Jihad Rehab is about compassion, not bigotry
Opinion
Although I was just in middle school at the time, I remember the social and political climate in the United States directly after the 9/11 attacks. Although President George W. Bush and other American leaders helpfully urged Americans to embrace their Muslim neighbors rather than blame them collectively for the acts of terrorists, there was no denying the sheer level of rage the country felt at the people who would commit this kind of violence.
That rage culminated in two wars that would go on for years, and a massive expansion of America’s policing powers. Perhaps no greater monument to that expansion of the American security state exists than the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which the federal government used to house suspected terrorists captured after 9/11.
For many Americans, the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay (often referred to as “Gitmo”) represented the worst humanity had to offer—they were ruthless terrorists who deserved to be held for years without trial and even waterboarded. Although Americans eventually turned against some of the harshest measures of the War On Terror, the continued presence of the prison camp in Cuba—multiple presidents have failed to close it and move the prisoners stateside—serves as a reminder that the rage most Americans felt on 9/11 remains with us.
Jihad Rehab, a new documentary by filmmaker Meg Smaker, asks its viewers to consider the possibility that at least some of those locked away by the United States after the onset of the War on Terror were not monsters but men.
Smaker spent years filming at the Mohammed Bin Naif Center in Saudi Arabia, which was set up to rehabilitate extremists (some of whom are former Gitmo detainees). She follows several Yemeni men who had spent time in Gitmo following their arrest for involvement with terrorism.
Over the hour and forty-eight minutes of the film, we learn the intimate details of the lives of these men—including the crimes they were alleged to have committed, their harrowing experience in Gitmo, and even their romantic interests.
Many Americans will likely find it hard to stomach such a humanizing portrayal of men who, in one case, worked as terrorist bomb makers. The bomb maker in question is a sort of success story. After spending time in the Saudi rehab program, he learns to leverage his technical skills and starts a career making remote controls for car alarms.
It would likely be difficult for an American who lost a loved one to the 9/11 attacks or the subsequent wars in Afghanistan or Iraq to feel any sympathy for someone who worked as a terrorist. But Smaker’s humane approach to this fraught topic reminds us that human beings aren’t simply angels or demons; as we bounce through life’s complexities, we are often pushed or pulled in one direction or another.
I recall a story I once reported about Life After Hate, a program that works to rehabilitate American domestic extremists. I spoke to one staffer there, Sammy Rangel, who was a former extremist himself—he was part of a vicious gang that had no doubt committed its fair share of despicable crimes. When he was imprisoned, he was seen as irredeemable.
“I had a lot of mental health diagnoses that said I was incorrigible, I was anti-social…basically that I couldn’t change,” he told me. And yet here I was, speaking to a man who today not only rejects all forms of hatred and violence but who also has helped countless other people do the same.
I found out that he had been brutally physically and sexually abused as a child; after learning the details of his harrowing upbringing, it would’ve been more surprising to me if he didn’t go down a dark path.
Like Rangel, many of the men at the Mohammed Bin Naif Center were funneled into a life of violence. Some of them had embarked onto a violent path as teenagers and had spent fifteen years behind bars. While there’s no justification for terrorism, there’s also little justification for not trying to understand why some people are more likely to make these dark choices than others—and how we can help them make better choices in the future. Jihad Rehab is ultimately a compassionate film that forces us to confront the truth offered by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, that “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”
Given the subject matter, it would be unsurprising to me to see this documentary come under fierce criticism from conservatives, who tend to embrace a harsher form of criminal justice and have less sympathy for sociological explanations for crime or terrorism. And yet the most damaging criticism towards Jihad Rehab has come from a different direction.
The film was selected to appear at the prestigious Sundance film festival; at that point, it almost immediately came under fire from political progressives and some Muslim-American filmmakers, who worried that the movie does little more than promote stereotypes about Muslims and Islam; the fact that Smaker comes from outside the Muslim community was also seen as problematic.
These complaints weighed on Sundance, which eventually issued a sort of apology following the resignation of two staffers. In that apology, Sundance Institute CEO Joana Vicente and Festival Director Tabitha Jackson wrote, “In this case it is clear that the showing of this film hurt members of our community—in particular, individuals from Muslim and MENASA communities—and for that we are deeply sorry.” (MENASA is an acronym for Muslim and Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian).
Following that apology, a group of Muslim and MENASA filmmakers wrote an open letter to Sundance airing their criticisms of the film, and some of the complaints are worth digesting. Critics have pointed to the reality that men featured in the film are in a mandatory rehab program in Saudi Arabia, a repressive autocracy—making it difficult to imagine they could freely air their thoughts in a documentary. While this complaint has some truth to it, the alternative would be simply to not interview the men at all, which would give the audience even less of a window into their lives and render these rehabilitation programs even more opaque.
I’m sympathetic to some of the complaints the film’s Muslim critics raised about the entertainment industry as a whole. It’s true that Hollywood has historically focused on stories about Arabs or Muslims that revolve around trite stereotypes. Especially if you look back at the 1990s and early 2000s it feels like every movie featuring someone from those two groups is about terrorism. No one would like their group to be portrayed exclusively through the lens of violence or criminality. It’s also true that Muslim filmmakers have been virtually absent from the industry for far too long.
One reason I’m a huge fan of the Hulu series Ramy is that it helps rectify both problems. A show about an ordinary Muslim American young adult who largely deals with the exact same problems in their life as any other American offers a more authentic look at Muslim community than years of Hollywood claptrap.
Yes, Jihad Rehab is another film about Muslim terrorism, but the topic sadly remains newsworthy. Gitmo is still open. America is still heavily engaged militarily around the world in the name of the War on Terror; too many young Muslim men and women are still drawn to the appeal of terrorist groups, and the West is still too often responding to terrorism with a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel. We’ve done too little to understand the roots of Muslim terrorism, and Jihad Rehab is a nuanced and empathetic attempt to understand how and why these young men were drawn to terror.
Smaker is careful to not make the story about herself; other than a few sections that feature her questions, the film is carried by the subjects themselves speaking in their own words. I followed a similar practice when I shot two short documentaries last year—one in Morgantown, West Virginia and the other in Austin, Texas. My team and I made the editorial decision not to narrate during the course of the films; we wanted people to explain these communities on their own terms.
Tellingly, many of the initial critics of Jihad Rehab apparently hadn’t even watched it; they were apparently offended by the title.
Yes, as a Muslim, I would prefer for the term “jihad” to not be associated solely with terrorism. But terrorist groups themselves have recruited thousands of Muslims to their cause by invoking jihad, and the debate over religious violence within Muslim communities often centers on the term. It’s hardly an Islamophobic trope to refer to Muslim terrorists as jihadists or to call religious violence jihad. When the Lahore High Court in Pakistan ruled earlier this year that it was a crime to raise money for a prohibited extremist organization, the newspaper Dawn reported it as so in a headline: “Pleas of two TTP convicts dismissed: No one allowed to raise Jihad funds in Islamic state: LHC.”
It’s hard to shake the feeling that if I had directed this exact same film the exact same way, it would be getting little to no criticism from anyone. One film critic, Eric Kohn, lamented that Smaker was “a white woman who embedded herself in Saudi Arabia” while noting that the movie “turns on assumptions about Islamic misogyny and militant impulses.”
Does the color of her skin really disqualify her from being able to report on these topics? Here’s a bit of Islamic education for Kohn: Islam is by doctrine a race-blind religion. You will find Muslims of every skin color; members of my own extended family are both white and Muslim. The mosque I grew up attending in Atlanta featured men and women of basically every ethnic background.
Unfortunately, misogyny or militant impulses are not simply an assumption when it comes to Muslim extremists; they are a sad reality that Muslims themselves face on a daily basis in places where extremist groups run rampant. Tens of thousands of Pakistanis, for instance, have been murdered by terrorist groups the past two decades, and it is a constant struggle to prevent these groups from recruiting young, impressionable Pakistanis. It is perhaps just a function of luck that I myself was not murdered by one of these groups. A hotel I stayed in during a visit to Islamabad was blown to smithereens a year afterwards.
I would assert that films like Jihad Rehab do the exact opposite of promote bigoted stereotypes. The documentary shows how the people who end up in terrorist organizations are little different than anyone else; under the right circumstances, virtually anyone can be groomed and inducted into a terrorist organization—Muslims are no different.
The fact that a non-Muslim woman directed the film does nothing to disqualify it. I’ve been a professional journalist for more than a decade, who has reported on all sorts of topics. You don’t have to share any number of demographic characteristics with the subjects who you are reporting on; you simply have to do the work to honestly and fairly document their lives—which I believe Smaker did here to the best of her ability.
There is something extraordinarily American about the controversy around this film. Many otherwise progressive cultural institutions in the United States have adopted deeply reactionary and sectarian views about race over the past decade that have led them to question whether people with different ancestry can ever really understand or relate to each other. This is happening as other parts of the world are questioning this sectarian thinking.
I recall the film Jinnah, which is about the founder of Pakistan, the country where my parents were born. I watched it as a child, never thinking too much about who had directed or produced it. I didn’t even know the name of the actor who portrayed Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Many Westerners who know nothing about Pakistan probably could recognize the actor who was chosen to be Jinnah. His name was Sir Christopher Lee, a British actor who is famous for playing both Count Dracula and Count Dooku (my guess is readers of a certain age will be more familiar with one role versus the other).
The fact that Lee was not just a white man but a white British man (the U.K. had conquered and colonized Pakistan for centuries) played no role in how the film was received in Pakistan. It was adored by Pakistani audiences. Yes, Lee was not Pakistani and didn’t know exactly what it was like to live Jinnah’s life—but then again, neither do I. Would my ethnic heritage really make me more qualified to play Jinnah?
As Bina Shah, one of the Pakistani writers who penned the film later said of Lee, “It spoke to his versatility as an actor and his talent. When he got into costume, he put on the famous Jinnah cap—he was Jinnah. There was no question… He came to life for us, it was superb.”
A white British actor was able to powerfully portray the founder of Pakistan because people who come from different social and cultural backgrounds can understand each other. Skin and blood doesn’t define the limits of our imagination or our curiosity, and neither does religion.
Meg Smaker spent years crafting a careful and nuanced portrayal of men who worked hard to transition from a life of extremism to something better. It is my belief that if the film is picked up by distributors and released more broadly, it will help many Americans make the transition from the unadulterated rage they felt after 9/11 to a more constructive inquisitiveness about what drives people to terrorism—and how we can help people choose a better way. Those who are criticizing the film from the left should be wary about dissuading people from seeing a movie that ultimately serves progressive ends and could help soften American hearts towards Muslims.
The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism or its employees.
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Jilani can always be counted on to grapple with complexity; i.e., no easy answers. Thank you, Zaid!
Really interesting piece. The response of Sundance to activist pressure reminds me very much of Sierra Club’s initial response to activists recently demanding it stop trips to Israel. They panicked in the face of activist bullying, and cancelled the trips. A concerted outcry against Sierra Club for caving to the activists’ thuggery led Sierra Club to issue an apology for its thoughtless actions. I know nothing about how Sundance works, but it would be nice to think that they, too, might rethink what their panicked reaction was really about, and how they might be better prepared to rationally meet such attacks in the future. Maybe Jihad Rehab can still be given a chance at Sundance. If not, maybe the American public will get to see it and benefit from it anyway. One thing that seems consistent is the people who go to the trouble to get a film like Jihad Rehab booted from Sundance or Sierra Club trips to Israel cancelled spend little to no time condemning, bullying, harassing or otherwise trying to stop violent jihadists from carrying on their crusade. Violent jihadists are as hateful as white supremacists but, these days, seem more prolific in their spread of hate-based violence. Shutting this film out of Sundance was simply a means of shutting down discussion of the subject, so as not to interrupt or challenge the narrative that jihadists are mere victims, and nothing more.