Dilshad D. Ali: June 2009 Archives

Contains some spoilers.

In 1986 Iran, in a remote village where the men manipulate, set, and enforce the laws based on their own version of Islamic teachings, one woman suffers a terrible, terrible consequence when her estranged husband decides to implicate her for adultery.

Based on a true story, "The Stoning of Soraya M." relates the awful sequence of events that befall Soraya, a wife on the outs with her brutish husband. As the movie begins, Iranian village elder Zahra ("The House of Sand and Fog's" Shohreh Aghdashloo) waylays a French-Iranian journalist passing through her village ("The Passion of the Christ's" Jim Caviezel) and tells him the tragic story of her niece Soraya, beautifully played by Mozhan Marno.

As the story unfolds, Soraya is approached by the local cleric with an offer of divorce from her husband, Ali. Though she also wants out (because he abuses her and sleeps around), she knows she cannot care for herself and her children without him. Zahra begs her to leave him. But Soraya, who gets a job tending house for a local widower, won't do so until she saves up enough money.

Ali, her husband, who is driven by his lust to marry a young girl, decides that if he cannot get a divorce from Soraya, he'll just have her killed by framing her for adultery. Through a shameful sequence of events, Ali manipulates the mayor and cleric of the village to support his vendetta against Soraya. And as the title of the movie foretells, Soraya, is sentenced under a warped version of an Islamic law that calls for a person who commits adultery to be stoned to death. The final sequence of the film is an utterly painful, drawn-out scene that shows the actual stoning of Soraya M, leaving nothing to the imagination. Ever seen the flogging scene of Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ?" This is worse.

If you are at all active in the national American Muslim community, or if you have paid attention in the least bit to the myriad of issues Muslim-Americans have struggled with since the tragedy of 9/11, then you've heard of Asra Nomani--activist, Muslim feminist, the "bad girl of Islam" as dubbed by the media. Why is Nomani a hot topic, even today? When many Americans saw Islam as a religion of violence, when Muslim women were viewed through the lens of full-covered burkas as second-class citizens, when many Americans feared what was being preached in American mosques, Nomani sought to expose what she thought was wrong with how her religion was being practiced--and subsequently rocked the American Muslim community to its core.

Nomani's story is told in "The Mosque in Morgantown," part of the "America at a Crossroads" series, airing tonight at 10 p.m. on PBS (check your local listings). The program details how she returned to her hometown from Pakistan, pregnant and alone, after dealing with the death of her Wall Street Journal colleague, Daniel Pearl in 2001. In shock, Nomani turned to her parents and her home to recoup.