Gay Muslim reconciled with his faith while secretly filming Mecca pilgrimage

Arranging to meet filmmaker Parvez Sharma is a little like setting up an appointment with an extremely polite spy. He asks to rendezvous in a public place — a Starbucks in SoHo where the noise level is high, the tables distant and the volume of customers great. His boundaries are clearly drawn: no discussion of his husband, his friends, his Manhattan neighbourhood or his family. He arrives a half-hour early.

Sharma’s discretion is no doubt borne of his experience growing up gay in a conservative city in India, but it has deepened since the release of his 2007 documentary, A Jihad for Love, which depicted the struggle of gay Muslims around the world to reconcile their faith with their sexual orientation. After Jihad, Sharma was labelled an infidel, and in the intervening years, he has gotten more death threats than he cares to recall.

His new documentary, A Sinner in Mecca, about his 2011 hajj, or journey to Islam’s most sacred sites in Saudi Arabia, put him at even greater risk. Saudi religious police allow selfies or short videos, Sharma said, but they forbid pilgrims from taking extensive footage of the hajj, which attracts up to 3 million faithful a year. While Sharma said there were govern- ment-sanctioned videos of the ritual, his documentary shows images of the annual pilgrimage that Saudi officials do not want others to see.

At one moment, A Sinner in Mecca seems to eerily anticipate the events of Thursday, when, government officials said, more than 700 people were killed and almost 900 were injured as pil-

I am not confronting Islam. What I’m confronting is the Saudi version of Islam.

grims surged through a tunnel en route to one of the rituals. “This is the place of stampedes,” the film’s voice-over says.

Despite Sharma’s notoriety as a gay filmmaker — the new film includes footage of his 2011 New York wedding to an atheist musician identified only as Dan — he travelled to Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is punishable by beatings, jail time and death.

The documentary was shown at Cinema Village in New York this month; it is available on iTunes and can be streamed on Netflix starting next Sunday.

Sharma said he hoped that A Sinner in Mecca would inspire questions among Muslims everywhere. “Islam’s reformation is long overdue,” he said. “Maybe Muslims like me will be the reformers.”

Growing up in the northern Indian city of Saharanpur, where Muslims made up a sizable minority, he was routinely bullied for being gay, Sharma said. He found solace in his mother’s Bollywood film magazines, spending hours cutting out pictures of his favourite stars to design posters for the fantastical movies he dreamed of making.

“It was an alternate reality I built for myself because the real world did not seem to offer much,” Sharma, 41, said.

A Sinner in Mecca opens with Sharma sitting at a laptop in his apartment, chatting online with Mohammed, a gay man in the Saudi city of Medina. Mohammed describes visiting a market to pick up some things for his mother, only to witness the beheading of a man rumoured to be gay. “Please know you are not alone,” Sharma writes. The film then cuts to videotape footage of the scene, stopping just before the executioner’s axe strikes the man’s neck. It sets the stage for the anxious 79 minutes that follow.

Sharma, a soft-spoken man with chiselled features and a trim black beard, said he was “terrified” that he would die at the hands of the Saudis. Nevertheless, he felt called to make the pilgrimage — it is considered a duty for all Muslims to perform at least once in their lives — and hoped especially to reconcile his faith with his sexuality.

The documentary, largely recorded on an iPhone strapped to Sharma’s neck with rubber bands, shows the pilgrimage in unflinching detail. The result is a religious reality film but also a piercing indictment of Saudi Arabia, which influences, Sharma said, millions of pilgrims annually.

“I am not confronting Islam,” he said in the interview at Starbucks. “What I’m confronting is the Saudi version of Islam.”

Islam there is rooted in Wahhabism, a form of the religion that Sharma describes as “regressive, cruel and puritanical.”

While it is difficult to capture spirituality on screen, Sharma manages in the film to convey his wonder as he worships at the Grand Mosque in Mecca and circles the cube-shaped Kaaba, the sacred shrine at the mosque’s centre.

Despite his unnerving experiences, Sharma said he felt as if the hajj had made him a better Muslim. It also allowed him, he said at Starbucks, to make peace with the memory of his mother, who died of cancer when he was 21. Not long before her death, he came out to her. Her anger was relentless . But during the hajj, in his sleepless, dreamlike state, Sharma felt her forgiveness — and he, in turn, forgave her.

“I cried a lot,” he said. “I unloaded a lot of baggage there.”