Both Danial and I saw your movie again… I cannot find words to express our gratitude and admiration for this brilliant and challenging undertaking. Mashallah, you are truly a hero. I intend to personally arrange showings at all major schools and colleges in Islamabad, including the Beaconhouse School System. Please let me know if there is any other way that I can help promote and publicize this great effort…in Pakistan or Washington… there were so many occasions on which I cried at the intensity of feeling and depth… thank you for all that you do for a better understanding and promotion of Islam. Bravo and God bless.
Danial and Mrs. Fauzia Kasuri head the Beaconhouse School System which teaches thousands of students in Pakistan and abroad.
Ahmed’s media profile is now as high as that of any living cultural anthropologist. One does not have to agree with all his positions to recognize that, in the specific but crucial field of Islam and relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, his life’s work has done much to advance the values of anthropology. His celebrity should be welcomed as a gift to the discipline.
From a review of “Journey into America” by Jonathan Benthall, former Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute, in Anthropology Today.
We were welcomed in the small town of Revel by festival director Denis Piel, a former photographer for Vogue and director of the film Love is Blind. Piel had started the festival to facilitate dialogue between different world cultures.
Nestled in a medieval village in the French countryside, we spent our time eating delicious international food and watching four films a day from all corners of the world. One of the viewing locations was Piel’s Château de Padiès, an elegant 13th century castle-like home that was once occupied by Napoleon’s biographer who accompanied him to St. Helena Island.
The film selections ranged from classics like Edge of the City with Sidney Poitier to modern-day, in competition films like Jackson about America’s homeless. The Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino, which, like ours, deals with themes of American identity in the face of immigration, was presented by the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Tom Stern, the film’s director of photography. It was great to meet and compare notes with filmmakers who were working on similar subjects like Deborah Harse, whose film Marathon Beirut, For the Love of Lebanon, also dealt with questions of Islam and how Westerners perceive the religion.
When it came time for our film, I was unsure how the audience would respond. When the lights came up, however, my concerns were put to rest. There was an audible hush and a “wow” was heard as applause rang out. It was a thrill to see something we had all worked so hard on over the past year received so well. Craig and I got up to speak and answer enthusiastic questions about the story behind the film and how it came together. We spoke about the film’s goal of improving relations between Muslims and non-Muslims as well as the technical aspects of the production like our method of having every team member film with their own small cameras.
The film touched a nerve with the audience, and not entirely in the ways I had expected. Some of the responses had to do with the Western perception of Islam and how our film challenged those perceptions. Others responded to different themes such as a German man living in France who spoke about the challenge of living in a society alongside people who are culturally different. When the Berlin Wall came down, he explained, he realized that he actually had more in common with the French, who don’t share his language, than the East Germans. Read the rest of this entry »
Please note that the event will now begin at 5:30 PM due to the timing of the breaking of the Ramadan fast. The film screening will conclude by 7:00 PM. The panel discussion and iftar dinner will take place in nearby McShain Lounge. Maps will be provided and staff will be on hand to direct guests to the dinner and discussion.
A year later, I am still struck by the man. We asked people throughout the country who their role models were. Many African American Muslims said WD Mohammed. After a year of hearing about the man, his legacy and all that he did for the country, I would put him at the top of my list as well.
Before the trip started, I knew very little about the impact of WD Mohammed. I knew his history and when he died , I knew it would be a big deal. But his cultural import, and the direction and heroic vision he gave to African American Muslims have been staggering to me.
He changed the direction of the African American Muslim community, led them from his father’s Nation of Islam to Sunni Islam, and encouraged Muslims to integrate into American life.
One Imam told me that WD Muhammed is the reason that he and many other African Americans “are not on the street selling drugs, hangin’ with the gangs. People don’t understand what he did for America in taking African Americans to mainstream Islam. We could have been gangbangers; instead we live the best life we can”. We heard this same sentiment over and over—that he saved peoples lives, kept them off the streets, inspired many to work in the community instead of being part of the destruction of the community.
The communities that followed his examples were, to me, the most inspiring that we met. His impact on the Muslim community is rivaled by none as far as I can tell and yet the anniversary of his death is nowhere to be found in the mainstream media while we are on our third month of Michael Jackson memorials. Today, I think we should remember the man and be thankful for his extraordinary legacy.
Since its premiere at the Islamic Society of North America’s (ISNA) Film Festival on July 4th, 2009, “Journey into America” has received much acclaim and praise, from the strong film review it received from The Khaleej Times in Dubai to its invitations to world class film festivals like C&CIFF in southern France and to the El Sawy International Film Festival in Cairo, Egypt. Now, the State Department has shown interest in the film, per a recent article ‘New Documentary Film Explores Muslim Experience in America’ by Ahmed Mohammad.
The State Department’s Bureau of International Information Program (IIP) has a world wide audience that prints material in Arabic, Chinese, French, Persian, Russian and Spanish. The purpose of this division of the State Department is to engage with international audiences on issues which the United States government finds imperative to American interests. The publication of Mr. Mohammad’s article on American.gov not only gives our documentary an immense amount of publicity in the global arena of politics and international relations but it also proves that high ranking American officials have endorsed the message which we communicated.
Please come out and join us for a screening of the film hosted by the Berkely Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University. The event will take place in the ICC auditorium on September 15 at 6:00 with a discussion and Ramadan Iftaar afterwords in McShane Lounge.
“Journey into America” was accepted into the El Sawy International Film Festival April 4-8 in Cairo, Egypt. We’re very excited about this. Please check out the website for the Amritsa Film Festivals and for El Sawy.
Also, the program for the C&CIFF festival should be coming out this week. The film is scheduled to be shown at the festival at 5:30 p.m. on Monday September 8. So anyone near Padies, France please come out to the festival .
A terrific review in the Khaleej Times out of Dubai. Read the entire review by Asif Ismail here.
A snippet of the review is below:
Even though the American odyssey was undertaken “to learn about Islam in America,” Ahmed says he found he could not “do so without learning the American identity.” Early on, the professor and his fellow travelers discovered a key reality: that people had different ideas about “what it means to be American” or “who can be an American?” Their experiences at each destination — be it Plymouth in Massachusetts, the place where the pilgrims established the first settlement; Las Vegas and New Orleans, the cities known for casinos and carnival; or Dearborn in Michigan, home to the largest Muslim community in the United States — would underline the same.
Along the way, the group also traced the roots of Islam in America. On Sapelo Island, off the coast of Georgia, they meet a descendant of an African slave brought to the country in the 19th century, who tells them about the fascinating remnants of Islam still visible on the island (such as churches facing east to Makkah). In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the American heartland, they visit the oldest mosque in America.
The film reveals that America is not a monolithic entity many flag-waving Americans want the country to be and many of its critics in the Muslim world project it to be. Over centuries, America has provided rich materials to many discerning voyagers. From Alex de Tocqueville in the early 19th century to Sacha Baron Cohen in our own era, a bevy of writers, thinkers and artists from overseas have left us many brilliant imprints of the land, and its people, culture and social systems that range from the classic to the comedic.
We very proud to announce that the Culture and Cultures Intercultural Film Festival has accepted ‘Journey into America’ as a major feature of the annual event. The festival will take place starting September 5th through the 19th in Chateau de Padies in southwestern France.
Dennis Piel, the director of the festival, has had his photographs published in GQ, Vanity Fair, and Vogue and is also an award winning documentary filmmaker with ‘Love is Blind’ (1993). The festival’s mandate is ’to use the power of film to show and explore cultural diversity, to promote cross-cultural understanding through films focused on the lifestyles, values, and attitudes of individuals who inhabit our world community’. Piel has also asked Journey into America to have a featured panel discussion. Here is a link to the festivals description.
We very proud to announce that the Culture and Cultures Intercultural Film Festival has accepted ‘Journey into America’ as a major feature of the annual event. The festival will take place starting September 5th through the 19th in Chateau de Padies in southwestern France.
