Your mosque is being spied on by the FBI. Your cousin may be looking at jail time for disrupting an Israeli speaker at UC Irvine last year. Due to the actions of fundamentalist lunkheads 7,000 miles away, you could get your butt kicked by skinheads on Main Street Huntington Beach.
Face it: It ain't easy being a young Muslim in Orange County.
]
Writer/director Qasim Basir's film Mooz-lum adds another dynamic many young Muslims in America face: the clash between their strict upbringings and everyday life.
Mooz-lum does not take place in Orange County, but it could. Tariq Mahdi (Evan Ross) has grown up to become angry and confused because of his overbearing father and estranged mother and sister. Then Tariq goes to college, where mentors, other young Muslims and people of other faiths open him up to an Islam he never knew existed. The 9/11 attacks come along to change everything again, forcing the lad to face his past and the biggest decisions of his life.
Co-starring Nia Long, Roger Guenveur Smith and Danny Glover, Mooz-lum is being released this weekend by Peace Films, which has partnered with digital-media company Eventful to promote and secure a deal with AMC
Theatres to screen the film. Check your favorite movie site for times.
Better yet, attend the special screening the Greater Los Angeles Area office of the Council on American-Islamic
Relations (CAIR-LA) hosts at 1:30 p.m. Sunday at the Block of Orange. Seating is limited. Purchase your $10 tickets at http://ca.cair.com/losangeles/event/mooz-lum.
Here's the trailer:
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.