WHEEL ME OUT - New Muslim Cool

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Scenes from New Muslim Cool – Hamza's wife Rafiah with son; Halal beef franks; news coverage of the mosque raid; M-Team on stage

Could you tell us about the raid by the FBI?

HP: They made an excuse in order to raid the mosque, because they’d been doing surveillance on us for so long, sooner or later they had to justify their budget.

JT: The raid was not something that we expected. I was trying to keep the 9/11 and security frame out of the film, but as much as we tried to keep it out, it imposed itself on us.

What goals did you initially have for the film? Did these shift?

JT: They got refined. I had this distant interest in some of the big questions. It felt like a lot of post 9/11 films about Muslims were either pejorative or bland—“don’t hate us, we’re just like you”—and I felt both were inaccurate. The project ended up being about humanising a community that’s been defined by others.

Also we didn’t expect to delve so deeply into the question of what faith is, or what makes us good; what makes some people try to do the right thing and some people feel like they can’t. Or the question of how much power do we have in ourselves to change?

The film also deals with different ideas of masculinity.

HP: It breaks a lot of stereotypes. You have a guy raising a son on his own. The whole Latino machismo is out the door. The whole mixing of races too - a Latino marrying an African-American. You have the Muslim working with a Jew, a Muslim doing music, which could be a big no-no in some parts of the world. You have a Muslim man watching his kids while his wife goes to work, changing diapers in a macho way...

JT: In some ways it’s a film about a new way of seeing masculinity, seeing this man’s relationship with different women and how he allows them into his life. That’s not something you see everyday.

HP: One audience member surprised me when she commented that everyone around me is a woman: my mother, my grandmother, my wife, Carol [who is working on the poetry with Hamza], all my major influences are women.

The Prophet Muhammad had a lot of strong women in his life didn’t he?

HP: The first person to embrace Islam was his wife. The first person to sponsor the Islamic movement was a woman. The first martyr in Islam was a woman. 30% of Sharia law comes from a woman.

What attracted you to Islam in the first place?

HP: I was selling drugs and being in the streets and partying. These were all false forms of happiness – everyone I knew that was involved with this still wasn’t happy. The only true happiness I saw was when my friend had a relationship with God. He disconnected himself from all the drugs we were selling. That was the main thing that made me go through that change. I was thinking old when I was young. I was 21.

What issues of faith did the film bring up for you?

HP: When filming started I was just beginning to go deep into studying traditional Islamic knowledge. The major problem we have in Islam is that people are not educated on the Prophet Muhammad’s character and when you are, you know you can’t react certain ways. He tolerated a lot of abuse that was done to him without ever retaliating. The more I learned about his character the more I learned that my character had nothing to do with his and I had to start changing the way I behaved if I was going to call myself a Muslim.

What are the next steps for the film?

JT: I want to make the film a dialogue tool in as many places we can, whether it’s about people who are struggling with how to form a Muslim identity that’s consistent with pluralism or whether it’s other youth questions. We’re also working with partners to develop a version of the film that’s going to be made available to jails.

What reactions do you get from different faith communities and non-believers?

JT: Sometimes the biggest push back we get is from people I would consider my fellow secular humanists, who were outraged that I would be making a film about people who were religious without making them look like idiots. I admit to that bias myself when I started, and if I had been assigned a film about a Christian I probably would have been a jerk, but because I was making a film about a Muslim I wasn’t implicated in the story in any way, I was like “let me approach this guy with compassion and respect and curiosity about what it’s like to have a deep faith experience.” Ultimately I believe God is a word for something we all identify with in one way or another, most of us have a sense that there’s something that connects us. WMO

More about New Muslim Cool. Find out how you can book your own community screening

www.newmuslimcool.com