Philadelphia Weekly

In A Jihad for Love, the first major documentary about the lives of devout Muslims who are also gays and lesbians, four young Iranian exiles talk about what happened at home that forced them to flee.

It's the spring of 2005, and they're holed up in a one-bedroom apartment somewhere in central Turkey, waiting to hear if the U.N. high commissioner for refugees will grant them refugee status.

One of them, Mojtaba, says he was married to a man named Mehrdad just a few months before. Their ceremony was back in Shiraz, the Iranian city where he grew up.

"What was on the table?" his friend asks.

At Persian weddings, a table called the sofreh holds symbolic foods and little items for luck.

"Everything," Mojtaba answers. "The mirror, the candles, the Koran, nuts, sweets. It was perfect. They even had those sweet noghl, the kind you have at real weddings."

They all laugh. Mojtaba explains that some guests videotaped the ceremony, and the tapes reached the police. He immediately took a bus out of Shiraz and made a trek up to secular Turkey.

Homosexuality is illegal and punishable by death in Iran. An Iranian human-rights organization estimates that 4,000 people charged with lavaat (sodomy) were executed in Iran from the start of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 through the mid-'90s.

Mehrdad got left behind, and even today Mojtaba doesn't know where he is. "He was my first introduction to love," he tells his friends.

Mojtaba's seemingly irreconcilable love of both his Islamic heritage and his partner is shared by many of Jihad's 13 subjects, who live in Iran, Turkey, India, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and France.

Maryam, a lesbian in Cairo, chooses to keep her hair covered with a head scarf, and wishes the Koran spelled out a punishment for lesbians--maybe getting lashed 100 times would cure her. Still, she holds hands with her girlfriend as they walk to the mosque together.

When Mazen, one of the Cairo 52, a group of gay men arrested and often severely tortured after a 2001 raid on a floating nightclub, calls his mother from his new apartment in Paris, he notes excitedly that he got the lease on Eid ul-Nabi, the day of the Prophet's birthday celebration.

Parvez Sharma, the film's director and a gay Indian Sunni Muslim, says he wanted to tell the stories of gay Muslims who find meaning and solace in their faith, partly as a response to films by non-Muslim directors about human rights in Islamic countries.

He spent six years filming Jihad, traveling to seven countries and gathering 400 hours of footage. He often traveled undercover as a tourist, sandwiching his interviews with innocuous footage of the pyramids in Cairo, for instance, to evade border patrol. Many of his subjects' faces are blurred out, for their own safety and for the safety of their families back home.

"Right now Islam is under attack, and the film is in many ways a defense of Islam," Sharma says. "I started making it after 9/11, and I was very angry then. I could've fallen into the trap that I notice a lot of gay Western activists are falling into, like unilateral Iran-bashing for instance. But realized I needed to present the fact that being gay or lesbian in Chelsea isn't the same as being gay or lesbian in Lucknow. It's a different context."

The film recently screened at the Istanbul International Film Festival, and Sharma was nervous about returning to Turkey since he recorded Mojtaba and his friends in 2005. In the last three years, Sharma says, the rise of religious extremism has made conversation about gay and lesbian rights very difficult.