BAB’AZIZ
Chale Nafus
Director of Programming, Austin Film Society
Now,
concerning the structure of this movie, I think it helps the spectator to
forget about his own ego and to put it aside in order to open up to the reality
of the world. It borrows the structure of the “visions” usually narrated by
dervishes, and the structure of their spiraling and whirling dances. The
characters change, but the theme remains the same: Love, under many forms. As
the famous Sufi Ibn Arabi said: "My heart can be pasture for deer and a
convent for monks, a temple for idols and a Kaaba [the holy destination in
Mecca] for the pilgrims. It is both the tables of the Torah and the Koran. It
professes the religion of Love wherever its caravans are heading. Love is my
law. Love is my faith.”Nacer Khemir,
director of BAB’AZIZ
“All paths lead to God” is an
Islamic Sufi belief reviled by present-day Islamist extremists (generally Wahhabis).
The Sufi extols individual search and experience, the latter demands strict
adherence to an endless list of rules and rituals. The Sufi embraces love and
living while the Wahhabi is too often filled with hatred and repudiation of the
joys of this life. One creates beauty in song, poetry, dance, music, and art as
the other moves to destroy all he considers ungodly.
All paths lead to God. Dervishes
represent the purest form of Sufism, as they become wanderers in search of God
through love of creation. This journey toward reunion with the One – the All,
the Universe, the Cosmos – is often rocky, meandering, and full of obstacles
and diversions. Some travelers might even seem to be lost or insane, like the
red-headed dervish in BAB’AZIZ who tries to remove the always encroaching sand
from a desert mosque or to sweep away the sand from a distant minaret. Others
might be on one journey – toward love for a beautiful woman, vengeance over a
brother’s death, or desire for a palace – but unexpectedly find themselves
drawn into the Sufi path of wandering, questing, and ultimately finding. They
have been diverted onto their true path, regardless of what their initial
motivation was for movement.
In Nacer Khemir’s film BAB’AZIZ,
an old blind Sufi dervish leads (and is led by) his young granddaughter Ishtar
to a distant celebration of Sufi singers, musicians, and dancers, a gathering
which happens only every 30 years. The old man doesn’t know exactly where this
event will take place, but he is unconcerned since no one really knows. “Walk,
just walk,” and the place will eventually be found. Along the way Bab’Aziz and
Ishtar meet other people, some on their way to the unknown gathering place,
others intent on their own ego-driven searches for riches, love, or vengeance.
Bab’Aziz begins to tell Ishtar the tale of “The Prince Who Contemplated His
Soul,” and it is her need to hear the end of that fable that compels Ishtar to
remain with her grandfather through the entire journey – through deserts of
startling beauty, storms, and danger. Some of the people they meet along the
way have their own stories and Ishtar listens to all of them, gathering
knowledge of a greater world of emotion, pain, and joy. This trip with her
grandfather will mark the beginning of her own life’s journey.
Like a Sufi’s path through life,
the film BAB’AZIZ meanders and wanders through place and time, from the present
indicated by cars, buses, a motorcycle, and a jet, back to a time of nomadic
camping in the desert, revealed by a handsome prince’s tent, stallion,
servants, musicians, and a beguiling dancer. Through the interweaving of the
journey of Bab’Aziz and Ishtar, the story of the Prince, and the stories of
other wayfarers, Khemir is adapting a more mobile version of tales like The
Arabian Nights, in which the life of the
storyteller is mixed in with the lives of the characters in the tales being
told. Ultimately they all coalesce to reveal deeper truths about humanity and
life.
The temporal/spatial structure of
the film is fluid and ever-changing, just as it would be if we were sitting
around a campfire in the desert listening to a story-teller. Our minds would be
capable of being inside his/her story and in our camp at the same time –
looking at the faces of the other listeners, imagining their lives, thinking of
our own life which has led us to this campfire, and following the thread of the
story of other times and other people, perhaps ancestors of those around us but
more importantly universal characters that speak of human emotions and
experiences that can be understood by all at all times.
It is this multi-layered aspect
of story telling that intrigues and inspires Tunisian filmmaker Nacer Khemir. Born
in 1948 in a village near Tunis, he generally makes his home in Paris, which he
finds more conducive to his creative life, even though he draws on Arabic
culture and history almost exclusively in his stories and films. He is
especially drawn to Sufi traditions, stories, and mental/spiritual freedom. His
creative life really began with art and writing. In 1972 he collected tales
from storytellers in Tunis and began writing his own versions in French,
ostensibly for children. These storybooks include The Ogress (1975), The Tale of Tellers (1984), I Swallow the Neighbor’s Baby (2000), The Book of Genies (2001), and The Book of Djinns (2002).
After some work in French
television, he began his feature film explorations in 1984 with the well
received WANDERERS OF THE DESERT, focused on the story of men from a village who
set out to discover the farthest reaches of their desert homeland. Six years
later Khemir made THE DOVE’S LOST NECKLACE about a calligraphy student’s search
for an ancient manuscript about love.
But it is BAB’AZIZ which really
plunges into Khemir’s fascination with Sufis and Arabic/Persian culture and
civilization. He had a very strong drive and motive in making this film. “I tried
to wipe Islam’s face clean with my movie, by showing an open, tolerant and
friendly Islamic culture, full of love and wisdom . . . an
Islam that is different from the one depicted by the media in the aftermath of
9/11. Fundamentalism, as well as radicalism, is a distorting mirror of Islam.
This movie is a modest effort to give Islam its real image back. No other
mission seemed as urgent to me as this one: to give a "face" to
hundreds of millions of Muslims who are often, if not always, the first victims
of terrorism caused by some fundamentalist. And although this movie is based on
the joyful and love-giving Sufi tradition, it is also a highly political film,
and deliberately so. It is a duty nowadays to show to the world another aspect
of Islam, otherwise, each one of us will be stifled by his own ignorance of
"the other one."
What better way to propose a more
profound, wise, and loving version of Islam than to look at the joyful mystics,
the Sufis? Khemir states, “Sufism
stands against all forms of fanaticism. Sufism is the Islam of the mystics; it
is the tenderness of Islam. But in order to give a better definition, let me
use this Sufi saying: ‘There are as many ways to God as the number of human
beings on earth.’ This quote alone is a representation of the vision of Sufism.
One could also say that Sufism is the pulsating heart of Islam. Far from being
a marginal phenomenon, it is the esoteric dimension of the Islamic message.
Abou Hassan Al Nouri, a great Sufi, once said: ‘Sufism is the renouncement of
all selfish pleasures,’ because true Love cannot be selfish. He also said, ‘A
true Sufi has no possessions, and he himself is possessed by nothing.’”
But rather than destroy those
possessions and those of others, the true Sufi simply walks away and begins
his/her journey. The Sufi is not filled with distrust and hatred of those who
do not believe as he does, but instead borrows from the more loving,
liberating, and wiser aspects of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism.
During the European Middle Ages, Islamic Sufis, Christian mystics, and Jewish
Kabbalists often read and quoted one another’s works as they wrote about their
own quest for Truth and God. It seems that at that time the three Abrahamic
religions could indeed communicate with one another, at least through their
spiritual explorers not bound by orthodoxy and limited by dogma.
Nacer Khemir’s image of the
“prince contemplating his soul” (not just his face, like Narcissus) originated
upon seeing a plate painted in Iran in the 12th century. The
filmmaker remembers, “It shows a prince leaning over water, and it carries the
following inscription ‘The prince who contemplated his own soul.’" That
image haunted Khemir until he could turn it into something else. Following the
origin of the plate, the director shot much of BAB’AZIZ in Iran, even in the
town of Kashan, where the plate originated.
In fact, much of the film was
shot in various areas of the visually rich and fascinating areas of Iran, as
well as in the director’s native Tunisia. Even so, it was not an easy
production, primarily because of the desert locations. Khemir explains, “The
desert imposed its law upon us. The temperature sometimes reached 50°C! [122
F]. We used to leave the shelter of the old lead mine, where we camped, at
around four o’clock in the morning. We worked until nine-thirty or ten o’clock
in the morning; after that, the sand became too hot and the light became bright
like a white screen that wiped out every detail, not to mention the hospitality
of the scorpions! We used to spend the rest of the day in the camp, and resumed
work at sunset. The scenes were shot only once, because it was impossible to
recreate the virginity of the sand after the actors had stepped on it. When we
were not satisfied with a scene, we had to move the set to a spot that was
unmarked. I will not dwell on the troubles we had during this shooting which
took place on very long distances, in Iran [Kashan, Yazd, Kerman, the Annarak
desert, and Bam] as well as in Tunisia [Tunis, Korba, Walad Sultan, and the
Tataouine desert].” Tragically, the mysterious ruins of the ancient city of
Bam, which served as the gathering place of the dervishes at the end of the
film, was further devastated by an earthquake several months after filming
ended there.
Fittingly for this movie, the
desert has long served Arabic and Persian poets and philosophers. As a
provocative example, Khemir refers to a proverb by North African Tuareg nomads:
"There are lands that are full of water for the well-being of the body,
and lands that are full of sand for the well-being of the soul." The filmmaker adds his own understanding
of the desert as “one of the rare places where the infinitely small, that is a
speck of sand, and the infinitely big, and that is billions of specks of sand,
meet. It is also a place where one can have a true sense of the Universe and of
its scale.” So many shots in BAB’AZIZ show the suggestively undulating curves
of sand dunes, often in 3, 4, or more planes in the ever receding background,
near or distant, impossible to know. One’s thoughts could be lost in that
landscape just as easily as one’s body could be lost wandering away from the
oasis or the caravan. The desert is as provocative as the sea and sky for
meditation and contemplation of the infinite and of our ego’s insignificance in
that enormity.
Ultimately the Sufi dervish’s
journey must end. In the case of Bab’Aziz, he recognizes that the time has come
for “what he had lost.” Having set his granddaughter on the Sufi path and about
to free Hassan from his misguided journey after vengeance, Bab’Aziz is ready to
return to Infinity. He simply asks the young man to cover his shrouded body
with sand and stones once he has died, but Hassan says he is afraid of death.
Bab’Aziz consoles him with a beautiful image from Sufi wisdom: “If the baby in the darkness of its
mother’s womb were told: ‘Outside there’s a world of light, with high
mountains, great seas, undulating plains, beautiful gardens in blossom, brooks,
a sky full of stars, and a blazing sun, and you, facing all these marvels, stay
enclosed in this darkness,’ the unborn child, knowing nothing about these
marvels, wouldn’t believe any of it. Like us, when we’re facing death. That’s
why we’re afraid.” Bab’Aziz’s final words liberate Hassan’s mind and his own
spirit. His
Sources
- Interview
of Nacer Khemir, Spirituality and Practice, Resources for Spiritual
Journeys http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/films/features.php?id=17822
- Youssef
Rakha, “Nacer Khemir, Orphan of Civilization,” Al-Ahram (Cairo), 27 April 2006 http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/792/profile.htm
- “Nacer
Khemir” in Donald Haase, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy
Tales (2008), p. 533
- Stephen
Schwartz, The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony (Doubleday, 2008)
- Back to Screening Page