5 Feet of Fury

“A Jihad for Love”: documentary about gay Muslims

“As a Muslim and openly admitted homosexual, Sharma had to challenge himself to make the documentary in a way that would neither make Islam look bad nor be apologetic. ‘Sharing some of the stories of condemnation, isolation, [and] pain would make it easy to issue a blanket critique of Islam,’ he explains, ‘[but] as a Muslim I could not allow myself to join the bandwagon of Islamophobes. I knew that I had to be a defender of the faith as a Muslim filmmaker and at the same time engage in a critique of what I knew was wrong in orthodox Islam’s condemnation of homosexuality.'”