This book collates a comprehensive range of fascinating essays by leading authors on film from across the Muslim world. Responding to political and theoretical misconceptions about Islam and Muslim culture, it covers North African, Arab and Asian cinemas in a rich series of industry histories, single film studies and detailed analyses of celebrated directors. Cinema in Muslim Societies is innovative and timely in its explicit engagement with vexing questions of Islamic aesthetics, political activism, socialism and the role of women in Muslim contexts. The authors explore a wide variety of topics, from cinematic art and poetry to religious identity and pornography. Debated extensively at a programme of public talks and screenings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2011, this volume remains supremely relevant in a world of polarising identities and political violence engulfing Muslim societies and the West. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third Text.

The first book to examine the troubled relationships between women, Islam and cinema.

Muslims in the Movies provides an introduction to the subject of Muslims and film for new readers while also serving as new works of critical analysis for scholars of cinema. This collection explores issues of identity, cultural production, and representation through the depiction of Muslims on screen and how audiences respond to these images.

Many global film industries fail in expanding the role of Muslims on screen. Too often they produce a dichotomy between "good" and "bad" Muslims, limiting the narrative domain to issues of national security, war, and terrorism. Naturally, much of the previous scholarship on Muslims in film focused on stereotypes and the politics of representation. This collection of essays, from an international panel of contributors, significantly expands the boundaries of discussion around Muslims in film, asking new questions of the archive and magnifying analyses of particular cultural productions. The volume includes the exploration of regional cinemas, detailed analysis of auteurs and individual films, comparison across global cinema, and new explorations that have not yet entered the conversation. The interdisciplinary collection provides an examination of the multiple roles Islam plays in film and the various ways Muslims are depicted. Across the chapters, key intersecting themes arise that push the limits of how we currently approach issues of Muslims in cinema and ventures to lead us in new directions for future scholarship. This book adds new depth to the matrix of previous scholarship by revisiting methodological structures and sources, as well as exploring new visual geographies, transnational circuits, and approaches. It reframes the presiding scholarly conventions in five novel trajectories: considering new sources, exploring new communities, probing new perspectives, charting new theoretical directions, and offering new ways of understanding conflict in cinema. As such, it will be of great use to scholars working in Islamic Studies, Film Studies, Religious Studies, and Media.

In recent years there has been a remarkable surge in Iranian films expressing contentious issues which would otherwise be very difficult to discuss publicly inside the Islamic Republic of Iran - such as the role of clergy in Iranian society. Nacim Pak-Shiraz here highlights how many Iranian film directors concern themselves with the content of the religious and historical narratives of culture and society, sparking debate about the medium's compatibility or incongruity with religion and spirituality. She explores the various ways that Shi'i discourse emerges on screen, and offers groundbreaking insights into both the role of film in Iranian culture and society, and how it has become a medium for exploring what it means to be Iranian and Muslim after thirty years of Islamic rule. This is invaluable reading students and scholars of Film Studies and contemporary Iranian cinema, but also of the culture and identity of Iran more widely.

This book presents a historical overview of the Indonesian film industry, the relationship between censorship and representation, and the rise of Islamic popular culture. It considers scholarship on gender in Indonesian cinema through the lens of power relations. With key themes such as nationalism, women's rights, polygamy, and terrorism which have preoccupied local filmmakers for decades, Indonesia cinema resonates with the socio-political changes and upheavals in Indonesia’s modern history and projects images of the nation through the debates on gender and Islam. The text also sheds light on broader debates and questions about contemporary Islam and gender construction in contemporary Indonesia. Offering cutting edge accounts of the production of Islamic cinema, this new book considers gendered dimensions of Islamic media creation which further enrich the representations of the 'religious' and the 'Islamic' in the everyday lives of Muslims in South East Asia.