“There Are a Lot of People Out There Who Feel Like They Don’t Belong”: An Interview with Farah Nousheen

Interview by Ahmed Nassef
Photos by Raj Luke

MWU!: Describe your personal journey as a Muslim.

Farah Nousheen: A few years before September 11th, I became completely out of touch with Muslims and Muslim institutions. It was a conscious decision. I had a realization that I did not need to go to a mosque. I used to be a very religious person. I went to the mosque all the time to pray, but I found that most people go there to socialize. I also felt very limited in what I am allowed to say at the mosque. I could not be myself there. I tried all kinds of different mosques in Chicago and Seattle, but it was the same feeling everywhere. So I just stopped going, except for the Eid prayers twice a year. I became very distant, getting to the point of becoming more of a cultural Muslim.

I think my experience had a lot to do with being a woman in an environment where almost all the leadership were men. At prayers, women we sat in a separate area with all the crying kids. It made me feel less important.

There are a lot of people out there who feel like they don’t belong.

In all this time, I learned a lot about other religions, but spiritually, Islam is still the only space where I feel comfortable.

Making the movie has helped me better intellectualize my experience as a Muslim. Before, I used to accept things. Now, I have a far better understanding of my history and what it means to me to be a Muslim.

Most of the imams at the mosques may have good knowledge of certain hadiths [reported sayings of Prophet Muhammad], but how much knowledge do they have of Islamic history, the experience of colonization, and non-Islamic knowledge? Without those things, you really can’t serve the majority of people.

MWU!: What got you interested in making films?

FN: Getting to actually make my own film has been a progression. I grew up watching lots of Bollywood and American movies. Then I started seeing more independent and art films from Europe. After September 11th, I felt I needed to do something. So I called up the 911 Media Arts Center in Seattle to see about organizing a screening. They told me they’d give me the space as long as I’d put together the film screenings. So I organized a screening of an interview film with Edward Said on Orientalism and his work on the Palestine issue and an experimental film by Elia Suleiman. It went great—70 people came and it felt so empowering.

So I followed up by putting together a 2-day festival of films on Muslim women. The films were from Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, and the US. And 150 people came.

While I researched all these films for the festival, I realized that there is a film missing. All the films reflected women from a particular country or ethnic group, but we needed a film that reflected the diversity of Muslim American women. America is one of the few places in the world where you can find Muslim women with so many ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

MWU!: What was the experience like in making this film?

FN: It was torture. I kept a journal while I was making it, and reading it now, I had so many sleepless nights, lots of tears, fears about whether people will accept it and about whether I am doing the right thing.

MWU!: What was your purpose in making the film?

FN: This is not an issue-based film. It’s just about the women themselves. I had a very open style. I never started with a specific agenda—I never set out to make a “progressive” film.

MWU!: Was it hard finding women willing to talk in the film?

FN: With all the anti-Muslim stuff around, some people were afraid to speak out. But there were also women who were eager to speak and educate people about Islam. I put the word out in every community and asked every individual I'd meet, even to the point of asking strangers on the bus when I saw a Muslim woman and asking her if she'd be interested, conversative to progressive, Somali to Iranian to Indonesian, young and elderly. There was a lot of support from Muslim organizations as well as media organizations who were also putting the word out for me. So in a way, it ended up being easy to find women to speak.

MWU!: In the film, you deal with some topics that are usually off limits in conservative circles, like lesbianism and pre-marital sex, aren’t you worried that you will be criticized by the Muslim American establishment?

FN: I just wanted to give voice to Muslim women. It comes down to defining what a Muslim is. If someone says they are Muslim, I am not there to deny them the opportunity to speak.

MWU!: What would you say to people who say that the women you picked don’t accurately represent Muslim women?

FN: I would say, Go out there and make your own film too. I think when Muslims make more films and speak in their own voices, that can only be a good thing.

Read the MWU! review of Nazrah.

Nazrah has won the Film Award by the National Association of Muslim Women, which will show clips of the film in their upcoming national conference in Richmond, Virginia on August 16. Nazrah has also been submitted to the film festival at the annual Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) convention on September 1. As of this writing, ISNA had not confirmed approval of the film for screening. For more information on screenings and how to obtain a copy, visit the Nazrah website.