Slumdog Millionaire

I shall now proceed to tell you how much I liked the movie and then hem and haw about it.

In the early scenes about Jamal's childhood, I was nearly sobbing with rage.  It made me yearn for some kind of UN strike force that would go in mow down the slumlords, child slavers, indifferent capitalists, corrupt police & government officials, etc. (Yes, I'm well acquainted with the paradoxes, impossibilities & moral quandaries of such an idea--it's just a fantasy).  But I liked just about everything about the movie and loved much of it. 

I don't know what the screenwriter's intent was, but it seemed to me also a good expression of how the Islamic faith gets lived out, at least in that particular historical context.  I don't mean the Islam as preached by the local imams, but Islam as it is lived out culturally by people who most of the time are only nominally Muslims--just like the bulk of Christians &,  say, Buddhists, are only nominally Christians and Buddhists most of the time.  And that brings me to the hemming and hawing...

There's nothing in the Koran that unequivocally enjoins classic holy war, honor killings, female circumcision, intolerance & passages that may seem to, especially as regards holy war, are offset by other passages.  Jesus reportedly said "I come to bring not peace but a sword."  That has been invoked by Christians when they found it expedient to wage wars or engage in violence, but there's little doubt that the Semon on the Mount demands that that particular remark of Jesus requires that it be treated symbolically rather than literally.  And whenever Christians don't have their bloodlust up , that's how they do interpret it. 

 (Much of what we Westerners object to in Islam has to to do with the local and (often) tribal cultural matrix in which it is embedded that actually pre-existed the arrival of Islam.  In Saudi Arabia, there was no tradition of pictorial art when Islam arose.  Consequently, Arabian art is confined to mosiacs and "arabesques"  In Iran and Indonesia there was already a naturalistic pictorial tradition so the Koranic stricture against likenesses of God was taken to mean only as "don't try to draw God" and their pictorial traditions continued.)

But the hemming and hawing concerns this:   There is a fatalism in the movie that works well vis a vis the wonderful love story, but to me could be enervating as far as the pursuit of social justice, not only because of the implicit appeal to resignation, but also because of a certain mystical individualism. 

I dunno.  Michael Walzer has argued that the Calvinists, who were nothing if not fatalists with their doctrine of hard predestination, were also the spiritual ancestors of the vanguard party of professional revolutionaries a la Lenin--don't remember if he discusses Blanqui or not.  I wonder if Blanqui came out of a Huegenot background.

But the fatalism I saw in the movie is something I associate with Islam.  But maybe that's all wet.   There is a saying, "Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel"  I wonder if it's in the Koran. 

R.

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/