By Damon Griffin
Since September 11, some Americans have made negative assumptions about Muslims, including that they are violent, hate America and are cruel to women. The American Islamic Congress (AIC) and the civic initiative Project Nur are working to change this stigma.
Last Thursday, a crowd of about 30 students and faculty gathered in Dodge Hall for a screening of the Egyptian film “Dunia: Kiss Me Not on the Eyes.”
The film was originally shown as part of the Boston Muslim Film Festival, which ran from Oct. 13 to Oct. 23, but AIC and Project Nur arranged for an on-campus screening, which was co-sponsored by the student group Awareness Brings Change.
The film stars Hanan Turk as Dunia, a recent graduate of a university in Egypt who is obsessed with “The Arabian Nights” and passionate about becoming a dancer.
Dunia’s two passions – literature and dancing – are compartmentalized into individual scenes with each of the men she has fallen in love with, but the two passions inevitably merge.
Honor Pope-Lance, a middler communication studies and religious studies major, said she enjoyed the film but found it confusing at times.
“I don’t know if it was a cultural confusion or the filmmaking,” she said.
Nasser Weddady, a founder of AIC, said he arrived in the United States in 2000 and helped create the Muslim Film Festival. A native of the African country Mauritania, Weddady said he grew up in Libya and Syria.
Shortly after September 11, while living in Kentucky, Weddady said he was arrested and detained after authorities discovered he was Muslim. He was released when they were convinced he had no terrorist affiliations, he said.
Weddady then moved to New York, but said that while visiting Boston in 2007, he noticed anti-Muslim writings in the subway. It was this experience that prompted him to start AIC, in response to the negative attention Muslim culture was receiving following September 11, he said.
“There’s no sense in muzzling people,” Weddady said. “We’re trying to build bridges.”
Project Nur President Assia Belguedj was instrumental in bringing “Dunia” to campus and said she thinks the group’s goals are about creating a space for other faiths and different beliefs.
“We are trying to communicate issues from the Muslim world to the west, but also from Muslims to Muslims,” Belguedj said.
The specific issue of importance in the film, she said, is domestic violence and the forms it takes in the Muslim world.
Throughout “Dunia,” a tense tone is set, which culminates in one scene toward the end of the film, involving female circumcision. Dunia climbs the stairs to her apartment and hears the screams of the young girl picked for the procedure, before giving in to the urge to save her, but she is too late. Female circumcision is sometimes foreign to US audiences, and Belguedj said it is what she means by the issue of domestic violence in the Muslim world.
The on-campus event also included a seven-minute belly dance performance by six Northeastern dancers. Belly dancing is the form of dance Dunia practices in the film.
Khalid Lum, a sophomore international affairs major and treasurer of Project Nur, said the film is a-typical of Arab films.
“I think it’s something people need to be exposed to,” Lum said.
