The Haj gave me validation: Openly gay Muslim filmmaker records his journey in a documentary

Shot on his camera phone and two small cameras that “looked like phones” that he smuggled in, A Sinner in Mecca moves from doubt to despair and eventually becomes a direct challenge to the Saudi Arabia and its version of Wahabi Islam. “My film is not an attack on Islam. It’s an attack on Wahabi Islam, which is at the root of the ideology that ISIS has,” says Sharma, who found himself, very often, at the wrong end of the baton of the Muttawas (religious police) and was told to stop filming on many occasions. His footage was deleted more than once. “One had to hold the camera for at least 15 seconds to get a decent shot. If you would stand in the same spot for too long, the Muttawas would notice,” says Sharma.

The film, which will be screened at the Hot Docs festival in Canada, is a disquiet and restless narrative. One sees Sharma as he gets closer to the Kabba, the stampede, the lack of water, filth on the streets while going towards Arrafat (a place one visits during the Haj), and eventually the way history has been wiped out, in and around Mecca, with “ugly” concrete structures making their way to “Mecca Vegas”. In the film, one can spot a mall 700 feet away from the Kabba. “They have actually demolished the house where the Prophet lived and have built toilets in that space. We hear such adulterated accounts of this journey from other Hajis that we don’t get to know the whole truth. It is a capitalist landscape of destruction,” says Sharma.

With word spreading about A Sinner in Mecca, hate mail and threats to Sharma’s life are now piling on. “The Haj gave me validation. It eventually became a question of me accepting Islam on my own terms,” says Sharma.

suanshu.khurana@expressindia.com