December 4, 2007
‘Noor’ uses drama to explore issues in today’s Islam
Actors perform the reading of ‘Noor’ (Photo by Jeff Watts)
Akbar Ahmed was thousands of feet in the air, flying home to Washington from an interfaith conference in Kansas City, when he began to scribble on the only paper available: envelopes and napkins.
By the time the plane touched down, he had outlined the plot for a play about a kidnaping. He had characters, story line, and a controversial theme about the Islamic world.
Except, of course, it wasn’t yet a play. It was just an idea—though one he knew, if done right, would spark a lot of heated discussion.
It took another year and a lot of encouragement from students, friends, and drama professionals before the scholar and prolific author of works on Islam and the West could bring “Noor” to life on the stage.
Late last month, it was given a series of readings at AU, followed by panel discussions. The audience packed the theatre and stayed until the Katzen closed, discussing, applauding, and debating.
In the play, set in an unnamed Muslim country, a young woman named Noor has been kidnapped, and her three brothers argue about how to retrieve her. Each
man follows a different path within Islam, but none of their approaches work.
The peaceful follower of the mystic Sufi tradition goes to pray with his fellow Sufis, but finds that, instead of compassion, they offer mainly a clubbish promise that personal connections will get things done.
The modernist who believes in the rule of law finds the legal system to be an empty promise that runs on corruption.
And the literalist, who believes the Koran calls for him to fight and even give his life to regain Noor, may cause a terrible tragedy.
The play is full of suspense and cliffhangers, but there’s a lot more going on symbolically. Noor, in Arabic, means light, and is also one of the names of God. The implication is that an essential light has vanished from the Islamic world, and the three brothers are each struggling to revive it using their beliefs.
Not an easy subject. Particularly in a dramatic form.
“The idea was really to continue doing what I’m doing, which is talking about and teaching Islam and raising issues around Islam, but through another medium,” Ahmed says. “A play reaches a different kind of audience.”
But for a scholar, even one who has been involved in plays and films before, it’s a challenge. It was Ahmed’s first full-fledged play. When you’re writing for theatre, “How do you say the same thing, with these complex, sophisticated ideas, but in a different medium? You’re not talking to your class. You’re a dramatist. No one wants lectures. You’ve got to make the characters credible. They’ve got to become human.”
“Noor” was given its first reading earlier this year at Theatre J. At the AU reading, one of the panelists charged Ahmed with washing the Muslim world’s dirty linen in public. “It’s time for us to start washing our linen in public,” Ahmed said, “because if we don’t, neither will Americans understand our pain and our predicament, nor will [we] understand, because [we will be] in a state of denial.
“After 9-11, instead of facing this head on and saying, ‘What the hell is wrong?’ and confronting that, Muslims are more inclined to say to other people, ‘We are perfect. We are peaceful, we are peaceful.’ People won’t accept it anymore,” Ahmed said. “It’s not a valid expression of anything.”
It was the sort of debate he’d like the play to spark.
Aja Anderson is a senior at the School of International Service who works with Ahmed and attended the play. “There was definitely a current of excitement, and also something unsettling. I felt it provoked a lot of thought and discussion,” says Anderson, a native of Gettysburg, Pa. “My parents came to see it, and they called me to say they spoke the entire ride home and all evening and were still speaking about it this morning.
“Dr. Ahmed said he wants us to be thinking about hard questions. The time for political correctness is over. It’s time to start discussing these things.”
