Movie review: ‘Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother’

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(RNS) — The Islamic hadith that ties together the threads of Bassam Tariq’s new film, “Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother,” not only literally shows up in the title but is also woven throughout this extraordinary story of a father’s grief and reckoning with his faith and choices in a manner that’s clocked by his middle child, who makes the most astute observation about his Baba.

In a crucial scene, eldest sister Fatiha reads aloud a hadith about the importance of mothers, one that is taught to so many of us as young Muslims in emphasizing where the reverence of mothers and fathers stand in the breadth of our lives.

Abu Huraira, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad who recorded numerous stories, sayings and actions of the prophet, reported in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim: “A man asked the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, ‘Who is most deserving of my good company?’ The prophet said, ‘Your mother.’ The man asked, ‘Then who?’ The prophet said, ‘Your mother.’ The man asked again, ‘Then who?’ The prophet said, ‘Your mother.’ The man asked again, “Then who?” The prophet said, ‘Your father.’”

Upon hearing Fatiha (played by Adia, who steals every scene she is in) read the hadith out loud, her younger brother, Qadir, replies, “Baba is cooked.” His sister asks him why, and he simply states that in light of what the hadith teaches, their Baba has impossible shoes to fill in the wake of their mother’s death.

Tariq’s latest film stars Oscar-winning actor Mahershala Ali as Latif, an ex-military hitman and devout Muslim working for a security specialist. He experiences a deep crisis of faith upon the sudden death of his wife, leaving him to care for Fatiha, Qadir and his baby daughter Aziza. His grief is compounded by struggles to feed Aziza, who was exclusively breastfed, leading Latif to search for breast milk and getting caught between two warring Muslim and Christian factions.

The movie came in the wake of another movie partnership between Tariq and Ali that fell apart. Tariq was set to direct Ali in “Blade” in 2019 but exited the project over creative differences just weeks before filming was to begin. And Ali, who physically trained for more than a year in sword work and other things, also walked away from the project. That training proved to be handy when the two began talking in 2024 about making a different kind of movie, one that would be rooted in the intertwined struggles of Islamic faith and fatherhood.

This is the fourth feature-length film for which Tariq was director, writer, producer or a combination of all three. Tariq also has directed three episodes of Rizwan Ahmed’s Amazon Prime show “Bait,” which gave a James Bond treatment to the experiences of British South Asian Muslims. But I first became familiar with his work in 2009, when Tariq and his friend Aman Ali pursued an ambitious blogging project called “30 Mosques in 30 Days” in which they traveled to different mosques around New York City each night of Ramadan.

In year two of the project, the duo visited 30 mosques in 30 states during Ramadan, exploring the diversity of the American Muslim mosque experiences around the country and sharing posts about the challenges and lived experiences of these communities. It was one of the first serial documentations of the vastness and diversity of American Mu…