WashingtonPost: 'Revisiting Pakistan’s Tangle of Contradictions'

Excerpted from The Washington Post

In December 2007, a 15-year-old Taliban suicide bomber assassinated former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi as she drove away from a campaign rally. Her murder and the ensuing political chaos sent shock waves through Washington corridors. It was a clear indication that nuclear-armed Pakistan was in free fall despite the U.S. alliance with President Pervez Musharraf.

That fall I had begun my journalism career as a reporting fellow at NPR’s headquarters in D.C. On the day of Bhutto’s assassination, as Pakistani cities exploded into chaos, I was asked to help work the phone lines to the country of my birth. A few days later, I was on a plane to Islamabad to contribute to aftermath coverage for a short stint. I may have known the language and culture as a Pakistani American, but for invaluable research on the current situation, I carried clippings from Irish journalist Declan Walsh, then writing for the Guardian as its regional correspondent.

It is strange to revisit that time now given that Pakistan, once at the center of the “war on terror,” has largely receded from international headlines and certainly from my own journalism career. In his book “The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches From a Precarious State,” Walsh returns the focus to the troubled Islamic republic and delves into his reporter’s notebook to explore Pakistan in the years after 9/11. Walsh first covered the country for the Guardian and later for the New York Times, reporting on what he describes as its “multi-ringed circus of violence.” He was there for every major story, including the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound and the endless wars along the country’s frontiers. Now the Times’ chief Africa correspondent, Walsh contributed dispatches that pulsated with urgency and empathy. In a few words, he could distill layers of history and culture into vivid brushstrokes of narrative. But as his writing became essential reading for both international and Pakistani readers, it earned the wrath of the country’s security establishment, which revoked his credentials and expelled him in 2013. It is on the eve of that expulsion that “Nine Lives” begins, as Walsh reflects on a country he spent a decade trying to untangle.

NyTimes: "‘An Acclaimed Novel Gets Its Bookend"

Originally Published in The New York Times

When “A Suitable Boy” was published in 1993, the 1,349-page tome about post-Independence India, written by Vikram Seth, became one of the longest English-language novels in print. Superlative reviews around the world ensured its place in the door-stopping canon of modern literary classics.

For many devoted readers, the book, set in the 1950s and featuring multiple interreligious friendships and relationships, has endured because of its myriad relatable family dramas and also for being a kind of guide to what it means to be a secular, independent citizen.

Now, after several stalled attempts, the beloved novel has been adapted into a lavish new six-part series, directed by the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mira Nair (“Salaam Bombay!,” “Monsoon Wedding”). When it debuted on BBC One in July, it was lauded in Britain as the network’s first prime-time drama filmed on location in India with an almost entirely Indian cast. In India, the reaction was more complicated: Members of the ruling Hindu nationalist party have called for a boycott over its depictions of interfaith romance, and the police opened an investigation into Netflix, which distributes the show there.

In the United States, where “A Suitable Boy” debuted Monday on the streaming service Acorn TV, the series arrives a bit more quietly, but boycott-free.

WashingtonPost: "Islam's Gilded Kingdoms, Faded Glories"

Originally Published in ‘The Washington Post’

On their recent state visit to India, President Trump and first lady Melania Trump joined the legions of modern lovers who have been photographed in front of the Taj Mahal, the marble masterpiece of 17th-century South Asian architecture. Amid the fanfare and surface admiration of the Taj from the patently anti-Muslim president and his Hindu-nationalist hosts, Muslim communities burned in communal attacks in New Delhi. A sacred funerary structure inscribed with chapter after chapter of the Koran made for awkward yet understandable political staging. The Taj is a product of the medieval Islamic renaissance, when the Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman empires ruled half the world as goods, religious ideas and aesthetics flowed between gilded urban centers. Even those who can’t stand Muslims simply can’t deny the glamorous ghosts of Muslim past.

The Taj was commissioned by a dynasty founded by the Emperor Babur of Kabul, and he is one of the hundreds of historical figures who appear in the new book “Islamic Empires” by the British journalist Justin Marozzi. This is an accessible, popular history to introduce readers to the kaleidoscopic sweep of 16 centuries of Islamic history. The author’s approach to this sprawling subject is to tell the stories of 15 cities, from 6th-century Mecca to 21st-century Dubai, that stand in for each century from Islam’s birth to its eventual spread across the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. It is a noble project to illuminate this extraordinarily misunderstood civilization in an era when Muslims appear on news feeds in stories of war, oppression and bigotry.

The author is inspired by the Greek explorer, historian and travel writer Herodotus, whose classic “Histories” provides his template to examine the rise and fall of urban empires. Marozzi dives into the jasmine-scented courtyards of Damascus and the libraries of Abbasid Baghdad. He walks through the blue-tiled palaces of Samarkand in modern Uzbekistan as he recounts the victories of Tamerlane, and sails the Bosporus to re-create the brutal siege of Constantinople by Ottoman forces in 1453. Marozzi’s 15 cities are summarized in neat 20-page chapters that open with historical maps and personal anecdotes. The narrative tends to follow a cyclical pattern: ascent defined by cosmopolitanism, inclusion and multiculturalism that eventually give way to brutality, barbarism and beheadings.

He writes, “The greatness of the Dar al Islam, once written across the world in imperial might and splendor, with world-beating cities like Baghdad, Damascus, Cordoba, Fez, Cairo, Samarkand, Isfahan and Istanbul at its core, is far more difficult to discern in the early twenty-first century.” He continues: “Division and disorder rule. Conflict and bloodshed, instability, poverty, even humanitarian catastrophe in countries such as Yemen, Syria and Iraq, have become terrifyingly prevalent. From one end of the Middle East and North Africa to the other, vicious fitna, the age-old plague of division and strife, has erupted again.”

As a child of one of Islamdom’s great former imperial capitals, Lahore, I grew up with bedtime stories of turbaned kings, bejeweled palaces and fragrant gardens. Even in ruin and irreversible decay, their memory remains part of the fabric of Pakistani culture and custom. In “Islamic Empires,” this seductive premodern heritage is cast as a weaponized study in contrast with contemporary Muslim societies. Marozzi writes: “Kaleidoscopes are beautiful, magical things. With their revolving, ever-changing patterns of colors they mesmerize young children. They are also fragile and delicate. Their harmonious balance can be damaged. When shaken too violently they can easily be broken.”

In cities like Fez, Damascus and Isfahan that were once glamorous centers of cosmopolitanism and learning, Marozzi now sees only civilizational decline, degradation and, of course, jihadist terrorism.

He makes huge editorial choices within Islam’s kaleidoscopic histories, not to mention his unexplained decision to focus on 15 cities as his narrative concept. His most curious omission is to overlook the impact of Western colonialism on Islamic history. Many of the Islamist movements Marozzi so deeply laments and resents were born in anti-colonial struggles during the 18th and 19th centuries. Political Islam has reactionary roots, whether in the struggle against the British Empire or in the Islamic State’s calls to expel American forces from Islamic lands. That geopolitical and historical dimension is largely overlooked as Marozzi diagnoses the decline of Islamic cities as a product of internal cultural, spiritual and political stagnation.It is impossible and irresponsible to suggest that countries like Libya, Egypt and Syria are not indeed tragic examples of political crisis and human rights violations. But the necessary depth of perspective requires a writer to slip under the skin of historical surfaces to explain the roots of the melancholia and the complex reasons underlying cultural stagnation. It is a project more demanding than what this quick-hit survey can accomplish. The Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif’s biography of her native “Cairo,” Orhan Pamuk’s “Istanbul” and Hisham Matar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, Libya-probing memoir, “The Return,” are all more-accomplished accounts of this jostling between past glories and modern melancholy in former Islamic kingdoms. They are also love letters to societies and cultures from the inside, rendered with nuance and kindness, and above all, hope.It doesn’t matter that Marozzi’s city selections and observations neglect contemporary Islamic countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, or that he never engages with new creative forces coming from the accomplishments of Muslim immigrant communities in Europe and North America. His history of these vast lands has a narrow thesis, and it is a narrative of past glories and contemporary wastelands. The book opens with a line from a Tunisian friend who tells the author, “I’m embarrassed to be an Arab these days.” The author agrees and writes, “It wasn’t always like this,” and so the story begins. In lesser hands, Marozzi’s central thesis would be a more obvious and shrill polemic. His immersion and passion for his subject deserve admiration. But his seemingly random city selections, overt cultural assumptions and historical omissions do not. When grappling with a subject as vast and politically fraught as Islam’s 16 centuries through such a personal lens, some degree of humility would seem reasonable. Instead, Marozzi’s tone gives the entire project a disappointing air delivered with an outsider’s smug condescension.

Marozzi seems to appreciate Islam’s deceased past, not its living adherents and future possibilities. In a project that claims to counter the contemporary misunderstanding of Islam, the portrait here rings as hollow as a president’s photo opportunity before a sacred Islamic relic.

WashingtonPost: "Parting & Partition"

Originally published in The Washington Post

Seventy years ago this month, my grandfather fled India to join millions of refugees in a new country to be known as Pakistan. He survived the ordeal across the still-unmarked border, but he lost family and friends in the killings, expulsions and unimaginable acts of vengeance that accompanied the making of India and Pakistan. These episodes still haunt the subcontinent. My grandfather died four decades later at his home in Lahore. He never returned to his village 20 miles away in what became a different country.

I thought often about his journey as I packed up two years of life in Delhi in preparation for my own, very different, Indian departure. My partner’s job had brought us there, and we returned to Washington this month. But despite the privilege of my U.S. passport, I lived in Delhi with the painful echoes of my grandfather’s partition. For almost two years, I lived as a Pakistani-born Muslim in Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist India. I knew that the experience would be disorienting, but nothing could have prepared me for how vast, toxic and enduring partition had become.

When I first landed in Delhi, the city seemed eerily familiar and welcoming. I beheld the same faces, music, spices and noisy alleyways from my childhood in Lahore. The city’s colonial avenues blended with its red sandstone Mughal monuments, just as they do in my home city. But then in the middle of introductions that first day, my driver revealed his great hope for war. He hated Pakistanis. “They’re a nation of terrorists,” he said. He wanted the new prime minister to consider using nuclear weapons against them. My instinct was to pass this off as the ramblings of an uneducated man. But I soon discovered how normalized, among all kinds of people, these views had become.

One example is a new intolerance for India’s history of religious coexistence. A month after I arrived, students at Delhi’s leading public university were arrested and charged with sedition for criticizing the government. They were eventually released and suspended, but the term “anti-national,” which implied pro-Pakistan (and thus pro-Muslim), entered the lexicon soon after as a powerful epithet. Trolls took to Twitter and the streets to police anyone who dared to speak out against the state. One day I opened the newspaper to find an image of two bodies — one a 35-year-old man, the other a 12-year-old boy — dangling from a tree. They were Muslim cattle traders who had been lynched by Hindu cow-protection vigilantes. Their corpses were meant to send a warning to those suspected of eating, transporting or selling beef. As similar attacks on Muslims grew in frequency and brutality, the leadership’s silence spoke volumes. Although I was privileged by Indian standards, with a gated apartment and a driver, I became depressed and increasingly nervous about leaving home.

A yoga teacher concluded a much-needed meditation practice with an unexpected tirade against Muslims. According to him, they’d ruined the city with their filth and multiplying population. He told me I needed to accept my community’s culpability in its subservient condition. I stayed silent during political dinner conversations that turned to the question of my nebulous heritage. “I’m American” never sufficed, so I evaded the subject. Everywhere I went, I was simply mistaken for an Indian Muslim and treated with neither the reverence nor the hustle reserved for Western tourists. I passed. But I was definitely elsewhere on the inside.

After a skirmish over the conflict in Kashmir, Pakistani actors and musicians were banned from Bollywood films, and it became mandatory to stand for the Indian national anthem before each movie. A disabled man was slapped and berated in one cinema for not standing up, in a case of mistaken anti-nationalism. I always obligingly mouthed the words of the anthem I didn’t recognize. I adapted my parents’ Urdu to sound like Delhi’s colloquial Hindi. (The languages that once played together had also become partitioned.) I raised my hands to say “ram ram” to the saffron-robed walkers in Lodi Gardens when “salaam” had once been my default setting. I was a closeted Pakistani, and only my very closest friends knew. I often wondered when and where I would be found out.

I never went to Pakistan from India, and nobody from my family ever came to visit. Since the Pakistani terrorist attacks on Mumbai in 2008, it has become almost impossible to get visas to travel across the divide. There is only one weekly flight between Lahore and Delhi. The closest I came to my Pakistani family was at the daily border ceremony at the crossing between the two countries near the city of Amritsar in Punjab. Every night at sunset, crowds gather on each side to watch Indian and Pakistani troops march toward each other as the gates are briefly flung open, then immediately shut. With soldiers in full regalia, soundtracked to military pomp and circumstance, the Indian ceremony is meant to stir audiences into a frenzy of nationalism. I had my first truly out-of-body experience sitting at the edge of the Indian stands looking at the Pakistanis beyond. They were seated behind rows of barbed wire, past the patch of no-man’s land and an arsenal of armed guards. They dressed as my Lahori relatives did, and they were playing pop songs I grew up with, remixed with the call to prayer. On India’s side, the speakers blared Bollywood anthems at full blast as men and women rushed to join the soldiers in bhangra dances. India was adding seating space to answer bursting demand. Performances were increasingly sold out, thanks to resurgent nationalism.

This was the region where my grandfather was born and where blood, rape and massacre were unleashed on an undocumented and unspeakable scale in 1947. The way that painful legacy was turned into a carnivalesque celebration of enmity made it the ugliest place I had seen in South Asia. It was the performance of familial hatred for cheap titillation and political affirmation. At some point, I stopped watching and looked up at the beautiful sunset. As the ceremony concluded, the crowds in the risers walked as close to one another as they could get. The occasional person on each side waved, with utmost curiosity, at the other next door, who looked, sounded and seemed the same but lived in a country so far out of reach.

On many days, I felt like I was being metaphorically ejected from India. I was living on the wrong side. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s extraordinary electoral victories across the country made secular liberals and minority communities feel unwelcome and unsafe. In March, the prime minister appointed a fervently anti-Muslim cleric as the chief minister of the country’s largest state. Hindu mobs harassed Muslim families to “go back” to a country they never came from: Pakistan.

Then one day, spring arrived, and Delhi suddenly looked just like Lahore: lush, floral and filled with what seemed like every species of bird that’s ever existed. Peacocks landed on balconies, and trees exploded with blossoms and fragrances. I stopped reading the news and started spending more time talking to neighbors and friends. We tuned into other frequencies. We discussed books, music, our melodramatic Punjabi families and the daily ordeals of the city’s horrendous traffic. It was a welcome reprieve from the rhetoric of difference. Even I began forgetting my secret.

One fundamental question that haunts the relationship between Indians and Pakistanis is whether partition should have happened. Wouldn’t we be better off together? I don’t know the answer, and I find it increasingly pointless to imagine the hypothetical possibilities. The tragedy of borders is that they eventually become real. India and Pakistan have turned into two very different societies. They have had different traumas and triumphs since 1947.

But they also share a much longer history and a familial bond. After living in India, I feel that the tragedy of partition is a more personal, unknowable one. What relationships, friendships and conversations never began? What ideas were unformed and unsaid that could have changed lives? For Pakistanis, only a sliver of the subcontinent’s extraordinary history and geography is accessible. For India’s Hindus and Sikhs, who were expelled from their former Pakistani villages and cities, homes, lives and stories have been erased by the Islamic republic.

Archiving the loss and suffering of that dying generation is so important. But in my life in India 70 years later, I was fortunate eventually to discover friends, mentors and family I never knew I had. Our ties were not based on bloodlines or nationalities, but on our shared language, geography and cultural references that felt deeper and more human. India’s Sufi poets always sang that the greatest journeys bring you home — and to yourself. As I traveled across the country, I thought of all the people who were not and will not be allowed to make that journey. I thought of my father’s relatives, who have never been able to go back to their homes next door to see what remains of the world that made them.

As I left Delhi, a series of panels to mark partition began, and the city’s beggars walked barefoot through traffic selling cheap flags and tricolored trinkets. I returned to America on Aug. 14, Pakistan’s independence day. India’s monumental celebrations followed the next day. In my own small way, was this a Pakistani partition from India once more? On our last Friday there, friends gathered in our Delhi home for an evening of farewells, and I realized that I no longer saw India as an abstraction filtered through the painful lens of partition. The other side had become my home. The choice to make a life there for two years despite the unwelcoming mood was a small, personal act of rebellion against the logic, brutality and irreversibility of partition. I’ll have these friendships forever, and I’ll always be grateful that I had the chance to make the return my grandfather never could. Partition is permanent, but I hope parting doesn’t have to be.

FilmQuarterly: "The Legacy of Deepa Mehta's Earth" →

Bilal Qureshi

from Film Quarterly Summer 2017, Volume 70, Number 4

Film Quarterly Summer Podcast: Columnist Bilal Qureshi in conversation with filmmaker Deepa Mehta about her film Earth and the 70th Anniversary of India’s Partition.

In a time of relentless news and disruptions, one of this year’s defining milestones in world history may pass without much consideration. And cinema is partly to blame for its lack of adequate global notice.

This August marks the seventieth anniversary of the partition of India, the monumental decision at the end of British rule to divide a once unified region into two nations—Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. By the late 1940s, the sun had set on the British Empire and a hasty line was carved through India in the mayhem of decolonization. This arbitrary border tore through the villages and cities of Punjab and Bengal, spurring unimaginable spasms of massacre and rape and turning millions of Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus into displaced refugees. South Asia was liberated and severed in the same moment. Today India and Pakistan are nuclear-armed rivals and a fifth of the world’s population lives at the razor’s edge of perpetual war.

For an event of such magnitude and intrinsic human drama, it is shocking how few films have been made on the legacy of Partition for a global audience. There is an extraordinary body of literature about the event, true, but for a region where cinema reigns supreme, the dearth of films is a glaring absence. The one exception is a nineteen-year-old film by Indian-Canadian director Deepa Mehta, Earth (1998). Throughout her career, Deepa Mehta has infused the energy of mainstream Indian cinema with fierce political consciousness.

Since making Earth almost twenty years ago, Deepa Mehta has seen her stature grow to include film festival premieres, an Oscar nomination, and a platform as one of the rare women auteurs on the international stage. She has lived in Canada since the 1970s, but her most celebrated films are not about immigrant displacement or hyphenated identity. Rather, she has always told Indian stories. From the groundbreaking story of a lesbian relationship between two housewives in suffocating arranged marriages (Fire, 1996) to the forced exile of widows in orthodox Hindu scripture (Water, 2005), she has confronted uncomfortable social realities in Indian society. Although she has been labeled an anti-national, had sets burned, and had cinemas attacked by the religious right for insulting traditional values, she’s taken the challenges in stride and continues making films.

Her latest film, Anatomy of Violence(2016), is an experimental study of sexual violence inspired by the grotesque gang rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi in 2012.1Instead of making a traditional feature film or a documentary based on the case, Mehta wanted to use fiction to understand the men who perpetrated the attack.2 To portray what drives India’s epidemic of sexual violence, she invited her cast to workshop and improvise the imagined backstories of the attackers, crafting painful portraits of broken families and combustible rage. Those individual narratives appear onscreen as fictionalized cinéma vérité, filmed with handheld cameras in uncomfortable proximity. In a radical and deliberate new form, Mehta offers yet another damning portrait of her own society of origin.

For the past year, I’ve been living in India’s sprawling capital. In the months leading up to the seventieth anniversary of Partition in summer of 2017, there have been commemorative exhibitions, conferences, and high-minded editorials. Today India and Pakistan live in a perpetual state of hostility. The absence of travel or sustained collaborations means the trauma of Partition has been replaced with one-dimensional nationalist narratives in both Indian and Pakistani popular culture. Filmmakers have simply followed suit. There have been several mediocre Bollywood efforts at dramatizing the events of 1947, but screenplays with nuance have never been the industry’s strength. Partition is a complicated political story that doesn’t lend itself to the confines of the family soap operas and gilded neoliberal fantasia that define contemporary Bollywood.

Even broadly speaking, international films set in India have their own limitations, at the level of aesthetics if not politics. Richard Attenborough’s classic biopic Gandhi(1982) may have won an Oscar for Best Picture, but it falls short in representing the complexity of the man and the moment, opting for handsome hagiography. Gurinder Chadha’s new film, Viceroy’s House (2017), tells the Partition story as an extension of Downton Abbey, an “upstairs downstairs” treatment focusing on the colonial administration. Other international films set in India such as the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel series (John Madden, 2011/2015) or even Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001) tend to feature an assortment of billowing fabrics, the emotive plucking of sitar strings, flowers and arched gateways, as if transforming India into a palatable and commercial cinematic feast. These filmmakers are not making Bollywood musicals in supersaturated Technicolor, but in their own efforts to meet the assumed Western gaze, there can be a tendency toward amplifying the sensuality and exoticism of the East. In stark contrast, Deepa Mehta’s trilogy of films—Fire, Earth, and Water—are brittle and difficult to digest. She uses her cinema to explore the darkness behind the color, digging into the rigid traditions and violent orthodoxy of Indian society. She deliberately shatters the region’s self-image and lazy exoticism onscreen. It is often not a pretty sight.

I first saw Earth in 1999 as a high school student growing up in Richmond, Virginia. It was screened in a small auditorium at the University of Richmond as part of the school’s annual international film festival. There are seminal works in every cinephile’s adolescence that shape tastes, emotions, and, if fortunate, even politics. My paternal grandfather was a Partition survivor. His sisters were killed on a train carrying refugees from India to the newly formed nation of Pakistan. I had grown up hearing his story in passing, but Deepa Mehta’s Earth opened my eyes—and more importantly, it opened borders. After the screening, I sat with my mother in the auditorium in silence. She had grown up in post-Partition Lahore, and I could sense in her mood that she had seen something that resonated with her in a profoundly personal way. In contrast to the escapism of the 1990s wave of glossy Bollywood musicals about diaspora communities, Deepa Mehta’s film was a haunting testament to a wound both Pakistanis and Indians share, even if they have never seen it onscreen.

Living in India in this anniversary year, I recently watched Earth for the first time in fifteen years. In one hundred luminous minutes, Mehta captures the scale of India’s division with nuance, cinematic eloquence, and emotional depth. The film is an historical drama that circumvents its staid genre by shifting the focus away from leaders and rallies to a small group of friends ripped apart by politics. It is an intimate piece that ruptures and expands in scale as history intervenes. Earth feels both timeless and timely. Since its first screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, it has aged into a new wisdom and relevance.

Deepa Mehta was recently in Delhi to screen her new film, Anatomy of Violence, which she decided to make in order to explore a culture of violence she sees accelerating across the urbanizing city she once called home. Planned as a meeting to discuss her new film and her work in general, we end up discussing the state of cinema and of the world in her family’s Delhi home on the very day that Donald Trump announces his ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries to America. Airports have been transformed into protest zones. The news is weighing on Deepa Mehta’s mind; wearing her professorial glasses, she sinks into a reading chair, exhausted by the day’s headlines.

Our conversation broadens to the state of world affairs and the rise of demagogues like Donald Trump and India’s own right-wing, avowedly Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi. She pauses and takes a deep breath. She says she’s alarmed by the global rise of right-wing nationalism. But in India, filmmakers and critical perspectives are being policed and silenced with new brutality. In 2000, Deepa Mehta famously had to cancel the shooting of Water in Varanasi after Hindu nationalists attacked her sets. She eventually filmed the project in secret in Sri Lanka. More than any filmmaker from South Asia, she knows the brunt of censorship and moral policing that awaits transgressing artists.

As the conversation turns to the upcoming anniversary of Partition, I ask her about the legacy of Earth. Her eyes light up and she tells me it remains her favorite film for very personal reasons. Like many Punjabis of her generation, Deepa Mehta is a daughter of Partition. She grew up in Amritsar next to the militarized border with Pakistan. “Even when I was growing up in Amritsar, we used to go every weekend to Lahore, so I just grew up around people who talked about it incessantly and felt it was one of the most horrific sectarian wars they knew of.” Mehta recalls that she made the film to explore the breaking apart of a multicultural society and to understand what moves neighbors and friends to turn against one another. “A driving force in the stories I want to tell is definitely curiosity. I was intrigued by sectarian war. I’m appalled by it. I was immensely curious about how it affects the everywoman and everyman.”

The late afternoon sun is casting shadows on Mehta’s long gray hair, as she looks out into the distance at the dome of one of Delhi’s most iconic Mughal tombs, where parts of Earth were filmed.

Earth remains one of my favorite films that I have made. It has something to do with nostalgia. I mean, I grew up in Delhi and I’m sitting here twenty years later and I’m looking outside and it’s Humayun’s Tomb that I see, and I have flashes of what it was like and [of] scenes that we shot that were quintessentially Old Delhi. And Humayun’s Tomb and Lodi Gardens. But it’s a different Delhi now. The monuments remain the same and I think that’s what really worries me. They’ve been there five hundred years and they remain the same, but the ethos around them is changing so rapidly. I feel like perhaps we’re in the middle of another upheaval or division and that makes me uncomfortable.

She says the majoritarian mood in India today has propelled the divisions between Hindus and Muslims back into the mainstream. Some journalists say the current government has embarked on a project to marginalize the country’s Muslim history and syncretic identity. Earth features a poignant relationship between Hindu and Muslim characters. Theirs is one of the many relationships ripped apart by the communal violence unleashed by Partition. Mehta says it would now be impossible to have those love scenes approved by India’s notoriously conservative and politicized censor board:

I think it would be absolutely impossible to make Earth today. I don’t think we’d get a big movie star to do it. But more than that, just the scale of it. And people are so vigilant about protecting anything that’s Hindu. Even if we could shoot, it would never get through the censor board today. Not a chance in hell. I don’t think it will be about the politics, it will be about a love scene.

But love scenes that cross India’s rigid love lines are always deeply political, and it is precisely those transgressive scenes of intimacy in Earth that give Metha’s film so much power. The censor board would have a point.

Fortunately, nineteen years ago in an age before social media firestorms, Deepa Mehta was able to make Earth on her own terms, drawing on a deeply personal need to understand what had pushed neighbors and friends to turn against one another. Mehta says for years she had been thinking about how to bring Partition to the screen in a way that was intimate and fair. She found her answer on a routine browsing trip through her favorite bookstore in Seattle when she stumbled on Ice Candy Man, the acclaimed novel by Pakistani writer Bapsi Sidhwa based on the author’s own experience as a child of Lahore in 1947. It is a harrowing story of losing one’s innocence and watching one’s entire world fall apart. Mehta finished the book in a matter of days and immediately reached out to the writer to purchase the film rights.

The central character of the novel is a young girl, Lenny, a privileged daughter of a Parsi family, doted upon by a nanny and a staff of servants whose backgrounds stand in for India’s many communities. The fact that Lenny is neither Hindu nor Muslim freed the narrative from an easy and divisive communal dichotomy. Raised in a utopian multicultural home, visiting the park with her Hindu nanny and her Muslim admirers, Lenny is forced to watch her world shattered and destroyed when Partition arrives. What attracted Deepa Mehta was the novel’s point of view: “I felt that through Lenny’s eyes we experienced the innocence of childhood. The Parsis didn’t take the side of the Hindus or the Muslims. I felt it was really balanced. That really appealed to me.”

In Mehta’s film, Hindus ravage Muslims, Muslims kill Hindus, a Hindu woman falls in love with a Muslim, and Muslims hide Sikhs from murderous mobs in Lahore’s back alleys. The violence and the acts of kindness transcend religious categories as they did in reality and that approach gives the film’s screenplay an important balance. Mehta says she knew she had succeeded when she was charged with bias from all sides: “There were a lot of Hindus who said to me, ‘Why have you made a film that’s so pro-Muslim?’ There were Muslim friends who said it was too pro-Hindu. I think it’s actually extremely fair because it’s the point of view of Lenny.”

Beyond its political nuances, Earth is also one of the most beautifully made contemporary Indian films. It features original music and songs by Oscar-winning composer A. R. Rahman, with whom Mehta worked, along with lyricist Javed Akhtar, to compose a series of poems in Urdu and Hindi to propel the narrative with verses on faith, identity, and the mindlessness of war. The film’s cast includes two of India’s best actors—Bollywood heartthrob Aamir Khan and art-house darling Nandita Das who had risen to prominence through Mehta’s earlier film Fire.

Since it would have been impossible to bring the mostly Indian cast to the Pakistani city of Lahore to shoot the film, Mehta and her crew recreated the city in Delhi’s historic neighborhoods. The city’s medieval Muslim center and its remaining British bungalows are mirror images of pre-Partition Lahore, and with strategically placed period details and furnishings, a lost era came to life onscreen. Mehta says the film’s color palette was also instrumental to its sense of authenticity:

Whenever I finish writing a script, it’s also about how it smells. I usually write at my kitchen table and the screenplay becomes a very organic and palpable entity. This all sounds stupid and fanciful. I finish writing a script and I think, my god, what colors do I see? With Earth, I saw terra-cotta, I saw blood, I saw red—and I saw Lenny’s green, the desire for growth. I told my director of photography and my production designer that I did not want to see blue in the film at all. I didn’t want anything that was cold. It had to be like a throbbing wound.

When the conversation returns to this year’s seventieth anniversary of Partition, I ask Deepa Mehta if she has been thinking about this milestone in her own life.

I think anniversaries like this are extremely important. Not the nostalgia for when we were together, but the horrors of how many millions were displaced and how unnecessary it was. I don’t think we should ever forget that. If it takes something as airy-fairy as an anniversary, it’s imperative. It’s like asking if, can we forget about the Holocaust? Never. We learn through history and we must.

To this day historians and political scientists are unearthing evidence to show how deeply and irrevocably the hasty division of British India shaped the political and cultural future of more than a fifth of the world’s population. Under the surface of this year’s commemorations, the trauma of division still haunts Indian and Pakistani society. Mehta sees it as a cautionary tale for every society as it flirts with the language of us-versus-them and exclusion. “Is it cyclical that we all go nuts and kill and discriminate at random? I’m very nervous about the way the world is at the moment.… Earth has a resonance today it didn’t have even three years ago.”

Amid the rising tide of nationalism and unrest, I ask Deepa Mehta if she personally finds solace or comfort in her Earth. She counters:

I think watching Earth to a certain degree provides discomfort, which is excellent because we cannot be comfortable. There’s a lovely quote in the film that Aamir Khan’s character Ice Candy Man says about the animal within us. We all live with the animal. And the point of living is to actually make sure that the animal remains caged. If something like [Earth] reminds us that we cannot afford to unleash the negative aspect of ourselves as human beings, then that’s a good thing.

Mehta tells me that, to this day, she is still approached by audiences at screenings and lectures that wish to reminisce and thank her for making Earth. It is neither her most commercially successful nor her best-known film, but it seems to have an enduring sense of relevance and power. “I don’t think films and books change the world. I think if you’re lucky you start some kind of dialogue. A dialogue did begin with Earth, and perhaps it’ll start again now.”

Living in India as a Pakistani-American over the past two years has brought me into many dialogues. Most have been uncomfortable, if not downright depressing. It is unfortunate to share the news that resentments on both sides have hardened with time. Artists with the ambition to work across that divide have been marginalized and silenced. Visa regimes make it impossible to even know the other, and politicians have ensured that hatred is the overriding narrative. The diaspora remains one of the only spaces where Indians and Pakistanis can even meet to reflect on the lines of 1947. It makes Deepa Mehta’s accomplishment—an Indian film based on a Pakistani novel, a Lahore story filmed in Delhi—even more inspiring.

Rediscovering Earth in this anniversary year has been a gift. Mehta’s film feels like a period piece on two fronts: a re-creation of the multicultural South Asia that preceded Partition, but also a relic of the late 1990s, when a less jingoistic moment allowed a film like Earth to be filmed and distributed. As mentioned, it was not a commercial success and it is not one of Mehta’s best-known works. The cast, the filmmaker, and the writers have all moved on. But in this seventieth anniversary year, it is important to recognize that Deepa Mehta has made the great missing film of Partition for all times.

NyTimes: "The Muslim Silence on Gay Rights" →

An Afghan-American Muslim walks into a gay club in Florida on Latin night during Pride Month. In my dreams, that is the beginning of another great story of remix, tolerance and coexistence that is possible only in America. In reality, it’s the start of a nightmare massacre fueled by hatred and perpetrated by a man from a group already scarred by a generation of suspicion and surveillance.

Whether Omar Mateen was a militant fighter financed by the Islamic State, a self-radicalized extremist or a lone wolf psychopath with a gun license, the distinction for committing the worst mass shooting in our history now belongs to an American Muslim.

After the attacks in Orlando early Sunday morning, many of my American Muslim friends began posting messages on Facebook about how frustrating it felt to go from the affirming images of the late Muhammad Ali to news of yet another terrorist attack. “He doesn’t represent us,” many wrote. “He can’t call himself a Muslim.” For many American Muslims, this kind of immediate condemnation and social media activism has become the first step in our symbiotic relationship with the news cycle. As the history of fellow minorities has taught us, retaliatory violence, exclusion and even internment are always possible in the American family and it’s best to try to get ahead of the curve.

But in this moment of hashtag solidarity, I hope we can also have some tough conversations about our limits. Accompanying those posts, I saw many gestures of solidarity and sympathy for the L.G.B.T. community. But behind those posts is a history of silence on gay rights.

For eight years, I was an editor and producer for NPR’s “All Things Considered.” It seemed as if each week featured an example of “Muslim” violence and with it an opportunity to bring more nuanced perspectives and context to the discussion. Through highlighting the voices of Muslim reformists and liberals, I felt optimistic about a generation that could bridge our widening divisions. But in my personal life, I was struggling in isolation with how to reconcile my own faith with my sexuality.

When I was growing up, there were no Muslim role models or blueprints for taking a different path to love. When it came to the breakthroughs for gay rights in the Obama era, even progressive Muslims were mostly ambivalent. An open letter by the religious scholar Reza Aslan and the comedian Hasan Minhaj supporting same-sex marriage prompted handwringing and arguments in my newsfeed. “Islam teaches us to be accepting but it is best for homosexuals to be celibate. What is wrong is wrong,” someone wrote.

For so many in the Muslim community, “traditional” marriage is a tenet of faith. Weddings, engagement parties and family picnics constitute our safe spaces. Although we’ve shared political goals like the protection of civil rights with L.G.B.T. activists in this age of terrorism, ours is not a natural or a deep alliance. More important, queer Muslims are marginalized if not simply invisible. In light of this weekend’s attacks, we can no longer afford this kind of superficial engagement.

No religion has a monopoly on homophobia. The track record of exclusion and outright abuse of gay men and women in the name of God is a depressing reality across faiths. But we cannot use those analogies to excuse our own shortcomings. Omar Mateen went on a rampage at a gay club out of hatred he attributed to his faith. He shot and massacred Americans for thriving in their safe space, for being among those they love and were loved by, and he did it during both Ramadan and a Pride Month that epitomizes self-love in the face of hate. The toxic cocktail of gun violence, unchecked mental illness and deranged ideology that propelled the massacre at Pulse is a threat to all Americans.

We must stand up against the anti-Muslim responses that come so easily in this current political climate. But for Muslims, this is also a moment to reflect more deeply on how we feel about living in a country where gay rights are central, where marriage equality is real and coexistence is the only way forward.

As I look at his narcissistic selfies and brooding poses on the cable news loop, I don’t know if Omar Mateen was mentally ill or just emotionally unhinged. I don’t know if it was the sight of two gay men kissing that infuriated him to the point of massacre. What I do know is that there will be more dark days to come if we don’t build the psychological, political and spiritual space within our communities to embrace the remixes that are possible only in this country.

NPR: "Breakthrough Black Filmmaking"

This year we've seen endless loops of online commentary and Hollywood hand-wringing about the enduring whiteness of American cinema and how structural challenges continue to restrict filmmakers of color. So it was not surprising that there was so much anticipation around the October release of first-time director Nate Parker's film The Birth of a Nation. The story of Nat Turner's slave rebellion and self-empowerment, as seen through the artistic vision of a young, black filmmaker, caused a bidding war at the Sundance Film Festival at the height of the #OscarsSoWhite campaign.

But by the time the Toronto International Film Festival opened last week, Parker was embroiled in a much louder conversation about sexual assault and toxic masculinity after debate about his acquittal on rape charges during his college days resurfaced. A month before the film that would prove Hollywood's diverse bona fides was to open, it was already in full-blown public relations free fall.

Fortunately, The Birth of a Nation was neither the only nor the most anticipated film about black life to screen in Toronto, which hosts the largest film festival in North America — one that sets the tone for the Oscars and tests the viability of serious American cinema. Festival artistic director Cameron Bailey told me that this year's festival may have been its blackest edition ever. It pushes back against the idea that Hollywood can only absorb one black story at a time, and challenges the limited parameters of a "black film."

This year's festival shifted the conversation about diversity from a focus on the absence of black faces in movies to a feast of cinematic styles and stories as wide-ranging as the black experience itself.  Most importantly, the films opening at Toronto explored stories about justice, family and selfhood without didactic or conventional Hollywood bluster about race. From the struggle for interracial marriage rights in the restrained drama Loving to a young boy's battle to reconcile his masculinity and sexuality in Barry Jenkins' lyrical second film Moonlight, this year's program introduced a new set of faces and performances for critics to savor and nominate.

Indian-born filmmaker Mira Nair premiered Queen of Katwe, a story about a young Ugandan woman's journey to become an international chess champion. The movie was filmed in Uganda and South Africa and opens in wide release as a Disney production. It stars Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o and David Oyelowo (Selma), and features no white saviors.

Perhaps the best-received film of the festival to directly confront the limited portrayal of blackness on screen was I Am Not Your Negro, filmmaker Raoul Peck's searing new documentary about writer James Baldwin. The film won the festival's prestigious top documentary prize and was purchased for wide release by Magnolia pictures. Made in collaboration with the Baldwin estate, Peck's documentary tells the story of American racism through the words of Baldwin's unfinished manuscript, archive interviews, and his essays on race relations. It features no talking heads, hazy footage or conventional biographical framing devices. Instead, it blends Baldwin's writing with arresting footage of contemporary police brutality to underscore the writer's powerful insight and voice.

At this year's Toronto festival, neither the filmmakers nor the curators wished to have these films categorized as "diverse" and, therefore, seen as niche. There's such range in the films, Bailey told me, that to just "call them all 'black films' really reduces their context, their variety, their differences and their power."

The most important function of Toronto's glittering premieres and sold-out screenings for films like Moonlight and I Am Not Your Negro, then, was to make them as visible and prestigious as any other major film. Bailey told me on the opening night of the festival that he shuttled between the premieres of Antoine Fuqua's Magnificent Seven with its diverse cast, to a screening of The Wedding Party from Nigeria, to a screening with 1,700 screaming fans for I Am Not Madame Bovary from China.

He said he left those movies with the distinct feeling that this would become "the new festival and the future of what we can do in movies."

Newsweek: "Riz Ahmed Interview" →

 Originally Published in Newsweek Middle East

The new HBO television series The Night Of is the story of a Pakistani-American young man’s hellish descent into New York City’s broken criminal justice system. It’s a tense crime procedural, a murder mystery, and a portrait of a racially and economically fractured city. Following its premiere earlier this month, The Night Of broke through the already crowded market of high-end television with critics and audiences alike. It’s been praised for its direction, its writing, and its central performance by the British-born actor Riz Ahmed.

Intense and brooding, Ahmed’s role as Naz Khan spans the emotional journey of a man from an immigrant family facing murder charges and imprisonment in post 9/11 New York City. It’s an agile performance by an actor whose career has been defined by nimbly traversing genres and identities. Raised in a Pakistani family in London, educated at Oxford, and directed by some of the world’s leading filmmakers, 33-year old Ahmed has already shattered Hollywood’s glass ceilings in a relatively young career.

He played the title role in Mira Nair’s 2011 adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and was Jake Gyllenhall’s co-star in the thriller Nightcrawler. His dark comedy Four Lions about a group of bumbling British Muslim terrorists has become a cult classic. And this year, he will be seen alongside Matt Damon in the new Jason Bourne film and will take to a galaxy far, far away as a rebel pilot in the highly-anticipated Star Wars spin-off Rogue One. As he jokes, “…as the first Pakistani in space!”

Reflecting on this breakthrough moment in his career, Riz Ahmed acknowledges that it’s “undeniably a big year.” But he politely adds, “…I’m not observing my life. I’m in it. From the inside, I’m just thinking about how I can do better and what matters to me.” For Ahmed, that has meant crafting complex characters in collaboration with the very best filmmakers in both mainstream and independent cinema. “If there’s something I find attractive, it’s films or projects that are hard to pin down in terms of what kind of animal they are,” he says. “Nightcrawler or Four Lions, are they horror comedies or are they twisted buddy movies? Are the bad guys good guys or are the good guys bad guys? Even The Reluctant Fundamentalist is kind of a love story but is it a political love story or a thriller? I like those hybrid pieces.”

Ahmed credits his ability to glide along hybrid categories to his own London upbringing. He says he grew up in a very boisterous British-Pakistani home and had to compete with jokes and characters to be heard. “There was this kind of performative element to my domestic life and then the whole thing of code switching drastically from my domestic setting to a posh private school. Then there was my social life, which was more British-Asian street sub-culture. So there was a lot of code switching and I was always acting in a way. I had to be a chameleon growing up.” Ahmed says those shifting scenes taught him how to act and make the decision to pursue a professional career as a performer, both natural and intuitive.

Riz Ahmed’s most memorable roles on screen—in Four Lions and The Reluctant Fundamentalist—and now as Naz in The Night Of—have often challenged conventional portrayals of Muslim characters in international cinema. He brings an authenticity and an instinctive sensitivity to each of those performances. But Ahmed abruptly reminds me that half of his projects have had nothing to do with his cultural background and it’s never been something he has explicitly pursued. In projects where he has taken on those roles, he says he applies a rigid personal standard.

“I’m not interested in playing characters that are two dimensional in any way. If they end up reinforcing stereotypes, I’m not interested in doing them. There is no lack of bad roles for people of color and I’ve chosen not to work instead of doing them. I’ve been selective and within the pool I’m willing to consider, I’ve been lucky to get those kinds of auditions and to be lucky to work with directors who have been collaborative and open to some of my suggestions. You want to do work that stretches labels and stretches people’s empathy.”

Although he is avowedly committed to the conversation about stretching diversity on screen, Ahmed says there is an unfair burden placed on stories about minority characters to be comprehensive and relatable. “The only reason that expectation exists is because people who feel totally under-represented expect the world from any image that exists. Because you only saw one brown family on TV a year you want it to be quintessentially brown. I think the way forward is not to do a census survey of an under-represented community to be represented in a single story. It’s just to have more of them.”

Off-screen, Riz Ahmed has built a dedicated following on social media as a musician, an MC and an outspoken voice against Islamophobia, racism and inequality. He’s a wordsmith on Twitter and Facebook, frequently riffing on the politics of Brexit and identity with his followers. He’s a recording artist, with multiple music projects and collaborations going at all times. Recently he released an EP entitled Englistan which features him rapping about embracing his own Britishness with all its flaws. On the title track, he raps

“…God save the Queen
nah she ain’t mates with me
but she keeps my paper green
plus we are neighbors see
on this little island
where we’re all surviving
politeness mixed with violence
this is England.”

I asked Ahmed if he ever fears any kind of backlash or risk to his Hollywood acting career with being such a political artist. He doesn’t mince words. “I don’t have a choice. By function of where and when I’m born, you’re born into politics. The question is will you be on the receiving end of politics or will you be in the conversation? From my point of view, you don’t have a choice but to be political if you belong to certain demographics. The question is are you going to be on the sidelines and watch yourself get kicked around, or play ball?”

When I ask him about the politics of appearing on screen as one of the only international actors of Muslim heritage, he says he feels proud of representing a broader cultural shift more than a specific community or storyline. “The thing I’m proud to be repping is progress and change. As an artist, there’s nothing more that you can hope for.”

Shahzia Sikander: Breaking The Mold

Shahzia Sikander is one of the contemporary art world's most celebrated stars. She's projecting her hypnotic video installations onto Times Square billboards; she's led exhibitions at major art museums across the world; and she was recognized by the MacArthur Foundation as a "genius" fellow in 2006. The Pakistani-born artist says art has always been a "ticket to life," but what distinguishes Sikander's art from her contemporaries is her training in a centuries-old handmade form of Islamic art — the bejeweled world of Indo-Persian miniature paintings.

The Finest Pictures With The Finest Lines

While the Renaissance masters were going big, the royal ateliers of India's Mughal dynasty were going small. Miniature painting thrived in the 15th- and 16th- century courts of India's Islamic kingdoms. Sometimes as small as 3 inches by 3 inches, these paintings were highly decorative, graphical pages that wove stories of heroism, lovers and political intrigue into gilded works of art. Artists followed stringent rules, and in addition to years of training, the craft required incredibly precise techniques. Pakistani art historian F.S. Aijazuddin says, "For the finest pictures and for the finest lines, they would use what was called an ek baal, which was a single hair — a single squirrel hair — to achieve the finest line."

These miniature paintings are often at the center of the world's leading collections of Islamic art. Navina Haidar curates one such collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She says miniature paintings are "dependent on tremendous technical finesse. As an artist, you are trained by your father, your forefathers, in a workshop setting to create a world that's miniaturized in its scale but absolutely universal sometimes in its content or in its ambition."

But as the Muslim kingdoms of India faded in the 18th and 19th centuries, so did the patronage and the practice of miniature painting. Then in the 1980s, the artist Bashir Ahmad. revived the tradition by establishing a formal department of miniature painting at the prestigious National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan.

As a young art student at Lahore's National College of Arts, Shahzia Sikander says she was fascinated by miniature paintings. And while she acknowledges it was a strict and "craft-oriented way of working," she saw miniatures as a language to say new things. For her graduate thesis, she created a miniature painting that broke the mold: a scroll that was 13 inches tall and 5 feet long and featured more than a dozen interconnected illustrations. More importantly, it was a deeply personal piece depicting the daily life of a modern Pakistani woman.

Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal says that thesis was a breakthrough in the history of miniature painting. "Miniature went in decline only because of absence of patronage, not because of loss of technique — so that technique was there," she says. "So when these techniques were passed on by Bashir Ahmad to younger people — I mean especially Shahzia, Shahzia took it to a new level. I mean, it was her thesis work that was sensational. Everybody talked about her work."

Sikander was invited to show The Scroll and other works at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, D.C. The show lasted one day and she didn't sell a single piece of art, but she spent the rest of her visit knocking on the doors of as many American graduate schools as she could, eventually winning a spot a the Rhode Island School of Design. There, Sikander began the academic process of further deconstructing miniature paintings. She says she often faced questions about her ethnic origins and was frustrated to be reduced to an ethnic artist. After all, at the heart of her ambition was the same ambition as any artist — the burning desire to communicate.

She says, "People want to know ... 'What is that cultural practice? Do you, like, run around catching your squirrel?' So I think some of these topics hijacked [the work], actually. They were detrimental."

Finding A Home In New York

Sikander eventually moved to New York City and began creating a new body of work that integrated her illustrations with her training as a modern artist. She says, "This is the first place that I'd been in my three or four years in the U.S. [where] I wasn't being seen through an ethnic lens. ... So I could be who I wanted to be. ... I felt the same kind of confidence that I had when my work got recognized in Pakistan."

In New York, Sikander began merging components of miniature paintings with modern, abstract designs. The result was a blend of surreal shapes and vivid colors that would be at home in a Salvador Dali painting. But her pieces were also tightly controlled, featuring geometric patterns and intricate Indo-Persian borders.

Glenn Lowry, director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, was astounded by the craftsmanship and beauty of her work. "There is a visual lushness," he says. "She has a capacity to draw that's absolutely breathtaking, so she can make images small or large with such precision that you look at them and you're dumbfounded."

In recent years, her illustrations have moved beyond the page into animation, video and large-scale projections.

Control, Exploitation And Hope In 'Parallax'

Sikander's latest piece, Parallax, is cinematic in its scale and ambition. It's a 15-minute film derived from hundreds of handmade illustrations and paintings. The title of the piece suggests a shifting point of view, disorientation and new ways of seeing. Sikander says was inspired by a drive she took across the United Arab Emirates. She spent that trip reflecting on the conditions facing millions of migrant workers from Pakistan, and both the curse and opportunity of the country's immense oil wealth. The result is a work where colorful flows of paint (echoing oil) collide with layers of illustrations and animated forms. She's interested in the layers of history and change that are remaking this region.

Parallax made its American debut at Tufts University at the invitation of historian Ayesha Jalal. She says Sikander is not an overtly political artist, but by disorienting the viewer she's forcing you to see reality in a new light. "She's not really making a political statement but the way in which she presents her work makes you understand that there is exploitation," Jalal says. "Something is going on here — there's control and there is exploitation but there is hope as well."

Breaking Out Of The Muslim Artist Label

So is Shahzia Sikander making Islamic art? Is she making American art? Or is what she does contemporary? Ruba Kana'an is a curator at Toronto's Aga Khan Museum of Islamic art. She says Sikander evades easy categories, and that is a breakthrough in its own right. "It takes quite a lot for artists from Muslim heritage to lose that sort of hyphen that identifies them," Kana'an says. "You're either [an] Arab contemporary artist or you're [a] Pakistani contemporary artist. Well, many artists want to be identified first and foremost as artists. ... Their work is not limited to or restricted to their heritage."

That's exactly what Sikander has been trying to do since she first tried her hand at traditional miniature painting. She says, "Whether it was the Muslim identity, whether it was the female identity or the Asian identity or the Asian-American identity or the hyphened identities ... I felt all of them were essential to who I was. All of it. I couldn't reject one for the other. I didn't want to be labeled by just one. That's still part of who I am."

And in the process of establishing who she is, Sikander has paved the way for other Muslim artists to break out of the frame.

Podcast: 'Beyond the Lights'

A conversation with Anushay Hossain about the acclaimed film by Gina Prince-Bythewood, pop culture feminism, and the cinematic shadow of race.

"Beyond The Lights" with Anushay Hossain

A Tribute to Anthony Shadid

Originally Published in the Egypt Independent

On Friday, readers of the New York Times woke to sobering news of the death of one of the newspaper’s most celebrated journalists, Anthony Shadid.  The two-time Pulitzer Prize winning Middle East correspondent had been surreptitiously reporting inside Syria, covering President Assad’s brutal crackdown of the uprising there. Despite the risk of reporting under a ban on foreign reporters, Mr. Shadid was in Syria because he had made it his journalistic mission to cover the Arab revolutions for Western audiences. He was unrelenting in his belief that the world needed to understand these movements and whether it was from Tunis, Benghazi, or Tahrir, Mr Shadid’s words helped define the narrative of the Arab Spring.

Tragically, he suffered a severe asthma attack on Thursday evening and died in the field. He was 43 years old. His colleague, the photojournalist Tyler Hicks, carried his body across the border from Syria to Turkey.

I acknowledge that for a region that has known so much suffering and loss, to mourn an individual ‘Western’ reporter’s life may seem aggrandizing or decadent.  But the tributes that poured out from across the Arab World and from the United States were testaments to the fact that Mr. Shadid transcended the role of an ordinary foreign correspondent. He was a rare Arab-American star of the journalism establishment: an award-winning reporter, a beautiful writer, and above all, a deeply respectful advocate for cultural understanding.

I first encountered Anthony Shadid not through his articles in the Washington Post or the New York Times, but as the author of a haunting book about the Iraq war, Night Draws Near. In stark contrast with the embedded military and Green Zone dispatches offered by most American journalists, Anthony Shadid set out to tell the story of ordinary Iraqis in the months leading up to and following the invasion. Nobody else was illuminating that side of the story and it fundamentally changed my understanding of the war. But what struck me even more was Anthony Shadid’s uniquely American voice, his dualism.  His ability to speak Arabic and write English as if a poet, his historical and deeply personal view of the Arabs and Americans… it was that double consciousness that gave his work its grace and its insight.

Unlike many reporters, he did not believe in ‘parachuting’ into the region during a crisis. He lived there, spoke the language fluently, and understood the nuances of the societies he covered. He wrote about the joy, the music, the warmth of the Middle East… and he wrote about the bitter politics and the violent sectarianism. As a result of that duality, Anthony Shadid’s dispatches allowed us to understand the humanity of the Arab world alongside its tragedies. And perhaps his intimate understanding of that fragile balance was a reflection of his own story.

Anthony Shadid was born in Oklahoma to Lebanese-American parents. His family had left their ancestral village in southern Lebanon generations earlier in pursuit of the American dream. Shadid studied political science and journalism at the University of Wisconsin and he recognized early in his career that he wanted to cover the region his family had once called home. He moved to Cairo to learn Arabic, befriended scholars including Edward Said, and wrote his debut book about the legacy of political Islam. His star rose quickly and he went on to cover stories from Palestine to Iraq for esteemed newspapers such as the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. In 2009, he was offered one of the most important jobs in American journalism, that of a Middle East correspondent for the New York Times.  It was opportune timing since it would give him the support and the platform he needed to cover the Arab Spring in all its complexity and depth.

Shadid’s unique voice is best reflected in his final project, a memoir of his family’s history in Lebanon called House of Stone that was scheduled to be published a few weeks after his untimely death. It is the story of his personal return to embattled southern Lebanon and his journey to renovate his great grandfather’s home so that it would become his family’s bayt, the home where he had planned to raise his son with his wife and the home he wished would become a symbol of his hopes for the future of the Middle East. I encourage you to seek out and read his work as a source of optimism against the cynicism we often feel about the role of media in the world today.

In Anthony Shadid’s death, the United States and the Arab world have lost a rare, critical bridge of understanding. His writing is his enduring legacy and he leaves behind those articles and books as a gift to a new generation of journalists. For that, I am both deeply saddened and deeply grateful.