Al massir

Chahine uses a story about the philosopher Averroës to tell a universal story about freedom of expression. In the Moorish city of Córdoba at the end of the twelfth century, Averroës worked on an oeuvre that would be very significant to the Enlightenment and with an influence that can still be felt today. The Caliph of Córdoba, Al Mansur, decided to burn all Averroës’ works to placate the fundamentalists.Chahine’s subject, fundamentalism and freedom, was not chosen by chance. He lives and works in a country that is repeatedly confronted with religious extremism, like many other Arab countries. For instance, in 1989, Chahine saw one of his actors turn to fundamentalism and, in only three weeks, ‘he changed into a zombie’. And his film L’émigré (1994), about the life of Joseph (the son of the patriarch Jacob), was banned in Egypt because portraying prophets is strictly forbidden.In Destiny, the personal stamp of Chahine is visible in the character Joseph (also Chahine’s own name), who sees his father die on the bonfire of the Inquisition in a village in Languedoc because he translated Averroës. Joseph then decides to travel to Andalusia, where he sees the destructive consequences of fundamentalism. Apart from being a wise and topical film about the mechanisms of sectarianism and a plea for personal responsibility, Chahine’s film is also a fine epic-historical narrative about the Spanish and Moorish Almohade culture.