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June 6, 2003
Recalling the Inspirational Legacy
The documentary ‘Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet’ recently telecast by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) has received an overwhelmingly positive response from viewers across the United States. E-mail feedback to PBS has run about 50 to 1 positive, with both Muslims and adherents of other faiths, including many Christians and Jews, expressing appreciation for this first serious attempt to tell the story of the life of Prophet Muhammad through the lens of some of America’s millions of Muslims.
Michael Wolfe, one of the producers, says the documentary “has opened a greater understanding of who the Prophet was. The film also seems to have opened up hearts.” “It was a huge topic, and in the post 9/11 world a controversial one. With so many negative things being said about Muslims and the Prophet Muhammad, we hoped to provide an idea of who he was and why Muslims love him,” says Alex Kronemer, the other producer of the documentary. The “larger American audience was open to hearing this story, which is one of the great things about Americans,” he adds. “Most of the negative attitudes people have here toward Islam are not expressed out of hostility but out of ignorance and suspicion about Islam after the 9/11 bombings.” True.
The documentary has been telecast several times in major cities of the United States since it was first aired by the PBS on December 18, 2003. Its telecast was propitiously timed. According to Alessandra Stanley (New York Times), ‘It would be fair to say that the most important invisible figure on American television is Muhammad. Even many educated PBS viewers know very little of his story, yet his legacy is felt in some form every day in the United States as well as in the rest of the world.’ So let’s review the documentary anew to recall its message for the benefit of our Muslim as well as non-Muslim readers.
The two-hour program is much more than a mere PR effort on the part of Muslim Americans. According to Michael Wolfe, a white American-convert to Islam, the documentary is a picture and portrait of a living person produced ‘at a time of transformation’ when Americans are keen to know about Islam. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was much more than a spiritual leader: he was also charged with temporal responsibilities. The noblest of all in lineage. The most honest and generous hearted. Everyone who saw him ungrudgingly conceded, ‘I never saw before or after him the like of him.’ An introspective child often found ‘contemplating under the stars.’ He encountered Jews and Christians and learned about both religions. In the clipped, illuminating comments of Karen Amstrong, the Prophet gave hope and peace to the people.
He was a perfect man embodying the quintessence of virtuous traits. To be a good Muslim, you have to serve people. ‘Serve your fellow people first,’ he urged. A feminist in his own right, Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) granted legal rights to women. Hazrat Ayesha, who had an active mind, questioned the Prophet and questioned him often without ever rattling him the least.
The Prophet always insisted that he should not be regarded as a divine person and did everything in his power to ensure that he was not worshipped in his lifetime or after. Tolerant, peace-loving and humble to the core, he did not recount his achievements and at his last sermon in February 632 asked instead, ‘Have I fulfilled my mission?’
The documentary defines jihad as a ‘struggle against your own desire,’ ‘an effort,’ a ‘striving’, and ‘by no means the major imperative to wage war,’ as is widely believed. Islam is ‘soft, not hard’ and does not endorse suicide bombings nor support killings in the name of religion. It does not promote a ‘harm for harm’ philosophy or advocate intolerance. The Qur’an asks Muslims to honor the people of the book - Jews and Christians. As for resolving religious animosities, the commentator makes an insightful observation as he delineates the chain of events leading to the Battle of the Trench: ‘Both are wrong - Muslims who regard Jews as treacherous and Jews who feel Muslims are their enemy.’
The documentary also describes how Muslim Americans - the like of Jameel Johnson, Daisy Khan, Nazzah Bazzy, and Kevin James featuring in the program - are adapting to the American scene and playing useful roles as peace-loving citizens of the USA. They are forward-looking and blend well with mainstream Americans without compromising on cherished values or faith.
In a tough Brooklyn accent, a heroic New York firefighter who looks like a cross between Charlton Heston and Sylvester Stallone, tells TV viewers that his deep faith as a Muslim inspires him to save lives. In Ann Arbor, 36 college students are finishing months of work with their professor to present a new Islamic exhibit at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Its centerpiece is a dazzling blue bowl with graceful Islamic inscriptions. Nazzah Bazzy tends to her patients with manifest compassion.
Muslim Americans appear an integral and inseparable part of the American nation. So the documentary mirrors.
There are other studies that suggest that the seven million Muslims inhabiting the USA consist of four major groups: South Asians make up 33 percent of the population, Arabs aggregate 26 percent, Afro-Americans form 20 percent and the remaining heterogeneous assemblage makes up 7 percent.
Compared to an average American, Muslim Americans are more affluent and better educated: 58 percent are college graduates as against the national average of 25; 50 percent have an yearly income of $ 50,000. Muslim Americans have made ‘inroads’ in four fields: religion (there are more than 2,000 Islamic centers and mosques in the US), education, ethnic media and public advocacy.
According to ‘Silent No More’, a book by Paul Findley, Congressman for 22 years, ‘US Muslims are prominent in engineering, business administration, medicine, finance, accounting, electronics, science and education, as well as retail establishments.
‘Egyptian-born Ahmed Zewail, 53, a professor at the California Institute of Technology in Los Angeles, received the 1999 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his development of a high speed camera that can monitor chemical reactions at one quadrillionth of a second and record the motion of atoms...
‘Chief executive officers of major industries who are Muslims include Safi Qureshey of AST Computers, Ray Irani of Occidental Petroleum, and Farooq Kathwari of Ethen Allen Furniture Company. Among Muslim notables are six professors and internationally acclaimed political scientists’.
‘The most astounding and gratifying revelation of my Islamic sojourn is the emergence of overwhelming evidence that a close kinship exists between Christianity and Islam, especially in primary literature’,’ writes Paul Findley, the former Congressman.
Considering the anti-Islam feelings in the wake of 9/11, it is truly gratifying that many educational and religious institutions - including schools, colleges, churches and synagogues - have sought permission to screen the documentary ‘Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet.’ Some institutions have shown excerpts of followed by insightful panel discussions.
Both Wolfe and Kronemer will spend parts of the “next year or two helping the film move through the larger American community.” Also, they are currently exploring the possibility of producing more documentaries related to Islam. Both the producers concurred that the success of the documentary was the result of an interfaith effort with Muslims, Christians, Jews, Sikhs and others joining hands to do justice to the story of a truly great man. “Muhammad is an inspiring person for all faiths,” Kronemer observes.
“There is a Qur’anic passage that tells people of different faiths to compete in good deeds with one another. Those verses describe the working process of our film, with every member of our team doing his best to make this show a success. At a time when some say that a clash of civilizations is inevitable and that people of different faiths can’t work together, this project proves that a peaceful and productive relationship among all people is not only possible, but necessary.”
“We always must work to achieve the positive,” Wolfe adds. “Now when it is the hardest, it is the most important. In that way, the legacy of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, is actively engaged in this effort too, through the film.”
Besides the US, the documentary will be shown in Europe, Middle East, Australia, South America and the Muslim countries.
Videos and DVDs of the documentary can be purchased by going to www.unityproductions.info or calling 1-888-786-0444.
-afaruqui@pakistanlink.com
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