Issue No. 592
Culture
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27 June - 3 July 2002 Issue No. 592 Culture |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Things that are hidden
Based on an interview by Nur Elmessiri
Shems Friedlander, senior lecturer at the American University in Cairo (AUC) where he created the graphics curriculum and teaches courses in visual communications, came to Cairo eight years ago. Before that he was based in New York where he worked as a designer and art director on numerous magazines, including Look; designed, wrote and did the photography for numerous books on, among other subjects, Sufism; taught at the Parsons School of Design; had several photography and painting exhibitions; and received over 30 awards, including the Silver Award of the New York Art Directors' Club annual exhibition of graphic design. He has recently ventured into the realm of film-making.
Several summers ago, every day after teaching summer I would go back to my office and work on a book on the 13th century Muslim poet and sheikh Jalaluddin Rumi. After the book, Rumi: The Hidden Treasure (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2000 & London: Archetype Books, 2001) was completed I felt that I wanted to do a film, something which was new for me.
Last year I did conclude a half-hour documentary, Rumi: The Wings of Love (New York: Parabola Video, 2002). When I interviewed Seyed Hossein Nasr, professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University, for the film, he asked: "How did you come up with this idea of doing a film on Rumi?" And then he paused: "But of course you've been doing this for over 25 years."
I've been doing documentary photography of the whirling dervishes since I first went to Konya in 1973. At that time I was working on a book called The Whirling Dervishes, Being an Account of the Mevlevis and their Founder Jalaluddin Rumi. That was published by Macmillan in 1977, and then by SUNY Press from 1992 until last year. Now, Parabola has asked me if I'll revise and re-design it.
I'm also working on a second film called The Circles of Remembrance. The title comes from a hadith (saying of the Prophet Muhammed): "When you pass by the meadows of the Garden, graze! They asked: O Messenger of God, What are the meadows of the Garden? And he replied: The circles of remembrance."
This quote, and the reception I got from the people who saw the Rumi film in Cairo and the US, inspired me to work on another film, one on dhikr, the remembrance of Allah -- in Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, Morocco, the States. All Sufi orders are basically the same; the only difference is in the manner in which they invoke the name of Allah. The Mevlevis turn in a whirling costume; the Halveti have a very heavy, loud dhikr; some orders have a silent dhikr. There are variations, but in essence they are all doing the same thing: remembering God.
We've already done some shooting, for example, of Sheikh Ali Gomaa, a great theologian and scholar of hadith, giving a khutba (Friday sermon) in the Sultan Hassan Mosque on dhikr. I have, too, footage that didn't in the end fit the Rumi film, of Hamza El-Din, a wonderful Nubian singer and oud player, speaking about how sound, breath and sacred music are all involved in what the dhikr is. As in the Rumi film, I will incorporate interviews and still photographs. My mentor in terms of the idea of moving around in the still is Ken Burns who did an incredible series called The Civil War for PBS television.
All of the art I've done -- photography, painting, design, writing -- has been a personal endeavour, and a film has to be done with a team. Even though I wrote, produced and directed the Rumi film, I still didn't do the sound, lighting, camera work, or editing. Now I've understood that the best thing you can have is a good editor. I had 14 hours of footage, looked at all of it several times, and thought "I know there's a film hidden in there, but how am I going to dig it out?" Steve Sprung, a wonderful editor, really made this film. He has already agreed to work on the dhikr film. When you put a good team together you want to keep them. Especially when it's sensitive material like this.
I feel at this time it is important to make this kind of film. I first showed the Rumi film at the Cinema in the Spirit Film Festival in San Francisco in November -- right after 9/11. And the very positive reception I got made me feel that going through all the problems that occur in making a film is worth it.
In the West people love Rumi, but they don't understand that he spoke of metaphysical love. They think they can leave the Islam part out, and just take the loving poetry part. It doesn't work that way. Rumi says: "I am dust under the feet of the Prophet Muhammed." And the main thing I try to get across whenever I speak of Rumi is that he embraced all religions, all paths, and invited everyone, but he was a Muslim who did that.
No, I don't feel that, as a non-Arab or non-native of the Middle East I'm an outsider coming into an alien field. After all, I've been going to Istanbul and writing about Islam and Sufism for over 30 years. Also, Rumi said: "I'm neither from the East nor the West, no boundaries exist in my breast." And therefore we shouldn't make this distinction; we should try to find unity, whether through books, or films or just talking.
An 80-year-old Sheikh said to me: "I've been a sheikh for 50 years, and only now when I make the dhikr invocation do I have way in the back of my throat a taste of honey. And now I want to live."
It's that taste of honey that I would like to convey in the films I'm working on. I'm attempting to show that there are things that are hidden. There's the world every one of us sees if we have eyes to see, the world in which we work, have friends, talk, eat, sleep, whatever. There's also an inner world into which one can find the path...
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