Although the scenes of the millions of pilgrims gathering in Mecca and scattered in its desert are among the most difficult to film in the history of cinema, the lover British director Ovidio Salazar was insistent on repeating his own experience of portraying the Hajj as an annual bridge between East and West 13 times in his life.
This is a unique case among a group of filmmakers from America and Europe, who took it upon themselves to preserve the Hajj file in the memory of fictional and dramatic cinema, by recording this greatest annual Islamic event in a group of documentary and dramatic film and television works, such as “The Great Mecca Feast” It was the first Dutch silent film about Mecca and the Hajj to be seen by European audiences in 1928, and the documentary “The Pilgrim to Mecca,” which is one of the films that contains rare archival materials, was produced by Swiss Radio in 1970.
Fantastic mosaic
A fascinating mosaic of films about the pilgrimage begins to form with Hajj - The Journey of a Lifetime, a documentary in which director Ovidio Salazar painstakingly followed more than 20,000 British pilgrims, who came from all over Britain, In 2001, they joined 3 million Muslims from all over the world to perform Hajj.
Nine years later, Salazar presented the 2010 film Circling the House of God, which tells the story of Martin Lings, or Sheikh Abu Bakr Sirajuddin, with the help of unique archival materials, with the Hajj, since he was a young man in his late twenties. converted to Islam;
And how he became respected by people around the world as a “friend of God.” Sirajuddin died a few months ago at the age of 96.
In addition to that, "Inside Mecca", one of the most beautiful documentaries produced in 2003, provided a visual guide for anyone who wants to know more about Hajj, regardless of their nationality, color or tongue.
In 2004, French-Moroccan-born Ismail Ferroukhi directed The Great Journey, a feature-length dramatic film, which won the Best Film Award at the 2004 Venice Film Festival, and was ranked as one of the favorite models of international Islamic cinema.
In 2009, Journey to Mecca was produced, a historical drama that tells the astonishing epic story of the first pilgrimage of Ibn Battuta, born in Tangiers in 1304, at the age of 21, for American director Bruce Niebuhr.
The documentary Journey to the Heart of Islam, which was shown at the British Museum in London in 2012, provides a brief account of the first major exhibition ever dedicated to the pilgrimage.
But in the following we will stop in front of the movie "The Road to Mecca".
Asad's Journey to Mecca
In the documentary "A Road to Mecca", which has a duration of 92 minutes, directed by Austrian director George Misch in 2006, Misch wanted to confront the world through this film with the wise ideas of Muhammad Asad (1900-1992), being a man who was not He is looking for adventures, as much as he wants to be an important cultural mediator between East and West.
The film follows Asad's steps and the path he took on "The Road to Mecca", which is also the title of Asad's most important and best-selling book, which was published in English, German, Dutch, Swedish and French in 1954.
In this film, which was nominated for the 2008 Vukovar Film Festival and presented by the Doha Film Institute as part of the exhibition "Pilgrimage - A Journey Through Art", Misch takes us back to the early 1920s, when Austrian Jew Leopold Weiss traveled from Vienna to The Middle East”, where he was fascinated by the desert and saw his new spiritual home in it, after he converted to Islam in 1927, and changed his name to Muhammad Asad.
He became one of the most important European Muslims in the twentieth century, through his work initially as an advisor in the Saudi Royal Court, then his translation of the Holy Quran into English, his participation in the establishment of the Islamic State of Pakistan, and his position as its ambassador to the United Nations.
The narration path in the film seemed very impressive, as it traces the journey of a lion's pilgrimage to Mecca, which he began from Jerusalem, during which he interacted with many situations and people on the way to Mecca, and in Mecca itself.
It offered "a mixture of travel and biographical literature, interviews with historians, scholars, friends and family, archival footage, photographs and quotes from Asad's vibrant and informative writing," critic Alyssa Simon described.
deep human religion
The film seemed like "a curious journey offering different perspectives, from moderate to fundamentalist, not without humour", says critic Lanfranco Acetti.
So, the beginning that George Mich gave was impressive through poetic images, and wide shots of the desert at different angles.
It contributed to clarifying the continuous development of the philosophy of Muhammad Asad, and "Mish's keenness to clarify the image of contemporary Islam; challenging deeply rooted Western prejudices, revealing the distance between ideas that support terrorism, and the basic beliefs of a deep human religion," according to Lanfranco Assetti.
Mish painted a fascinating picture of the life and legacy of Muhammad Asad, as a traveler, writer, political thinker, diplomat, and Islamic scholar, and raised some challenges that still persist at the present time.
Many of those interviewed bemoan the increasing stagnation in the interpretation of the Qur'an, and the growing gap between East and West, in their view.
However, as Misch accurately shows, fanaticism is by no means limited to Islam or the Middle East.
Although it is noticeable that the pace began to slow down a bit, when Mish visited a group of "Assadists" in Lahore, Pakistan, it quickly rebounded when he traveled to New York, recording the poignant memories of Assad's son.
By his death in 1992, Asad was deeply disillusioned with the state of the Islamic world, intellectual isolation, and intolerance of what he described as "extremists", and Mich expressed it with an appropriate official closure, by making us stand in front of Muhammad Asad's tomb in Andalusia.