Infidel of Love: Muslim Understandings of Islam

http://www.dragontape.com/#!/5180225637842944

(video embedding isn’t working)

I created this “video collage” in response to Professor Asani’s excerpt of “Infidel of Love: Exploring Muslim understandings of Islam”. The excerpt assigned explored common misconceptions of Islam, and addressed these misconceptions by outlining Muslim understandings of Islam. I wanted to create a visual representation of this work. The resulting video is almost a conversation between those who aim to demonize Islam and those who know the true meaning of Islam.

The video has two distinct, but related components. The first section, “Misconceptions about Islam” addresses specific misconceptions about Islam. There are clips in this section of people claiming that Islam is a violent religion, that Islam is un-American, and that Muslims wish to harm people of other religions. After the attacks on Islam, I stitched together clips of people explaining how Islam is actually a peaceful religion. As Asani explains, for many Muslims, Islam is fundamentally a peaceful and compassionate eligion. One of the reasons people view Islam as a peaceful religion is the etymology of the word “Islam”. He explains, “the Arabic verbal root s-l-m, in addition to meaning submission, can also signify to be at peace, or to be safe, sound and secure” (pg 58). Many parts of the Qur’an also encourage Muslims to practice peace and compassion. Asani explains that for many muslims, “extending compassion and love for all human beings and the whole of God’s creation is a way of loving and knowing God” (pg 60). The video clips I included in this section of the video collage reflect that Islam can be viewed as a peaceful, compassionate religion- just as Asani explains.

The second section of my video collage, “Painting Obama as a Muslim”, explores the implications of the campaign to label Obama as a Muslim. Asani explains that people who called Obama a Muslim did so to “de-americanize him in the eyes of the American public by falsely portraying him as the ‘other’—that is, as a Muslim” (55). These attacks were predicated on the offensive assumption that being a Muslim was antithetical to being an American. The second section of my video collage aims to interrogate such a claim. The video collage features conservative voices calling Obama a Muslim and then people responding to those claims- not by simply asserting that Obama is a Christian, but also by arguing that there would be nothing wrong with electing a Muslim president.

A note: The software I used only allowed me to edit the videos by the second rather than the millisecond. Therefore, some videos are a few milliseconds too long and/or contain irrelevant sounds or images.