Documentary ‘Among the Believers’ gets up close with the cleric behind the Red Mosque siege in Islamabad

Among the Believers is the second Indo-Pak collaboration at the Mumbai International Film Festival after Lyari Notes. Directed by Hemal Trivedi and Mohammed Naqvi, the film examines the spread of Islamist ideology in Pakistan through a handful of characters. Chief among them is Abdul Aziz, the extremist cleric at the Red Mosque in Islamabad that was the site of a bloody battle with the Pakistani Army in 2007. Aziz runs a chain of madrassas throughout the country, which provide food, shelter, religious education and the promise of salvation to scores of impoverished children. All government institutions have failed in Pakistan, Aziz points out, and somebody has to fill the vacuum.

Among his most ardent students is Talha, who is studying to be a cleric. Another key character is Zarina, who was briefly at a Red Mosque-run school for girls, but now studies at a school set up by a progressive resident of her village.

Pervez Hoodbhoy, nuclear physicist and vocal campaigner against Islamic fundamentalism, provides a counterpoint to Aziz’s divisive rhetoric. Pakistan has irrevocably changed, Hoodbhoy says with sadness. “It is hardened, unrecognisable in so many ways.”

Filmed in 2010, the documentary provides a rare close look at Maulana Aziz, a thorn in the side of the Pakistani establishment. The 84-minute documentary also examines the roots of fundamentalism and explores the impact of Islamist thought on education. Premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2015 and shown at several places since, Among the Believers will travel after MIFF to the Vancouver International Film Festival in September. Excerpts from an email interview with Trivedi (Naqvi could not attend MIFF because he did not get a visa at short notice.)

What was the trigger for Among the Believers, and how did you and Mohammed Naqvi end up collaborating on the production?

I grew up in a chawl of Mumbai, in a conservative Hindu Brahmin family. There was a culture of mistrusting Pakistan and its people where I grew up. I defined the country by the violence and terrorism I saw it inflict on my homeland at the time. In 2008, I lost a friend in the Mumbai terror attacks. After the attacks, my heart was full of anger and hate for the perpetrators of the crime, who were found to be Pakistanis. To make sense of my anger, I started digging deeper into the root causes of these attacks.

I came to understand that ordinary Pakistanis are themselves the victims of this violence rather than the perpetrators. Their way of life is under attack by this fringe minority that is forcing itself on the country’s vast, peaceful majority. The same people who carried out the Mumbai terror attacks are attacking ordinary Pakistanis on an almost daily basis. There is an ideological conflict that is reshaping modern Pakistan and causing it to implode. And this ideological conflict’s most important battleground is the field of education. Young minds are trained, militarised, and instilled with the most extremist brand of Islam in many of the country’s madrassas and are used as pawns by certain militant groups for their own political agendas.

I travelled to Pakistan in 2009 to document the depths of Pakistan’s ideological divide. By then, my lifelong misconceptions about Pakistan had completely unravelled. My co-director is a talented Pakistani Muslim filmmaker, Mohammed Naqvi, and most of our incredible crew are Pakistani Muslims as well. A producer and the film’s writer, Jonathan Goodman Levitt, also started to work on the film in 2010.

What were the challenges during the shoot?

As a woman, a Hindu, and an Indian, I faced different risks during production. When we first started filming, I visited the Red Mosque several times disguised as a Muslim. These realities limited my access. During those times, my co-director stood in for the both of us. I was so fortunate to have a local Pakistani crew who were willing to risk their lives to shoot the footage for my film.

This film took six years to make under touch-and-go circumstances at many points. Throughout, we faced numerous dangers, from being tracked by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies such as the ISI, to having our phones tapped, to receiving thinly-veiled – and at times more overt – threats.

We wrapped up the bulk of our shooting with Talha and Zarina in 2011. For the next two years, we tried to get deeper access to Aziz’s world. By 2013, Aziz finally felt open enough with us to give us access for a much more intimate shoot.

What persuaded Abdul Aziz to be interviewed at length despite knowing that you might use the film to critique his ways?

Our co-producer, Syed Musharaf Shah (Mush), speaks Pashtun fluently, as do many among Aziz’s primary guard detail. Mush essentially camped out with them for months, made “friends,” and was instrumental in helping us achieve better access than any of us had initially thought possible.

Once Mush entered the inner circle of Maulana Abdul Aziz, Mohammed Naqvi took over the process. It took Mohammed two more years to gain the complete trust of Maulana Aziz. With Aziz, Mohammed’s approach was to ask him genuinely for guidance about his own faith and spirituality. After building a personal relationship, Aziz trusted him enough to engage with questions about his controversial political and religious practices.

The first day we shot with Aziz, we arrived at a nondescript house in a middle-class neighborhood of Islamabad. As soon as we entered, there were at least 15 gunmen sprawled across the courtyard. One of them stepped towards us and body searched our whole crew.

Afterwards, we were led into the house, and there in the middle of the room sitting on the floor, was Aziz, with the kindest, most beatific expression on his face.

Prior to meeting Aziz, Mohammed had looked at maulanas like him with hatred. But in order to get Aziz to be open and honest, Mohammed learned that he had to build his own relationship with him. It wasn’t about challenging Aziz with tough interview questions right off the bat. Rather, it was a careful dance between investigation and relationship-building.

After our first interview, we immediately started receiving calls from unknown numbers. They demanded to know who we were, who we worked for, and what we were doing. Once, while filming on the streets of Islamabad we were stalked by three men who filmed our faces and jumped back in their car and drove off. It was terrifying. For our own safety, we had to stop production with Aziz on that trip.

How do you maintain a balance between understanding a figure like Aziz and keeping a distance from his fundamentalist views?

Our greatest challenge came during our final shoot in January 2015. It was a month after the Taliban attacks on the school in Peshawar. Our co-producer, Musharaf Shah, lost four of his nephews in this attack. Maulana Aziz condoned these attacks on the children. As documentarians, we try our best to remain detached from what we are observing, but for our co-producer to conduct the final interview in the film with Aziz without succumbing to rage is nothing short of remarkable.

The most difficult task in the edit was humanising Aziz. It would have been easy to simply vilify Aziz and pass judgment on his character given his “extremist” views. Instead, I submitted myself to Aziz’s worldview in the edit. That realisation was key to crafting a character who was multi-faceted and full of contradictions. No matter who looks at the film, be it Aziz, Pervez, Zarina or Talha, each should feel that the film has presented their point of view truthfully.

The documentary traces the rise of Islamist ideology to the Afghan war, deprivation and poor educational facilities in Pakistan. Was this approach also an attempt to address often biased reporting from the region?

Islamic extremism and the rising tide of Islamists are often heated topics of discussion in the media. These topics, however, do not get unbiased, in-depth coverage. Often when the Western (and Indian) media tells a story about Islamic extremism, it always depicts just one side. It never talks about the actual plight of the vast majority of moderate Muslims who are the real victims of Islamic extremism. This kind of biased reporting has not led any solutions for the debate on the ‘War on Terror.’

Since 2001, the US has fought two long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and spent an upwards of $6 trillion dollars on its ‘War on Terror.’ Despite this, the Taliban and Al Qaeda still exist. ISIS has emerged as the largest terrorist threat to the US and the world. Terrorism and the ideology that fuels it can’t be destroyed by American military interventions. Such interventions, in fact, set the stage for a disastrous backlash. They empower and embolden the reactionary radical groups.

What has the response been like at screenings?

The audience’s reaction has been phenomenal so far. In fact, some of the biggest fans of the film are Pakistanis themselves. They felt that this was the first time that their internal struggle was so accurately depicted. A lot of audience members were drawn towards the tense ideological divides that fuel much of the conflict in the region. They found the narratives of Zarina and Talha most valuable. The film was perceived as complex and nuanced, rather than simplistic.

There were some audience members who were seriously disturbed and unhappy about the ideological perspective and approach to the material. They felt that the film serves to perpetuate stereotypes against Muslims. They felt that we filmmakers were exploiting the extremes. These audiences were in a minority – but it was interesting to have those perspectives as well.