Blood, guts and Islam
Peter Ackroyd
Blood of Hussain ('AA', Gate Cinema, Russell Square) This is the story of 'the unceasing struggle of an oppressed people against illegitimate and tyrannical rule', at least according to the opening credits. It is thoughtful of the director, Jamir Dehlavi, to tell us in advance what to think about his film, but it is best to be wary of film-makers bearing gifts.
Blood of Hussain concerns the activities of Muslim fundamentalists, and must surely qualify as one of the first Islamic films to be shown in this country since that religion proved itself to be as ferocious as Christianity during the Crusades. It does, in fact, have a number of peculiarities which I assume, for want of a better reason, are characteristic of Islamic film-making. There are, for example, a great number of significant pauses, when glances are passed between protagonists which last as long as most people's conversations; the actors stare silently at each other before speaking, as if in mourning for a dead script. And then there is all that blood — dead babies, hands chopped off in the middle of a gesture, rivers turned incarnadine — which suggests that the film is trying to make up in frenzy what it lacks in credibility. Certainly there is a sometimes perverse disregard for the ordinary laws of narrative: an old man pops up from time to time, sometimes with a camel and sometimes not, saying things like 'Our journeys curve back to the beginning'. He may be a symbol of ancient wisdom, although I seem to remember Eliot saying much the same thing in one of his interminable longer poems.
Whatever wisdom there is, however. turns out to be more modern than ancient. Despite the Eastern elements, casting a pall of mystery over the narrative, there is still a definite and — given the political stance of the picture — puzzling Western presence in the film. Some of the names on the credits are unmistakeably European, with Chris this and Sue that, and the film has adopted Western techniques of cinematography, direction and production. It is a little confusing; like the activities of Voluntary Service Overseas in the 'third world', it is hard to know which virtues are imported, and which are indigenous.
The narrative is impaled upon a similar ambiguity. This is, essentially, the story of two brothers, apparently the only survivors of an aristocratic Pakistani family. One of them, first seen reading the Financial Times on a plane, becomes a minister with the newly installed military junta in Pakistan.
The other brother, incensed by what the newly ennobled soldiers are doing to the peasantry, becomes a 'freedom fighter', or 'guerrilla', according to taste. He kills soldiers, and as a result his workers are massacred, and his lands appropriated. He is the 'Hussain' of the title, but he is seen throughout the film as a reincarnation of another Hussain who, 1400 years before, stood against the Caliph and in the process became a martyr and religious hero.
The new Hussain is, in other words, the true son of Islam — complete with white stallion which rises miraculously from the earth — and he is carefully distinguished from his bureaucratic brother who is the epitome of Western influence. Hussain wears native costume and rides over the fields; his brother has married an English wife, smokes cigarettes, wears suits which look suspiciously Austin Reed, and even implants an electronic bugging device in an ancient religious necklace. As a result the military junta which he supports is also seen in terms of this dualism — as an alien, Western-style' imposition upon the ancient culture of Islam. But, like all simple descriptions, this onlY confuses the issue. Blood of Hussain Was completed only a month before Zia seized power in Pakistan and it would be invidious to claim all the benefits of hindsight — but it was my understanding that the Pakistani army claimed to represent the forces of, Islam ranked against the machinations of Westernised politicians. Surely the director should not have got it quite as wrong as that. And when Hussain fights against the caste system and promulgates a form of agrana° socialism, it is hard to know who is the true Moslem and who the unwitting agent Of foreign orthodoxies. The film does not s° much deal with these difficulties as ignore them; the soldiers are stereotypicallV evil' and Hussain the revolutionary with as man. Y clichés as weapons. All of the ambiguitlesf are suppressed in favour of a neat set 0, propositions; the result is muddle and ambiguity. The acting throughout tries to rise above these local difficulties, and almost succeeds. Hussain has a convincing nervous tic, a way of letting his eyes wander, his body vighlY but unsuccessfully trying to control the violence it harbours. His Westernised, brother is sleek and cool, exactly the kind 0' person one meets in the press departments of foreign embassies. The military dictator resembles some barrack-room hybrid of Idl Amin and Montgomery. The photography, also, can hardlY he, faulted — with scenes of frenzied ceremonial contrasting admirably with the bleakness of desert nights and pain — although some of the prettier pictures might have come straight out of National Geographic, a reminder that there is a Western presence brooding throughout the film. But °,11.e thing does at least become clear in this picturesque overview of Pakistani life — the politics of the mosque, from which the fundamentalists.derive their inspiration, is seen as a matter of eternal verities; the men, beat their breasts and sob at the recital °I. old battles and ancient deaths, as if theYf happened just yesterday — which means, ° course, that they might also happen WITI°1.row. It gives proof, if any were needed after the example of Iran, that to pit religion against dictatorship is simply to substitute one despotism for another. But here, again.; the film fumbles the point: although It begins and ends with scenes of quite horrific self-laceration during a religious festival, when young men beat themselves into _ bloody pulp, there is no sense in which the religion itself is seen to be inappropriate 01 destructive. The film has a quite differen," point to make and, as if aware of .its hollowness, makes it again and again,. Blood of Hussain is simple propaganda Oa.: however well-intentioned or honourable. t`. may be, it differs very little from Russian films about happy workers or Amer films about happy housewives. The 0 MAI 11l„ .i!
real blood spilled here is that of the '
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