When you’re confronted with a truly groundbreaking piece of art, a certain disorientation is sometimes what you experience first. “A lot of journalists ask me: ‘What is real? What is real in this film?’” says the Swedish director Tarik Saleh, suddenly seized by a chuckling fit. “And I think this obsession is because the way the media portrays Muslims is so fictional that when people see a fictional film that portrays al-Azhar [University], they feel like they’ve seen a documentary. And I try to tell them: ‘No, it’s fiction!’”
He is talking about his new film Cairo Conspiracy, so seductive because it appears to give us privileged entry into what has been for most westerners a hitherto invisible world: al-Azhar University in the Egyptian capital, a vast hub of learning and theological wellspring for Sunni Islam. But it’s not the real al-Azhar, as it was all recreated in Turkey, following Saleh’s expulsion from Egypt in 2015 three days before his previous project The Nile Hilton Incident was due to begin shooting. What is real is the outrage the 51-year-old continues to hurl at Egypt’s powers-that-be in this clenched and cowed film. With the novice student Adam (Tawfeek Barhom) drawn into the battle to elect a new grand imam, it’s The Name of the Rose meets John le Carré.
The story is pure fiction, though modelled on real-life figures, such as Safwat el-Sherif, the late head of Egyptian state security, on whom the apparatchik (played by the strapping Swedish-Lebanese actor Fares Fares) who recruits Adam to spy on the electoral manoeuvrings is based. A less notorious inspiration was Saleh’s grandfather; like Adam, , he attended al-Azhar and was later sent to teach in the same fishing village as in the film. “He was very open-minded,” remembers the director over Zoom, perched on the end of a bed in a Helsinki hotel room. Bald, handsome and goateed, he talks in soft, firm and slightly ponderous phrases. “He made a lot of statements that would probably be considered blasphemous. I remember when he had made his first pilgrimage to Mecca, he came back and said: ‘If the Prophet was alive, he would forbid this practice.’ It was too crazy. He told me: ‘Tarik, don’t ever do anything that feels wrong. Always listen to what feels right.’”
Perhaps this pliable common sense explains Saleh’s frankness in depicting the political compromises and fallibility at the heart of religion. Being a foreign film-maker (the director’s father emigrated to Sweden in the late 1960s, where he met Saleh’s mother) gives him the liberty to pull back the curtain on the institution, just as the Denmark-based Ali Abbasi recently did for the Iranian holy city of Mashhad in the serial killer film Holy Spider (like Saleh, he filmed abroad, in Jordan). But Saleh is convinced there is a pent-up hunger for this kind of scrutiny. “I don’t think Muslims are used to films where religious arguments are taken seriously. So one of the most rewarding things is to have so many religious people – they always come up afterwards, they don’t ask questions in public – who want to discuss the film.”
Is he a believer himself? “I don’t practise. But I did for a long time. I don’t, it’s not that I … ” He is writhing. “I do … It’s not that I have no [faith] … I have a strong relationship to Islam. But I’m also at a point in my life when I identify first and foremost as an artist, as a film-maker. I’m not so interested in my identity – I’m old school in that way. I know it’s important for to me to have an Egyptian and a Muslim background for me to be able to do this film without being questioned. But when I do films, I do it for the absolute opposite reason: to be someone else for two hours.”
Going back to Egypt as a teenager, he was struck by a kind of street pragmatism in the face of the systemic corruption seen in both The Nile Hilton Incident and Cairo Conspiracy; so different from the bedtime fairytales about the country his father had told him. “People find ways to survive, to live a good life. And one way is by negotiating with things like rules and religion. They create their own versions of things. For example, corruption in Egypt is not a negative word. Wasta means like a favour, it’s a positive thing. So if I have a wasta at the airport, we’re not standing in line.”
That expediency seems to have rubbed off, becoming a kind of self-reliance in Saleh that stood him in good stead as an up-and-coming graffiti artist in Stockholm’s western suburbs – and onwards. “Graffiti taught me one thing, which was not to ask for permission to do things. So if I see a wall, I’m like: wouldn’t it be great if there was a big blue chameleon there? And then, magically in a week or so, there is. And I feel a little bit the same with a film. Should you do a film about al-Azhar? Or about police corruption in Egypt? I will not ask. I’ll just do it.”
• Cairo Conspiracy is released in cinemas on 14 April.
