A film about Muslim integration in the US through the eyes of three artists who question the stereotypes against Islam in their artwork. Sandow Birk, Mohja Kahf, and Kamran Pasha are three artists approaching Islam in different ways through the creative interaction between word and image. Birk, a non-Muslim painter, has embarked on a massive project to hand transcribe the entirety of the Holy Qur’an while illustrating it with images of contemporary American life. Kahf, on the other hand, is a poet who tries to draw images through her poetry that deals with what it is like to be a veiled Muslim woman in general and in the US in particular. Finally Pasha, who is a one of the few Muslim screenwriters in Hollywood, is struggling to draw a more realistic picture of what Muslims are really like through his scripts. The Art of Jihad is an exploration of Muslim integration in the US through the lens of art. It acknowledges that a considerable part of the current conflict between the US and Islam and within Islam itself is a conflict over words, their meanings and the kind of images they spark. As we follow the life of those three artists, examine their work and know about their struggles and aims the film addresses some of the key misconceptions about Islam in regards to its relationship to violence, women, and artistic representation.
(Producer, Director, Cinematographer, Editor)
