Moroccan-Belgian filmmaker Jawad Rhalib tackles Islamic intolerance and the results of forced multiculturalism in Belgian society. The end product is a film which will leave you breathless.

From the first shots of Amal, the latest title by Moroccan born Belgian filmmaker Jawad Rhalib, I felt a voice creeping up in my head. It was the voice of Somalian author, and often problematic feminist figure Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Many years ago, and thanks to William Dalrymple’s wondrous Jaipur Literature Festival, I heard Hirsi Ali speak. I remember her words to this day, even if at first I might have tried to dismiss them — probably for my own survival as a journalist who writes about cinema from the MENA, with respect. The Infidel author, who went into hiding in the early 2000’s after her collaborator on the film Submission, Theo Van Gogh was brutally murdered by a Muslim fundamentalist, said, and I paraphrase only slightly: “Islam does not allow for a discussion, even if you question some passages, the simple act of asking makes you a heretic.”

In her 2015 book, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, she pointed the finger further by writing that “multiculturalism should not mean that we tolerate another culture’s intolerance. If we do in fact support diversity, women’s rights, and gay rights, then we cannot in good conscience give Islam a free pass on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity.”

From this place, this idea, comes Amal, a film starring one of the most phenomenal actress in world cinema, Lubna Azabal. It is a film that feels like 105-minutes long thriller, where you as the viewer are on the edge of your seat waiting for the other shoe to drop, as the Americans would say. And drop it does, several times, across the sharply constructed, tightly filmed plot, making Amal a suspenseful watch all the way. I won’t give any plot spoilers away.

Amal is a literature teacher in a progressive Brussels school which includes in its curriculum a Quran class conducted by Nabil (played wonderfully by Fabrizio Rongione) who is allowed to teach behind locked doors. He’s a converted imam and a strange figure, polite and progressive in appearance, yet the secrecy he’s allowed in his religious teachings is managing to turn students one against the other. A lot of the female students in the school wear the hijab, the headscarf, yet aren’t allowed to do so in the classroom — part of a law that came into effect in 2020 and is still being debated to date. When classes are over, they retreat into the women’s restrooms to put on the veil and reclaim their faith.

Among Amal’s teenage students are Monia, who is grappling with her sexuality, Jalila, a hijab-wearing fundamentalist in her beliefs, and Rachid, who is on the fence about his religious beliefs, particularly when it comes to the imam.

One day, as a sort of provocation to the more fundamentalist students who are fighting amongst them and bullying Monia because of her tattoos and her sexual orientation, Amal brings into class the poetry of Arab poet Abu Nuwas, the so-called “bad boy of Abbasid poetry” who lived in the 8th Century, born in what is modern-day Iran. In particular, Amal reads from his collection titled ‘Poems of Wine and Revelry’ creating an uproar with her more fundamentalist students when she reveals that Abu Nuwas, a Muslim, was openly bisexual.

This is the fuse that Rhalib, famous for his reality-based fiction films and documentaries, has lit for us, and thrown the grenade into the classroom, waiting for one of the students, or perhaps all of them, to pick up and detonate.

What makes the film tick, apart from its powerful message of religious intolerance mixed with the freedom required for us to live in the modern world, is Lubna Azabal’s powerful performance as the leading character. Azabal’s previous turns have included parts in Hany Abu Assad’s Paradise Now, her award worthy performance in The Blue Caftan, with a cameo in the screen version of Coriolanus by Ralph Fiennes, among many many more spellbinding characters she has brought to life in her career.

Haunting is the idea that religion will never find a way to solve the problems of the world. You could sit three people down from different cultures, speaking in their own tongues only and with opposite political ideals and by the end of their chat, they may have come up with the answer to world peace. But bring together an Orthodox Jew, a Muslim fundamentalist and a Bible Belt Christian and war will break out right there on the spot, while each spews out their parrot-learned rhetorics, without any effort to hear what the other has to say.

Religion may have been the opium of the people, as Marx said, but Amal clearly shows us that these days it is the bomb which makes the world implode, one person, one act of hate at a time.

Amal enjoys its US premiere this weekend and plays next week at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, with the following screenings:

Friday 5th of January - Regal Cinemas at 4 pm

Sunday 7th of January - Camelot Theatre (PS Cultural Center) 4.45 pm

Saturday 13th of January - Regal Cinemas at 6 pm

Image used with permission.