(RNS) — In May of 2022, in the middle of her master’s degree at Harvard Divinity School, Ariella Gayotto Hohl lost her father to cancer. Five thousand miles away from her home in Brazil, she never knew how sick he was or got to say goodbye.
Overwhelmed by grief and feeling that her Muslim faith had been shaken, Gayotto Hohl met the team members at Unity Productions Foundation shortly after her father’s death and found that they were exploring some of the same questions about Islam and loss. By the beginning of 2023, she was working with them to film a documentary about five stories of love in Islam.
In “Islam’s Greatest Stories of Love,” Gayotto Hohl speaks with experts and travels to new locations to better understand the wisdom in five stories of various types of love: star-crossed lovers Layla and Majnun; Shah Jahan and his love for Mumtaz preserved in the Taj Mahal; the Prophet Muhammad and his first wife, Khadija; Malcolm X and his half-sister Ella; and the profoundly spiritual friendship between Rumi and Shams.
Omid Safi, a professor studying Islamic mysticism at Duke University, tells Gayotto Hohl of Rumi’s wisdom, “Every heart breaks, and your heart must break. But what a difference there …