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Known as a bastion of secularism in the Arab world, a new film about one of thousands of religious schools in Syria shows a rise of religiosity in the conservative society. “My experience was Syria and there is this religious population that’s growing,\u201d director Julia Meltzer told Reuters at the Dubai International Film Festival, which ended this weekend.
\u201cAnd that’s a story that needs to be told about moderate Islam and it’s a story we don’t see, especially in the West.”
Meltzer and Laura Nix co-directed a documentary \u201cThe Light In Her Eyes\u201d about the spread of religious schools in secular Syria.
The film features Houda al-Habash, who opens up the mosque and school she runs where hundreds of teenage girls, sent there by their parents, spend the summer learning to memorize the Qur\u2019an.
The students also take religious study classes that conclude with most of them taking to the hijab, or Muslim headscarf.
Houda lectures the girls that the veil is an Islamic duty that God intended as protection and which for Houda is part of a process of empowering girls to play an active role in society as Muslims.
“The flag is the symbol of the state, but the hijab is the symbol of Islam … you have not been faithful to the symbol,” she tells the girls in one of her group pep talks.
“God made the hijab an obligation to protect women from inappropriate looks and preserve her for her husband.”
She also tells the girls in another talk: “Does a woman have a right to be the president of the republic? Yes. Don’t let go your mind, or your choice” — an opinion that is the subject of dispute among Islamist political movements today.
The documentary’s directors said they wanted to show that the Islamic revival depicted in the film reflects the mainstream in Syria today and should be seen as progressive in many respects.
“What I saw in that educational environment (university) was that people did not arrive on time, teachers didn’t really seem to take things seriously,” Meltzer said.
“In contrast to that world, going to Houda’s mosque was a really eye-opening, and complex, experience for me where girls were encouraged to read.”
Syria has been gripped by unrest since activists began protesting for democratic changes in one of the most tightly run police states in the region.
The government of President Bashar al-Assad argues that it is facing an armed insurrection by Islamists.
Assad’s Baath party has relied heavily on his Alawite sect to run the security, military and other key arms of the state.<\/p>\n