Islam Documentary Screened at Fairchild Theater

By: Nicholas Kowalski

The East Lansing premiere of the documentary “Inside Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think” was held at Michigan State’s Fairchild Theater on Friday October 23.

Executive producers Alex Kronemer and Michael Wolfe described their work as “a documentary film based on the Gallup poll of worldwide Muslim public opinion.” The event was sponsored in part by the Association of Michigan Muslim Physicians and the Michigan State University Muslim Studies Program.

Dr. Mohamed Elnabtity began the evening with a brief opening statement. Elnabtity began by proclaiming that there are approximately 1.57 billion – not one billion, as the title of the film suggests – Muslims worldwide, which equates to about one in every four people. The licensed neurosurgeon also argued that non-Muslims commonly misperceive the Muslim religion and its followers, continuing that their misperceptions are predicated on inaccurate beliefs, or what Elnabtity called, “projects of the media.”

Following an introduction by Master of Ceremony Saeed Khan, Dr. Paulette Granberry-Russell, Director of the Office for Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives at MSU, offered her gratitude and excitement for the event. Granberry-Russell stated that the documentary was a six-year work-in-progress, essentially since the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

“As a non-Muslim, I look to have the myths debunked about the faith,” Granberry-Russell said.

Alex Kronemer, executive producer of the documentary and co-founder of Unity Productions Foundation (UPF), addressed the crowd. Kronemer injected humor into the pre-film presentation by using a joke about a rabbi and the Pope to illustrate to the audience that, according to him, disputes over religion “lead to tragedy not comedy.” Kronemer ended his speech by thanking the MSU community for their advocacy in global peace.

U. S. Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI) was slated to speak prior to the showing; however, the Congressman was unable to make it out of Washington. An official correspondent on behalf of Rep. Rogers remarked that the Congressman has been kept busy by a tightly packed schedule in the House Committee on Intelligence.

“Since MSU is promoting global peace, it is fitting to display documentaries portraying often misunderstood religions, such as Islam,” Kronemer said.

The film itself was a presentation of a series of statistics gathered by Gallup through surveying people from thirty-five nations over the span of eight years. Much of the documentary is devoted to displaying a range of facts from a sampling of opinions from a broad test group through various graphs and data tables.

One of the primary speakers in the film is Dalia Mogahed, Senior Analyst and Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, a nonpartisan research institute that strives to provide analysis derived from data on the views of Muslim populations. In the documentary, Mogahed claimed that “Americans” – presumably those native to the U. S. and not Central or South America – and Muslims are equally likely to find terrorist attacks on civilians as morally unjustifiable, and that a large majority of Muslims, if it were up to them, would include a free speech provision in a new written constitution.

The film also attempted to display the discontent towards the United States in the Middle East. The film highlighted a poll that showed 60% of Egyptians hold a negative view about the United States, while only 3% hold the same view of Canada.

“Inside Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think” is being viewed in cities across the United States and Canada with confirmed dates up to February 20, 2010.