JIHAD
Jihad A Story of the Others is available to watch here
2016 BAFTA Nomination in the Current Affairs documentary category
Nominated for Best Documentary on Current Affairs at the 2016 Grierson Awards
Nominated for a 2016 Golden Nymph Award at Monte-Carlo TV Festival
Norwegian Ministry of Arts & Culture Human Rights Award
The world has watched aghast as thousands of young men and women abandon comfortable lives in the West to join the barbaric ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). Girls and boys have gone rapidly from being apparently well-adjusted school kids, to enthusiastically joining the ranks of Kalashnikov-wielding religious warriors and burkah-clad “jihadi brides”. It feels like a new and frightening phenomenon, one which has left many feeling bewildered and revulsed.
But as this new documentary film by Emmy Award winning director Deeyah Khan shows, Westerners embracing jihad and death is nothing new. For three generations now, young people across Europe have fallen prey to extremist groups and fought, killed and died with mujahideen movements from Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Kashmir, to Chechnya and Burma.
In this film, Deeyah, who has herself faced threats from extremist fundamentalists in the past, sets out to find out why the jihadi message has such an alluring hold on young Westerners.
First, she went back to the roots, spending two years with some of the leading figures in the British jihadi movement from previous generations. She secured unprecedentedly emotional and raw testimony from former extremists, learning from the inside what it is like to be drawn into radicalism, to have your life ruined by extremism and violence, a message which has continued appeal cascading down through the generations.
In JIHAD, Deeyah meets one of the founding fathers of the British jihad, who went abroad to fight, and who preached extremism to thousands of young Muslims across the UK and the West.
Deeyah’s search for answers then takes her to the streets of modern Britain, meeting today’s young Muslims, caught between extremism and the War on Terror. She meets young British Muslims who feel angry and alienated, facing issues of discrimination, identity crises and rejection by both mainstream society and their own communities and families; but in surprising moments of insight and enlightenment, she also finds hope and some possible answers to the complex situation we are currently in.
JIHAD received its world premiere on ITV as part of the Exposure series with the title JIHAD A BRITISH STORY on the 15th of June at 10:40pm.
Netflix streamed Jihad: A Story of the Others to audiences across America and the UK throughout 2018 and 2019.
Norwegian TV channel NRK first broadcast this film in September 2015 under the title Jihad – hellige krigere.
JIHAD has also been screened (2nd April 2016) on Danish television channel DRTV under the title: Jihad – de andres historie.
Leading broadcaster SBS in Australia showed JIHAD a story of the others in April 2016.
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“A powerful and deeply thoughtful film – trying as it does to understand the human imperatives that lie behind the new radicalism. Essential viewing on the most challenging subject of our troubled age.”
–Peter Kosminsky, BAFTA-, Emmy- and RTS Award-winning director
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“Great journalism often challenges the official version of events. That’s what Deeyah Khan’s film Jihad does to the story which governments and tabloids like to tell about the radicalisation of Muslims. She takes those cliches and caricatures, shreds them, and then she let’s you see what is really happening.”
— Nick Davies, special correspondent, The Guardian.
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“Most surprising in this extraordinary film are the silences. Eloquent, painful and raw. Like the silence of a former British jihadist, searching his own mind for the rationale behind his actions – unable to forgive himself for what he has done. There are plenty of reasons why some British Muslims turn to extremism – this film uncovers many of them in rare and uncomfortable detail. And while it offers examples of redemption, it sounds a very powerful alarm to communities right across the country. The journey to violence and hatred can be remarkably short and easy. The journey back is infinitely more difficult.”
— Tim Sebastian BAFTA and RTS Award-winning television journalist and novelist.
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“Anyone wishing to understand why thousands of Western-born Muslims are leaving comfortable homes to fight with Isis would do well to watch Deeyah Khan’s powerful new film, Jihad … featuring extraordinary interviews.”
–The Independent on Sunday
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“Film-maker Deeyah Khan interviews former British jihadists to find out what drove them to extremism. The men describe their feelings of alienation that made them ripe for recruitment… a riveting insight.”
–The Daily Telegraph
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“Based on 18 months’ research, Deeyah Khan’s intelligent and absorbing film investigates the appeal extremism has for some British Muslims … a persuasive plea for acknowledging complexity.”
–Sunday Times
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“A sensitively handled piece of film-making.
The analysis…was detailed and specific. The conversations were captured sympathetically. The focus on young Muslims and their experiences in the British social context was carefully and subtly carried out. The issues of identity, sexuality, intergenerational disconnect, racism and alienation were all suitably focused on. The issue of racism and the securitisation of multiculturalism, and a focus on the war on terror, or more specifically British and American foreign policy since the late 1980s, was also touched upon.”–Tahir Abbas
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AUDIENCE REACTIONS TO FUUSE DOCUMENTARY JIHAD
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Production stills from JIHAD.
