The Infidel is a new comedy written by David Baddiel, and starring Omid Djalili:
Watch a clip at the Graun.
Islam News @ NYT- Women’s Rights in Mideast:
- Driving Miss Saudi: Young women in Riyadh try to balance Islam and modernity as the stunted desert kingdom makes progress in “Saudi Time.”
- Swedish Artist Says Sketch of Prophet Aimed to Mock All Religions: A man who prosecutors say was the target of a murder plot says his caricature of the Prophet Muhammad was intended to poke fun at all sacred symbols.
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Bang Gully 4:13 pm on February 5, 2010 Permalink |
Judging from the clip, it doesn’t look too funny. That could be the American in me. I also don’t like the idea in this movie (or at least in this clip) that Muslims are “anti-Semitic” in the “racial” sense that other groups (particularly Europeans) have been/are.
Muslims that dislike Jews dislike them because of politics , not religion or “racial essentialism.”
Naeem 11:33 pm on February 5, 2010 Permalink |
Excellent point. I think it needs to be stated over and over that Muslims who dislike Jews are not guilty of anti-Semitism. The concept is a historically loaded term predicated on Christian Europe’s hatred of the Jewish people. Muslims who reject the politics of Israel must not be forced to bear the burden of this racist disease.
I posted my thoughts on this issue some while back.
Naeem 11:36 pm on February 5, 2010 Permalink |
Sorry, I meant to say in my first sentence “Muslims who dislike the politics of Jews”.
Big difference.
cbarwa 9:49 pm on February 6, 2010 Permalink |
True that is the motivating factor; unfortunately the boundaries have become very blurred now and a lot of the discourse has been badly poisoned to the extent that there is a lot of borrowing of symbolism, themes and other elements from European anti-Semitism.
thabet 12:18 am on February 7, 2010 Permalink |
I don’t expect this film to be funny. It is written by Baddiel and starring Djalili, who are both unfunny. It’ll probably have a lot of very obvious jokes about Jewish-hating Muslims, and Muslim-hating Jews. (Four Lions on the other hand, promises to be genuinely funny.)
As for antisemitism, I think Conrad has it about right.
Kalim 12:00 pm on February 27, 2010 Permalink |
Er, sense of humour failure? I’ve seen a preview of this and there are a couple of tired stereotypes it’s true, but most comedies do. As far as people hating each other, I think it rather overassumes the cool rationality of the human animal to assume it’s possible to disentangle different modes of hatred entirely from one another. While that disentanglement is a necessary project to pursue its one that has to take place hand in hand with one that acknoweldges that the political, the religious and the ethnic merge into and constitute one another in lived experience and will always do so. To call that “poisoning” is a somewhat misanthropic way of perceiving things that can only ever lead to a rhetoric of suspicion and distrust, as this strand evidences.
For me this film which had a warm heart even if some mistakes were made — is one that manages to do that. Anyway, I could be wrong but let’s proceed carefully and with a sense of humour. Otherwise the let’s say revealing Freudian slips of the keyboard that Naeem makes will seem sinister to some people, rather than something we can smile together about. Thanks, K