2000), and ... Yahaan (2005), in order to argue for a new emphasis, cumulatively evident through these films, on the Kashmiri as Muslim in the history of Bollywood's long engagement with the Valley of Kashmir. In analysing closely the visual, narrative, cinematic and affective aspects of this development, and in contextualising it against global and local politics of Islam, the article aims to contribute to a better understanding of how Kashmir, and Islam, while topics with separate discursive genealogies within Bollywood, have converged decisively at a certain historical juncture so as to open up new possibilities for the ideological co-optation of the Kashmir conflict, and the place of Muslims in India, by the popular cinematic apparatus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the composition and the interconnecting socio-political background of the film "Kantata Takwa" (Cantata of Devotion). He states that the said film highlights the influence and power of political Islam and the masses and deals with the regime of Indonesian President and dictator Muhammad Soeharto. He adds that the said film addresses the concerns of contemporary Indonesians by imbibing its spirit of personal devotion, creativity, and risk-taking.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editors discuss articles published within the issue, including an overview of the Islamic-themed film from the New Order period by Eric Sasano, a discussion of the links between appearance and practice of Islam in recent films by Intan Paramaditha, and an article on Islam as a powerful form of political resistance by Katinka van Heeren.

In 2006, the Turkish film, Valley of the Wolves [Kurtlar Vadisi-Irak] (Serdar Akar, 2006), was released to audiences in Turkey and Europe. Costing US$10 million, it was the most expensive production in the history of Turkish cinema, breaking all box office records in the country. A fantastical account of a Turkish victory over a fictional US invasion of the country, Valley of the Wolves has been interpreted as a reaction to the 'Sack Incident' [çuval olayi] of July 2003, in which eleven Turkish soldiers were hooded and arrested in northern Iraq shortly after the US invasion. The film's title hence refers to a dark and dangerous place where howling and vicious 'wolves' -- namely Americans and Kurds -- are gathered. This article argues that Valley of the Wolves confirms a reemergence of 1960s Turkish industry (Yeşilçam) films which emphasized the historical conflict between Western and Islamic values. It discusses the extent to which Valley of the Wolves reflects popular Turkish attitudes towards the US war on Iraq, and it analyzes the film's projection of Turkish humiliation, anger and frustration following the Sack Incident. The article also addresses how Valley of the Wolves engages US--Turkish relations and Turkish concerns over current Iraq-related politics, especially the US--Kurdish alliance, the establishment of an independent Kurdistan, Turkmen and the issue of Kirkuk, US violations of international law in Iraq, and the conflict between Islam and Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines the inclusion of real-life footage of the September 2011 terrorist attacks in New York City (9/11) in Thomas Bidegain's film "Les Cowboys." He discusses a montage in the film which shows the passing of time and how significant events have a way of engraining themselves into time. He also describes his reaction to the film's claims regarding Islam and how they relate to the 9/11 footage.

The article presents an update on the film industry in some countries in Africa as of May 2012. It reports a three-month jail sentence imposed on Egyptian actor Adel Imam for insulting Islam in several of his highest-profile film roles. It talks about a challenge facing the Nigerian film industry. It also notes the slow pace of progress of the industry in South Sudan where electricity is scarce.