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Metro Detroit Muslim Documentary by 'Detropia' Filmmakers Debuts Tonight on HBO
Filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady captured the economic crisis in Detroit with their acclaimed 2012 documentary “Detropia.”
Tonight, HBO will debut another made-in-Detroit documentary from the two women. “The Education of Mohammad Hussein” is a 38-minute film that delves into the lives of young students at the Al-Ikhlas Training Academy, described as one of more than a dozen traditional Islamic schools in metro Detroit.
In the film, which overlapped time-wise with Ewing and Grady’s work on “Detropia,” viewers get to meet tweens and teens, like 10-year-old Mohammad, who face discrimination because of their Muslim faith.
Some scenes show the students just being kids. There are mentions of Facebook and Justin Bieber, and one girl drops a pop-culture reference to “The Brady Bunch” when discussing a large family.
But other moments speak to the particular challenges of growing up Muslim in post-9/11 America. In one scene, Mohammad talks about feeling bad that some people in his Detroit community don’t accept Muslims.
“They say Muslims are dirty and terrorists,” he explains.
Speaking from New York City, Ewing says the film is an example of the city’s vast store of film-worthy topics.
“Detroit is a very fascinating and multilayered place, and there’s a lot of different stories to tell. This one merited its own treatment,” says Ewing, who grew up in Farmington Hills.
The film covers the tensions stirred by Quran-burning Florida pastor Terry Jones, who has made trips to metro Detroit to hold rallies against Islam. He is shown speaking in June 2011 outside City Hall in Dearborn, which has one of the largest Arab-American populations in the country, and inciting a crowd that showed up to protest against him.
In another sequence, Jones is greeted at a diner by a supporter who says to him, “They can blow our stuff up, but we can’t burn a book?”
The documentary also includes an interfaith rally that unites local religious leaders in their support of tolerance.
The filmmakers were allowed inside Al-Ikhlas Academy by its director, Brother Nadir Ahmad. But Ewing says it wasn’t easy to gain the same sort of access to the private homes of Muslim-American families.
“People were as friendly as they could be, but truthfully, there was, at one point, a rumor going around that we were not really a film crew, but the FBI” in disguise, she says.
“The Education of Mohammad Hussein” was shown at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in 2013. It made the Oscar short list in 2012 for best short documentary film (as did “Detropia” in the best feature-length documentary category), but didn’t land a nomination.
Ewing and Grady were nominated for an Oscar for their 2006 documentary “Jesus Camp.”
Muslim rights activist Dawud Walid, who is featured in the HBO documentary, says he likes the film’s approach.
“I think the documentary did a wonderful job of showing how the metro Detroit community did not allow itself to be divided by Pastor Terry Jones,” says Walid, the executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Julie Hinds
Detroit Free Press