ABSTRACT
Islam is practiced by almost one-and-a-half billion adherents around the world from Africa to the Middle East and Central, South and Southeast Asia and its numbers are growing significantly in North America and Europe. Traditions, cultural practices and historical factors differ both within nation-states and larger cultural communities, and consequently, have played a significant role in the establishment and evolution of cinema. A study of cinema throughout the Islamic world suggests homogeneity, which is not the position of this chapter. Even “the world of Islam” is problematic from this point of view: Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, the Maghrib countries in North Africa are linked by a common religion; however, this is not the case, for instance, in sub-Saharan Africa. In some of the dominantly “Islamic” countries such as Egypt, landmark works have been accomplished by non-Muslim filmmakers such as Youssef Chahine who have brought valuable insight to spiritual and practical aspects of the Muslim faith and the dichotomy that may exist between the two. In the Middle East, the non-Arab countries Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, although sharing a common religion, differ significantly in culture and tradition from the Arab world and even from each other. This chapter thus employs a regional approach for practical purposes, which does not endorse any notion that these regions constitute homogeneous identities although transnational elements arising from shared histories in collective memory do exist and are manifest in cultural interpretations, one prominent one being the trauma of colonization.
