Excerpt:
Esteemed documentary filmmaker Greg Baker premiered his film last week at the Tribeca Film Festival to standing ovations and joyful applause. The film follows young Muslim children in the annual 2009 International Holy Quran Festival held in Cairo, Egypt. The competition pits 110 contestants ranging in age from 7 to 20 against each other in the ability to memorize all 600 pages of the Koran.
The movie reveals that most of these kids have devoted their lives to this memorization. Surprisingly, the pro-Muslim film doesn't hide the fact that some of these children learn nothing else, and most of these children don't understand any of the words they are reciting. Salon.com, in a glowing review, points out:
One of our stars is a 10-year-old kid from Tajikistan named Nabiollah, an angelic, big-eyed moppet who can recite the entire Quran from memory in an astonishingly pure boyish soprano, with remarkable command of melody and intonation. He's like the Justin Bieber of Quran recitation, and judges at the Cairo event seize on him as an amazing gift from Allah. But memorizing the Quran (in Arabic, which he does not otherwise speak or read) at a rural madrassa has nearly been Nabiollah's entire education; he is functionally illiterate in Tajik, his own language.