Locating Muslim Cinema(s)

The project of locating Muslim cinemas is an inherently open-ended endeavor that serves more as a disciplinary provocation than as a clearly defined and finite task. The four essays collected here raise a series of questions that unsettle and reconfigure some of the most persistent boundaries in studies of world cinema. In “The Idea of a ‘Muslim Cinema,’” Imed Ben Labidi highlights the potential pitfalls of such an attempted mapping, focusing on Hollywood’s essentialized and essentializing portrayal of Muslims and Arabs. Conversely, while remaining within the confines of a small national industry, in “The Poetics of Tajik Cinema,” Sharofat Arabova transcends the implicit distortions of schematic periodization, tracing evolving traditions of film poetics across the major historical transformations of the Soviet and sovereign periods. Similarly, while feminist theory has been at the core of film studies since its inception, the two final pieces complicate understandings of the construction of gender in Muslim cinemas. Sitara Thobani’s “Locating the Tawa’if Courtesan–Dancer: Cinematic Constructions of Religion and Nation” resists the impulse to understand tawa’if solely in terms of gendered spectacle, instead exploring the less examined question of this figure’s Muslim identity. In the final piece, “Defa-e Moghadas and the Making of Social Cinema in Post-Revolutionary Islamic Iran,” Fakhri Haghani contrasts the front-line masculinist cinema of the Iranian “sacred defense” with social dramas that reveal undertheorized gender dynamics of sacrifice and justice. Each of these pieces, then, invigorates core questions within the field of religion and popular culture by positing Muslim cinema as a point of intersection at which Muslim participation in the creation and viewing of film may productively be explored, while simultaneously offering a broader, more universal alternative perspective by attending to cinema's functions in the quotidian lives of members of religious communities.