Paradise Way: Watching Sirāt After Gaza

Mysticism is cooler than you think – and not just because the ecstatic dance so often at its heart looks and feels uncannily like a rave. In the Muslim tradition, the radical nature of mystical belief is cool too. Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi held that God created the universe in order to experience Himself. Everything He created, every possible thing, is a fragment yearning to return to the Whole. And, of those, the human being is potentially the most perfect embodiment of the sole Truth that is Him. Oliver Laxe, the Galician-French director of Sirāt – which won the jury prize at the 2025 Cannes Festival – epigraphs the film with a paraphrase of two or more traditions of the Prophet Muhammad’s on the subject of the title: ‘There is a bridge called Sirāt that links hell and paradise. Whoever crosses it is warned that it is narrower than a strand of hair, sharper than a sword.’ Laxe says being radical means ‘to jump into the abyss and try to connect with yourself, even if you think there’s no safety net. But having faith’, the self-professed Sufi adds, ‘is about believing that there always is a net’.1 It is to walk the Sirāt, which is what watching the film ends up feeling like.

In dhikr – or remembrance: Sufism’s central ceremony – a large group of people use a loud beat and rhythmic motion to temporarily depart the physical plain. Their stated purpose is reunion with the divine. They consciously invoke God or praise His Prophet, and apart from analogue percussion – sometimes also a chanter accompanied by flute or fiddle – they rely solely on their breath and vocal cords. But the paradoxical sense of community in which each member is simultaneously alone and part of a throbbing whole, the essentially otherworldly purpose of the gathering, and the altered state of mind it is intended to induce – all are uncannily similar to what happens in the ostensibly profane ceremonial space where Laxe sets his film: a rave in the desert. The film is itself a ceremony, Laxe says: ‘For me, a rave was a place where I was connecting myself with my strength and my fragility. It’s a contradiction, but that’s what happens on a dance floor … When I was dancing with [the images that became the film], I was also celebrating my wounds … Dancing is not selfish. You can be connected to the pain of the world and still celebrate life.’2

Since coming up with the term ‘postmuslim’ to describe my work, I’ve sought out art that reflects the same urge to draw on the Arab Muslim experience, both glorious heritage and present-day discontent. Postmuslim has now become a book of essays subtitled ‘A Testimony’.3 In those essays as in my novel, The Book of the Sultan’s Seal, I want to affirm my own existence as a modern non-Westerner and to demonstrate the need for an alternative to the post-Enlightenment world-view that has brought humanity to this point in the Anthropocene.4 I want to expose the Western world order’s lies about secularism and democracy and to reclaim Islamic civilisation beyond religion. And I want to explore the possibility of an Islam that assimilates modernity rather than cocooning itself in a doctrinal dogma or essentialised identity. Sadly, whether by clinging to it or renouncing it, Muslim artists themselves rarely get past the idea of Islam as a narrow belief system or behavioural code. At the same time, to be part of the contemporary world, they feel obliged to uncritically embrace Western ideas that stunt and distort their sense of themselves and the world. Laxe evidently speaks some Moroccan Arabic and has his own Muslim religious practice, but he is free of that double bind. 

Perhaps a raver is more likely to use chemical stimulation than a dhaker – the practitioner of dhikr, or rememberer – even though rememberers haven’t exactly been averse to drugs either. Of course, ravers rely on sound gear, rather than their own bodies (with or without microphones), for music. And their activity doesn’t consciously refer to an immanent presence to balance their desire for transcendence. But an outdoor dhikr in the Sahara is hardly unheard of, historically. And just like remembering, raving can be a ritual renunciation of the individual, logical, and productive impulse in favour of something communal and ethereal, ungoverned by time. For as long as it lasts, at least, a rave is a space where people shed their worldly sense of themselves, relinquishing the values that animate the capitalist-colonial world in which most of us live most of the time. To invoke reality, Laxe befriended a whole crew of dedicated dancers and set up a real-life rave of his own; he worked with David Letellier (Kangding Ray) to produce the music for it and the film. He found the dancers to be contemporary fakirs in essence: modern-day dervishes, even if they’re unaware of that designation. Five of those, two of whom are missing limbs, eventually formed the cast: Bigui (Richard Bellamy), Steff (Stefania Gadda), Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson), Tonin (Tonin Janvier), and Jade (Jade Oukid).

Like dervishes, those five ravers come across as renunciates who set themselves apart from the rat race of the world’s spiritually comatose majority. They embrace the pain of being human, the grief of separation, which the Quran acknowledges when it states that life is a constant struggle. And unlike orthodox believers in the materialist creed, they do not pretend to be whole. ‘We are all broken’, Laxe keeps saying.5 And together with only two professional actors, Bruno Núñez Arjonaand Sergi López, he uses the premise of dancing-as-brokenness to dramatise seeking out something both truer and less tangible than wealth and wellness. In the end, he depicts what looks uncannily like the world during and right after the Gaza apocalypse. ‘I think cinema can cure the collective imaginary’, Laxe says. ‘We can connect with this wound that all of us have … We have to die before dying, I think … We are in a changing era. That’s why sometimes the past appears inside the future. This world is dying, and it will pass. Life will push us to the edge of the abyss, and we will be obliged to change.’6

Today’s global zeitgeist conflates art with activism. It also confuses symbolic activism with real political change. Endless time and resources have been spent on objecting to what has been happening in Gaza, notably by Westerners outraged by their own governments’ complicity, but none of it has led to those governments taking the kind of action that could slow down, let alone stop the horror – sanctions against Israel, for example – or reversing the damage the war has wrought across the region. Our West-dominated world prioritises commodified identities over shared humanity. It recognises only transactional labels, however ‘politicised’ on the surface or cynically depoliticised down below: presenting a deliberate genocide as a ‘humanitarian crisis’, for example; or conflating the nearly century-old colonial project of ethnically cleansing Palestine with a momentary response to an act of ‘Islamist terrorism’. An identity like ‘Palestinian’ will be more relevant the more convincingly it becomes a topic for the theatre of moral outrage. And so, the West’s cultural gatekeepers have been busy selling this newly discovered brand of victimhood rather than seriously thinking through the historical moment, reinforcing the unwritten rule that in the West Arabs can only ever be heard when they voice a political cry for help. Against the backdrop of Gaza, in other words, Arabs are being celebrated, not for what they are intellectually and aesthetically capable of, but for once again being the West’s historical victims: fallout of the racialised death industry posing as the acme of civilisation. 

Launched in the fall of 2023, meanwhile, Sirāt was shot from May to July 2024. It makes no explicit reference to Palestine. But despite the glut of ‘Palestinian’ material being pushed simultaneously in the context I’ve just described, it remains the most eloquent response to Gaza I’ve seen. In place of the powerful villain-vs-helpless-hero narrative, the narrowly tribal standpoints to which contemporary discourse is confined and the constant insistence on moral absolutism, Sirāt goes to the substance of what Gaza is subjectively – hence humanly – about: evil, transformation, grief, and the cul-de-sac clearly facing civilisation. Without a trace of Orientalism, it also orchestrates a postmuslim perspective on the human condition right now. 

Already, the images of giant speakers with which the film opens make them feel like a desert shrine, the kind of earthly portal into heaven to which dervishes have always made pilgrimages. Immediately the action is given a spiritual purpose, too: seeking, a search, the hope to end a separation. A middle-aged Spaniard named Luis (López) – a representative of the non-raver majority, who clearly doesn’t belong in Laxe’s community of renunciates – arrives at a rave in the Moroccan desert looking for his daughter, Mar, whom he hasn’t heard from in five months. Luis has brought along his son, Esteban (Arjona), a boy of ten or eleven, and their little dog Pipa. Nothing much happens for the first seventeen minutes while they show people pictures of Mar and find out about another rave where she might be, further south. Sound and sight are so closely coordinated, though, the presence of the dancers so palpable, no slowness or tedium interrupted my engagement even for a split-second. This initial quietude was the most effective prelude to the string of Game of Thrones–level shocks the film would give me, even if, unlike GoT violence, those were never gratuitous.

Rooted in spiritual questions and the global moment, Sirāt’s many unpredictable calamities are more like the blows of a Zen master, intended to jolt the viewer into lucidity. The Sufi path is modeled on a journey with various stations marking stages of spiritual evolution: from repentance and renunciation through endurance of suffering to the bliss of wilayah, the sainthood often described in terms of friendship with God. Perhaps that is how Sirāt became a road movie. It is the journey on which, in their comparatively inadequate van, Luis and Estaban join the five ravers in their own much sturdier vehicles when they break away from the initial crew and venture into nature and the unknown, pooling resources to survive. Signaling the start of a world war, the exodus is triggered by the arrival of Moroccan army troops who escort the predominantly European dancers out of the desert; only the film’s seven heroes manage to break away. Their journey turns them into mendicants and pioneers, cosmic seekers, but it also exposes them to unimaginable suffering. 

Sufis agree that affliction is a necessary condition for becoming God’s friend; Abdul Qadir Gilani says that if suffering were not required for attaining wilayah, too many people would make a claim to it. Laxe’s characters are not on a formal path – apart from arriving at that other rave or finding Mar, they are certainly not aiming to get anywhere – but the terrible things that befall them have the same purpose of purifying their souls from ego and attachment and liberating them from material shackles. It’s a gift: ‘If god loves you’, as Laxe puts it, ‘he breaks you’.7 For him the Sirāt, which is often imagined as a bridge over hell that only the righteous can cross without falling, is not just a test on the way to paradise. It is the hell you must go through to arrive at a better place. Of course, each time a misfortune goes down, the viewer endures it by proxy. There is something uncannily visceral about the way Laxe stages those moments; for me, at least, their effect was not just devastating but also strangely revivifying, almost exhilarating. 

That is why, even though there is more at stake here than enjoyment, I don’t want to spoil the film. For those who have not experienced its effects, detailing what actually happens in it would risk ruining something invaluable. I do want to point this out, though: Laxe doesn’t follow the zeitgeist’s course of ‘politicising’ what can only be seen as a colossal failure of present-day humanity (not only those who control our fate, headquartered in the West, but also those who attempt to speak for it, whether in the West or elsewhere). By ridding it of every last vestige of them-and-us and vastly shrinking its scale, Laxe makes the viewer experience every aspect of the evil the world has seen since the violence that started on 7 October 2023. When it is no longer identified with specific human subjects, evil reemerges as the timeless philosophical question it is: a father’s grief, a lover or friend seeing the person they have lived with for years vanish right before their eyes; the scarcity and the urgent need for food, petrol, or safe passage on foot; a military convoy trailing a ravine, ambiguously.

The diversity in Sirāt is organic and spontaneous, pointing to the same need to get past the reigning ethos. It is in the instinctual joy of being human that markers like race, language, gender, and disability coexist, intermingle, and occasionally clash – when the fugitives try to ask a teenage Moroccan shepherd for help, he simply turns round and runs away – and not in the clinical and legalised strictures of correctness so often substituted for the kind of radical transformation the moment demands of us. The film’s constant awareness of the need for such transformation is part of the baraka – or godly benediction – that Laxe attributes to it. As it turns out, the Quranic word sirāt—a classical Arabic term if ever there was one – actually comes from the Latin strata, also the source of the English word ‘street’. That too, I feel, is baraka. A believer, Laxe is also a radical optimist. And by the end, when those of the film’s characters who remain can be seen scattered among all kinds of people riding a train to safety, perhaps affliction has prepared them for a new, post-apocalyptic world that they – we – cannot yet see. Sirāt’s message is that, when all is said and done, Gaza might turn out to be more of a beginning than an end.