Hello! Gavin McDowell here, and welcome to the inaugural column of Sects, Lies, and Videotape, where we look at the representation of religion in film and—on very special occasions—television. But don’t worry! This will not be an endless litany of bad Evangelical films, much less an attempt to proselytize. If there is any didactic element at all, it’s to promote religious literacy via the medium of film. And religious literacy is frankly an important life skill, whether it’s navigating a potentially awkward social situation (weddings, funerals, brises), figuring out what the hell is going on in a famous painting, or preventing the insurgents from rising up and killing you.
The main focus, however, is film analysis. This will be like a deep dive into the world of cult movies, with a much more literal emphasis on “cult.” The subject matter is broad. If human beings have believed it, or even simply dreamed it up, then it is worthy of coverage. This includes the Abrahamic religions and their various subdivisions but also Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, the classical religions of Greece and Rome, other ancient religions, modern forms of paganism, UFOlogy, atheist or skeptical takes on scriptural tales, and wholly fictitious belief systems. The type of films covered includes period pieces, drama, comedy, horror, silent films, animation, the occasional documentary, and, every now and then, a television series (the first victim has already been—ahem—chosen).
Each column will have three sections derived from the Soderberghian title. In Sects!, we look at the background of the film in question, including information that might simply be presumed by the filmmaker and not evident to contemporary Western audiences (as in today’s entry). In Lies!, we look at the representational aspects of each film, including period details and the depiction of the religion(s) in question (with, it is implied, an emphasis on what the filmmakers are doing wrong). In Videotape! we consider the film as a film. Is it worth watching? So bad it’s good? Dare I say… so good it’s good?
For this first column, I have chosen a movie close to my heart, Youssef Chahine’s Destiny (al-Massir, 1997), which I saw for the first time (and also for the second time) while a college student. The film takes as its subject the renowned Islamic philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd), who lived in twelfth-century Andalusia (Muslim Spain). In terms of plot, the film greatly resembles 2009’s Agora, except instead of a Spanish film about medieval Egypt, we have an Egyptian film about medieval Spain. Both are about respected philosophers who are swept up in a rising tide of religious violence, leading, however, to radically different outcomes.
Chahine, a nominal Christian, was nevertheless the preeminent Egyptian filmmaker. Destiny was in part* a reaction to the reception of his previous film, The Emigrant (1994), a retelling of the story of Joseph from the Bible (Genesis 37–50) and the Qur’an (Sura 12)—and also a future candidate for this column—that tried to circumvent the Islamic (well, Sunni) prohibition of depicting prophets onscreen by, basically, changing everyone’s names. That didn’t work, and Destiny is a cri de coeur against governmental indifference to religious fundamentalism, a universal theme that also resonates with the specific situation of modern Egypt. Chahine, who died in 2008, was at least spared the clusterfuck of the Arab Spring and its aftermath.
Sects!
The bulk of the film takes place in Córdoba under the rule of the Almohad dynasty (the year, specifically, is 1195), but the story actually begins in Languedoc in the south of France. The very first thing we see is an accused heretic named Gérard Breuil being burned alive—along with his works—for the sin of translating Averroes into Latin. This scene—which sets off my bullshit detector, but that’s for the next section—also establishes that Christianity will play a role. Our first viewpoint character, Gérard’s son Joseph, is a Christian and remains a Christian throughout the narrative, even as he makes his way to Andalusia, meets Averroes, and ingratiates himself into the philosopher’s inner circle, even falling in love with his daughter. This is most evident in a key scene where Joseph travels back to France with some of Averroes’ works. He crosses himself as he navigates treacherous waters while choral music plays on the soundtrack.
Apart from Joseph and his family, Christianity is portrayed as a sinister, mostly unseen outside force. Joseph arrives in Córdoba at about the same time the Almohad caliph Yaqub al-Mansur returns victorious from the Battle of Alarcos. The threat of military reprisal is constant, although we never see any armed conflict between Christians and Muslims. We do, however, see some of the movie’s villains negotiating with Christians to help overthrow the caliph.
This leads to the portrayal of Islam. A key difference between Agora and Destiny is that Destiny is an internal critique of Islamic society while Agora is about the Brights maintaining their dignity in a world filled with stupid Christians. Averroes himself is a pious Muslim, shown holding public forums where bad faith actors try to trip him up on questions of religion to no avail. Averroes is also an avowed Aristotelian, and one of his major contributions to philosophy (both in the film and in real life) is his commentary on Aristotle’s works, which became inseparable from the works themselves as they were translated from Arabic into Latin. Averroes’ enemies have a bug up their ass specifically because he criticized al-Ghazali, a Persian theologian of the previous century, whose book The Incoherence of the Philosophers attacked Greek philosophy and stated—to oversimplify the matter a bit—that everything happens because God says so. Averroes wrote a refutation with the provocative title—again, name-dropped several times in the film—The Incoherence of the Incoherence, one of his many attempts to harmonize faith and reason.
The extremists are not merely displeased with the application of reason to religion but also by the simple pleasures of life. Averroes belongs to the caliph’s court and is the teacher of his two sons, Nasser and Abdallah. Nasser loves women—but Abdallah loves to dance. So, strangely, Destiny is a little like a medieval version of Footloose. The extremists want to reach the caliph via his sons, and so they indoctrinate Abdallah into what I can only describe as a Sufi dance cult. It takes the whole movie—with help from Averroes’ Roma friends (but they are not called Roma in the subtitles, if that sort of thing bothers you)—to sing and dance Abdallah back to his senses. Yes, this movie is also a musical!
Notably absent from the film is a strong Jewish presence, a troubling fact since Jews were a major part of Andalusian society. The closest we get is the Roma family at the center of Abdallah’s plot: Marwan, the father, Manuella, the mother, and Sarah, the girl Abdallah loves. Marwan appears to be Muslim, but it is unclear where the rest of his family stands. Sarah is not exactly a common name among Muslims or Christians (in this era, at least), so it leaves one to wonder. According to this essay, the presence of the Roma is an anachronism, a deliberate substitute for Jews who could not be depicted positively onscreen for political reasons.
Lies!
We now return to the opening scene of the film and the execution of Gérard Breuil. That the film gives his name is a lucky break because it means I can fact check him. And he appears to be a cipher, a person who never really existed. The best I could come up with is a Gérard de Breuil, who wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s On Animals about a century after the film takes place. No Gérard (de) Breuil was executed for translating Averroes or any of his Aristotelian works.
This is unsurprising, because the translation of the Greek classics from Arabic to Latin (and Hebrew)—before the Greek originals became widely known in Western Europe—was an intellectual boon that made Averroes something of a secular saint. He, along with the physician Avicenna and the general Saladin (both named in the film) were the three “good” Muslims in the minds of European Christians. Dante, a fan of Aristotle (“the master of those who know”), also admired Averroes and placed him—along with his co-religionists—in hell… but, like, the good part, the part where no one suffers, reserved for those who lived before Jesus or who, like Averroes, didn’t love him enough. Aristotle is there too, so the compensation for being deprived of eternal bliss in the heavenly court is a perpetual roommate situation with your intellectual hero.
This is not to deny that so-called heretics were burned in southern France in the twelfth century. It is precisely in the Languedoc region that the Cathar heresy spread, and they were crusaded and inquisited over the course of the next few centuries. We’ll get to the Cathars and their idiosyncratic beliefs eventually, but the iconography of the opening segment is drawn from their persecution, which has been romanticized by sympathizers who do not completely understand what Cathars believed or why they were so hated (their legacy lives on in academic studies, conspiracy theories, and board games). But Aristotle and his interpreters were a cornerstone of the Christian intellectual life in the Middle Ages, and Averroes influenced some of the era’s greatest philosophers, including Thomas Aquinas, the most important medieval Christian thinker.
Destiny also engages with what might be called the Myth of Andalusia, a received idea that Muslim Spain was a multicultural paradise where Jews, Christians, and Muslims freely exchanged ideas, the so-called convivencia. Chahine holds up this standard as the ideal but hardly promotes the myth. On the contrary, the film’s Andalusia is in decline. The Almohad dynasty was notably less tolerant than its predecessors, and the film’s caliph turns a blind eye to reactionary elements in his own government because he needs them to fill his army. Eventually, these conservative forces target Averroes and attempt to destroy not only him, but his entire legacy. The second half of the film is occupied with the question of how to preserve the philosopher’s written works. We see them copied out by his students and then taken to France and (in a self-congratulatory scene for an Egyptian filmmaker) to Egypt. The message seems to be: Egypt is now the intellectual custodian of what Spain has lost. But also: If it happened there, it can happen here!
Videotape!
All of Destiny’s best scenes involve fire. The opening sequence, despite its questionable historicity, is nevertheless remarkable. We see the local bishop putting on his vestments as the statues of saints adorning the church look down in judgment on our poor Aristotelian, whose own books are being used as tinder. The image cuts from one of these implacable stone images to the bishop’s hand, who then gives the signal to light the fire. Cue the title card!
Fire will be a recurring motif throughout the film, including a book-burning at the end. Before we get there, though, we have a couple of other key scenes of incandescent blazes. My favorite individual image appears when Abdallah is inducted into the dance cult. He had previously been seen suggestively dancing and drinking with Manuella. Now he is swaying in rhythm with a bunch of dudes he met in a bathhouse. They are chanting a hymn about the greatness of their emir, who will restore the purity of their faith. The emir in question is in fact right there, standing just beyond a raging pyre with his hands outstretched.
Fire strikes again about halfway through the film, when Sheikh Riad, the man pulling the strings behind the cultists, has someone set fire to Averroes’ house. This is the closest thing to an action set piece in a film more interested in ideas than spectacle.
The second-closest thing to an action sequence is probably the dance numbers. The movie has at least three musical sequences—two near the beginning, where Abdallah dances first with Manuella and then, shortly thereafter, with the cultists—and near the end, where Abdallah’s friends try to break the spell of his indoctrination. As song and dance plays such an important role in the narrative, I wish that the movie had more musical interludes, especially in the absence of any meaningful action, a disappointing lacuna in an epic movie.
That’s not to say that the film is boring. It’s a long movie (135 minutes) but not a slow one. It is filled with incident, and those incidents usually take the form of political intrigue. There is also some entertaining banter, which is not lost in translation. The caliph, on the point of banishing Averroes from the court, warns him, “If I didn’t owe you some respect, I’d destroy you.” Then, when Averroes quits in disgust, the caliph passes by one of his other advisers, who chides him for heeding obsequious but insincere courtiers (“People bow even when you fart!”) before delivering what will become the film’s epigram: “Ideas have wings. No one can stop their flight.”
Apart from the dearth of action, the movie benefits from the other usual qualities of an epic. It doesn’t have a cast of thousands—more like a cast of hundreds—but it has the undeniable charm of a film where a crowded square is filled with real, flesh-and-blood humans. It is also well-shot, with Syria and Lebanon standing in for Spain. More than its earnest messaging, the film captures something of a distant time and place that is rarely seen on film, and certainly not in the work of American or European filmmakers.
Andalusia has unfortunately become a talking point in the broader culture wars. In addition to the aforementioned “Myth of Andalusia,” there is the opposite perspective, that nothing good can come from Islam, and that Andalusia was no different than other Islamic states. Destiny is a testament that this is untrue, and its hopeful vision of the future—where Jews, Christians, and Muslims collectively work to preserve the heritage of the past—serves as a pre-emptive corrective to the navel-gazing pessimism of Agora, where Christian mobs tear apart the Library of Alexandria and the philosophers who maintained it.
*The other event that spurred the making of this film was the attempt on the life of Chahine’s friend and collaborator, Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who was stabbed by Islamist extremists in 1994 in retribution for his allegorical 1959 novel Children of Gebelawi. The controversy over the then 45-year-old novel had been renewed by the fatwa the Iranian government placed on Salman Rushdie’s head for The Satanic Verses in 1989. Since I first wrote this column, history has repeated itself, and now Rushdie has been stabbed for a novel he wrote a lifetime ago. The word fatwa is even used in Destiny, certainly not by accident. It’s a sad fact that Destiny’s straightforward, almost naïve pre-9/11 messaging has now backed itself into relevance.
Gavin McDowell is a Hoosier by birth and French by adoption. He received his doctorate in “Languages, History, and Literature of the Ancient World from the Beginning until Late Antiquity” and is currently investigating Aramaic translations of the Bible. He is supremely unqualified to talk about film. For more of his unprovoked movie opinions, see his Letterboxd account.