Even though I knew before I started my fieldwork that it would be important to watch these films, this was not the main reason for including Ayat-ayat Cinta and Ketika Cinta Bertasbih in this article. The main reason I focus on these films is that almost all informants referred to Ayat-ayat Cinta and Ketika Cinta Bertasbih when I asked them which Islamic films they had seen. I will focus on Ayat-ayat Cinta (Verses of Love, 2008) and Ketika Cinta Bertasbih 1 and 2 (When Love Praises God, 2009), as most of my research participants listed these films as their favourites.
His background and teaching experience resemble that of the author of Ayat-ayat Cinta, Habiburahman El Shirazy.19 Fachri embraces his life in Cairo, completing his studies while translating religious books. Ayat-ayat Cinta is notable for its Islamic theme, as it fits Wright's model of what constitutes a religious film. Realizing the need for mass appeal in their venture, the producers of Ayat-ayat Cinta were keen to emphasize that this film is about love, which is considered to be universal.
Many experts realized that what made Ayat-ayat Cinta very popular was the recipe for packaging a manual for living in an Islamic way in a melodramatic love story. Although Ayat-ayat Cinta was intended to be filmed in Egypt, it did not materialize. The Ketika Cinta Bertasbih films were not as commercially successful as Ayat-ayat Cinta, but the US$4 million films were popular.
Berbeda dengan Ayat-Ayat Cinta, film Ketika Cinta Mengagungkan tidak hanya tentang cinta dan pernikahan.
Informants’ Response to the Film
The film suggests that while Islamic-style marriage may look like an arranged match, it is not a forced marriage. Meanwhile, R from Bandung admitted that she only watched the movie because her high school teacher asked her to review an Indonesian movie. Therefore, it is clear to me that part of the Muslim youth identified the film as an Islamic genre and is relevant to them.
It confirms Heryanto's argument that Ayat-ayat Cinta is, in essence, a love story crafted with good filmmaking skills, although not without some criticism, and this makes the film attractive to most young Indonesian Muslims.21 Therefore , it is not surprising. that an important message that Bramantyo wanted to convey, the principle of tolerance within Islam, failed to reach the general audience. We have seen how pious they were in the movie and we were convinced that they were pious in reality too. Bramantyo shares a similar background with his actors and almost his entire crew; none have special credentials from Islamic educational institutions, activities, or experiences.23 The exception was El Shirazy—an Al Azhar student who plays a cleric in the film.
Criticism of the film also stemmed from the fact that some scenes did not fit Islamic teachings. B said that he watched the film with his family, including an uncle, a teacher at an IAIN (Institut Agama Islam Negeri/State Institute for Islamic Studies) who once went to Al Azhar for a six-month course, and that the uncle very dissatisfied after seeing the movie. In an interview, he admitted that he had tried to shoot the film in Egypt to fully conform to the portrayal of Egypt as written in the novel.
Despite these and other difficulties, Bramantyo managed to shoot the film in India, thinking the place was quite similar to Cairo. She explained that this did not mean that she had never had lessons on how to be a good Muslim before, but rather that the film embodied the Islamic teachings she was taught before going to university. Another respondent, me, said she had watched the film with colleagues because many of their seniors in an Islamic group had recommended it.
I even cried at that time because I did a lot of wrongs in high school and the movie made me know that these were sins. Turner says that film stars must have some representativeness, some recognizable elements with which viewers can connect the film with their own experiences. The similarity of the experience of watching a film to a religious experience, as stated by Lyde28, is evident in my research.
The film did not present polygamy as an ideal, but presented it in a positive way and made the idea of polygamy attractive to Muslim men. Those films are important to 'Islamize' films as sex, horror and violence themes occupied Indonesian films. However, if the writer, director and producer of Ketika Cinta Bertasbih wanted the film to convey Islamic lessons to the youth, their intentions were not realized. .
Islamic Identity and Modified Appropriation
However, as I have discussed, the intent of the authors of Islamic novels and film directors to propagate Islamic principles is crystal clear and my informants could sense their powerful messages. I call my informants' responses "modified appropriation": they accepted and appropriated some messages, but modified others. They have learned Arabic, or at least would like to learn it, but are motivated by the trend of Arabic, not by religious imperatives as in the movies.
Some specific features of Muslim identity emerge in the films, especially in Ayat-ayat Cinta and Ketika Cinta Bertasbih. First, in the films, all Muslim female characters wear the veil, except for Eliana in Ketika Cinta Bertasbih, who only includes the veil in the film. In the self-help books, if a Muslim woman is featured on the cover, she always wears the veil.
The films and the books reinforce the general idea that being a female Muslim involves wearing the veil.34 Almost all research participants agree that a female Muslim must cover her body and, in the contemporary Islamic environment, this means the wearing of the veil. The custom of wearing the veil is popular among university students, and this is not a surprise since it was university students who started the phenomenon of veiling in Indonesia in the 1990s. Her statement is consistent with Hamdani's argument35 that the standard of modesty in the case of Islamic dress varies from one culture to another, although the idea of covering certain parts of the body may be universal.
In the Arabian Peninsula during the period of Prophet Muhammad, the veil is a modest clothing for women, and also the most suitable clothing regarding the conditions of the desert. Other Muslim scholars also agree that veiling is a continuation of regional customs, practiced by women in Arabia in the early period of Islam, which was wrongly enshrined as a religious edict (Mahmood, Politics of Piety, p.51). Some of the participants did not apply the principle of physically avoiding people of the opposite sex; neither of them wanted to marry without a date.
Although he knew the principle before watching any Islamic films, he felt that the principle was justified by the Ketika Cinta Bertasbih films, as none of the characters physically touched the opposite sex unless they were family members. Of course, devotion is one of the requirements I will look for in a woman in the future. In fact, most of my informants have boyfriends/girlfriends and they live their lives in the same way as their more 'secular' colleagues, such as having lunch and dinner together, going to the cinema and hanging out in malls with their 'pacar' (boyfriend/girlfriend).
Apart from wearing Islamic dress, it is also shown in the Islamic films by the use of Arabic terms at every available opportunity. M's words confirm Hoekstra's argument that watching religious films inspires viewers to connect film and life experience, to reflect on their own life experiences and, quite often, to change their behavior.39 Here, as in the case of the piety movement in Egypt, behavior is at the heart of the enforcement of the norm by Islamic groups.40.
Conclusion
Amin, Ali, Religion in Indonesian Cinemas: The Representation of Religion in Indonesian Box Offices Saarbrucken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011. Arief, Gde D., “From Sex to Syahadat: The Market and Resurgence of Religion in Indonesian Cinema in http:/ /etnohistori. Bayat, Asef, "Muslim Youth and the Claim of Youthfulness," i Linda Herrera og Asef Bayat (red.), Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Heryanto, Ariel, “Pop Culture and Competing Identities”, in Ariel Heryanto (ed.), Popular Culture in Indonesia: Fluid Identities in Post-Authoritarian Politics, Oxon: Routledge, 2008. Upgraded Piety and Pleasure: The New Middle Class and Islam in Indonesian Popular Culture', in Andrew N. Mahmood, Saba, Politics of Piety: the Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, Londen: Oxford University Press, 1950. Smith-Hefner, Nancy, “Young People Language, Gallische gezelligheid en de nieuwe Indonesische middenklasse”, in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2007, Vol.
