I was able to watch, Flora’s film They Call Me Muslim. The film followed two women’s lives in France and Iran that had two different perspectives on what it was to them to be Muslim. It was filmed between December 2004 and January 2005.

In France, they have a democracy, they passed a law that banned the Islamic headscarf. This created an outcry in the Muslim community. The Muslim community makes up 10% of France’s population. 800 Muslim students were affected, 47 of them expelled.

The first woman was an 18-year-old named Samah. She had been wearing her headscarf since she was 14. When this law was passed she was still in high school and she felt that her identity had been violated. The Hijab makes her feel confident because she feels that a woman is an object that needs to be hidden.

In Iran, they have a theocracy, which forces the women to wear the Hijab. To rebel and also protest, the women have been able to wear the hijab in different ways.

The second woman is K, she is a mother of two and she feels that she should be able to wear what she wants. She smokes and she dances which are two things that the religion shame. While in her home she was wearing a tank top and shorts and said to the camera, “They call me Muslim…but do you see me as a Muslim? What do you have in mind for a Muslim person?”

This film showed the two different perspectives of what it meant to be Muslim. I felt that if they wanted to they could have included more women from different places to make more of an impact on showing what being Muslim meant to these women while also educating others.