The Muslim woman (Allah bless her tortured soul) is all the rage these days. The woman in black is, one could almost say, The New Black.
If she isn’t creating a storm across Christendom by demanding to wear those ridiculous black veils on Oxford Street, then her burning quest to be out of her hijab and into her bekeenee is being immortalised in books with saucy titles such as The Caged Virgin and Lipstick Jihad.
Muslim Women on Celluloid Season kicks off with a bang this year with two new releases on the local circuit: The Syrian Bride, directed by Eran Riklis and co-written with Suha Arrad and Sabah, directed by Ruba Naddaa.
Both follow the trials and tribulations of that poor creature, the Muslim woman who is (it is assumed) either a bored and pampered middle-class “kept” wife, or a pitiable non-person, living in perpetual servitude to her husband, father and brothers. The heroines are racing against the clock to escape arranged marriages. They want true love. They have boorish fathers. They want to go to university and learn the intricacies of nuclear fission, instead of staying home and pureeing the humus.
Yawn.
But those who would bandy about accusations of cultural ventriloquism by “the West” and its filmmakers, may find it a tad harder this time around. The Syrian Bride, set in a Druze village in the Golan Heights in northern Israel, is directed by an Israeli, and co-written by a Druze. The director of the second offering, Sabah — is a Canadian born of Syrian extraction.
As with most chick flicks, a bit of Islam notwithstanding, there is the standard quixotic gaggle of womenfolk, a matriarch, a bitter sister-in-law, and a teenager with aspirations “of studying”. Then there is Sabah, a fortysomething, never married Syrian-Canadian woman and her quest for true love against the odds: which are, specifically, her religion, her culture and her family.
Sabah is set in Toronto, Canada, and opens with a scene of our long-suffering heroine, Sabah (Arsinee Khanjian) giving a miniskirt-clad lovely the covetous once-over at the bus stop. In an age where “bling hijab” is common even on the streets of some of the most hardline countries such as Saudi Arabia, Sabah’s Islamic garb (white pantaloons included) give her the appearance of a Franciscan abbess. Sabah rushes home and stares at herself in the full-length mirror, to the strains of woeful Arabic music. The filmmaker makes it clear very early on that this primitive appendage, the veil, is the source of Sabah’s pathology: and that the route to her emancipation must by necessity involve ridding herself of it.
Sabah, who has never had a man or ever sipped wine, meets the wholesome, blue-eyed carpenter Steve, who turns her world around. Before we know it, the God-fearing Sabah has become a fiddlestick — sipping Chardonnay and cutting a caper across the parks of Toronto for trysts with her new lover.
Though Steve himself just can’t seem to understand it, Sabah wants to keep things quiet — because it is mamno-ah (forbidden). Her priggish elder brother, Majid (Jeff Seymour), who is the family breadwinner — naturally threatens to cut her off once the affair gets out in the open. A classic case of throwing stones from glass houses, as his own wife is having an affair, and his niece is trying to put the brakes on a marriage he has arranged for her because she wants to go clubbing.
The younger girl, Souhaire (Fadia Nadda), a vampish and generally outré teenager with a penchant for belly-dancing (behind her uncle’s back) is another stage-setter for a common theme in such films: the old generation-gap tearjerker. The mother’s marriage was arranged, so she’d rather fall dead than see it happen to her daughter. Et cetera.
And so we follow the hapless Sabah, the almost-spinster, who finds true love in the arms of her Canadian man, because, as the constant references in the film point out: “They treat their women better than our men do.”
Less of an ethnographic tale is The Syrian Bride, made by an Israeli man about a Druze wedding in Najdal Shams, a village in the Golan Heights in northern Israel. Mona (Clara Khoury), a young Israeli Druze girl with an unhappy past marriage, is about to be wedded to a groom she has never seen, from neighbouring Syria. The Druze are a sect of Islam known to be particularly insular, rarely mixing with or intermarrying with even other Muslims. A marriage has been arranged, as per custom, between two families, and the parties have not ever met.
The wedding hides an impending catastrophe. This time around, however, the filmmaker took the trouble to be more nuanced and less ham-fisted in tackling issues around arranged marriage. The marriage itself, one discovers, is not the tragedy.
Mona’s family, Israeli-Druze — arranged the marriage between their daughter and the family of the groom, a famous Syrian comedian. As per tradition, the bride goes to live with the groom’s family after the wedding. Though tears at leaving her mother’s house are said to be the staple of brides everywhere, Mona’s tears tell of a greater sorrow. As Amal tells the wedding photoÂÂgrapher in the hair salon who asks Mona why she looks so sad: “We will never see her again.”
Syria and Israel mutually regard the other as enemy states, and no diplomatic relations exist between the countries. The holder of an Israeli passport is not allowed to travel to Syria, and Syrians cannot enter Israel. When Mona leaves her village to live with her groom in Syria, she assumes her husband’s Syrian citizenship, and forfeits her Israeli travel documents. Once she crosses the border, she will never be allowed back into Israel.
The film takes place over a single day, and event. Though the film is titled The Syrian Bride it is not Mona who is the designated heroine. In fact, she rarely speaks throughout the film: and spends most of it sitting glassy-eyed in her bridal finery in the family’s sitting room, receiving guests and staring off into the distance.
The designated heroine is Mona’s older sister, Amal, a housewife and mother, who is (as Muslim women are wont in the movies and popular fiction) torn between the life in the kitchen, and her dreams of going to university. Her angst is not helped much by her bearish and mustachioed husband, Amin, who says little save the occasional line about needing to “be a man” — and stands around looking apish. For this reason, we never really find out precisely what it is about Amin that his wife finds so odious. Maybe it’s his moustache.
The film could have done without the moralising that the route to the Muslim woman’s emancipation is by casting off her man, and to the contrary, the route to her sorrow is by marrying him.
As far as entertainment goes, both films score, the latter perhaps more than the former. But insofar as the reality of Muslim women’s lives go, one can’t help but feeling one hasn’t been given any insight. Not anything new, that is.