IZWAYZ - Muslim Video Project Story

So this is the way that it seems to go, for me at any rate. It is not scorn or disparagement that wears you down in the end, but a steady stream of great enthusiasm, immoderate praise, and pledges of support, always encouraging you to go down that little side road that bring you what you need to speed further along your chosen path, to make that extra effort and spend those extra hours doing what you wish was not really necessary but you believe will make what you dream of doing possible. Indeed, for its day the idea of The Muslim Video Project was good, and if I had been a TV producer in a muslim country, with available finance and access to all the usual staff and equipment and facilities, I'm sure I could have had it all done and dusted within a year. But with none of those things this grand flight of fancy had no engine and just couldn't get off the ground. I suppose the first and greatest mistake I made was to think that because it was so worth while a project I would be prepared to work enthusiastically for nothing to see it succeed. Unfortunately, what this did is to blind me to the fact that as far as the muslim community were concerned they wouldn't have dreamed of having it any other way. That is, if it was going to cost them anything success was not an option. I should point out that when I say 'the muslim community' I'm not really talking about the lower ranks, like the students that gave me the occasional five or ten pounds which was more than likely a precious chunk of their budget, but the muslim organisations, many of which had obvious access to much larger sums of money but eventually made clear that they had no intention of handing any of it over to me.

The trouble is that was never the first impression, or the second or the third. It takes a while to realise that those words of enthusiastic support are just that - words. It isn't helped by the fact that some of those words are promises - all you will need to make your dreams come true. It's just that you will have to do a little more to make it possible, to explain it a little better, spend some time writing things out a little more completely, perhaps if we could see a pilot script in more precise detail, the actual words that will be said, perhaps drawings of the images you describe. And we really need you to write up the numbers in much more detail, just because they are estimates of production costs there is no need for them to be so vague, I'm afraid our accountants will need it all to be more precise, and with everything included. As one well known organisation told me 'but there is no money for yourself in these figures - you must include your own time and expenses, you aren't asking for nearly enough'. In fact, one of the ways you find yourself sucked into the belief that this time it will happen is the number of times that you are told that you can get more than you are asking for - it's just that you will have to do a little more or wait a little longer to get it. In the beginning I was just trying to raise the money for some professional equipment suited to the task, but to do better presentations I needed a better computer, which I then had to use to show the organisation that had originally offered their support that I was not just relying on them, by designing and printing leaflets and taking them to their affiliates in mosques around the country on a fund-raising drive - which took a large amount of time, of course, and in the end barely raised enough to cover my travel expenses.

And strangely enough, although travel expenses had not been on my original estimates at all, they ended up using up a great deal of the few funds I did manage to raise over the years, because you have to go and see the ones with the finance, not the other way around, and that could demand several trips from Glasgow to London and back (at least I had family to stay with and didn't have to pay for hotels) to discuss the latest revisions they might require in what I had provided up to then, or just to discuss progress, or explain why they hadn't come up with the money as promised as yet, and to give a new commitment as to the maximum time it would take to arrange after the latest meeting, but never to actually hand over a cheque. And in many ways it is the time spent waiting that saps the spirit, month after month (and then year after incredulous year) desperately hoping that this time the money will come through, not really wanting to start the process with someone else after having jumped through so many hoops for the one you are currently dealing with, and eventually having to leaden-heartedly face up to the fact that this was another wild-goose chase and it was time to give up and move on to the next group's enthusiastic support, generous promises, and time and effort absorbing new demands. One organisation after another, and each time finding it hard to believe that the process could possibly be the same thing over again. Surely they can't all be like that? Well, certainly a high enough proportion to mean that you can go for years without finding the one that is different. Certainly I haven't found one in over twenty years, and although I finally gave up on my video project not long before technological advances made it obsolete, my experiences in various projects that followed it have only reinforced my belief that this side of Trust in God, self-reliance is the way to go. God willing I will achieve something yet before I die.