Critic Reviews

With ideological clashes that span countries, Among the Believers offers an intricate and frightening look into the microcosm of our current world’s biggest international issue.

There’s enough cinema in Among the Believers to set it a step above solid respectable investigation.

The filmmakers quietly expose conflicts and contradictions without the intrusion of voiceover, and with only occasional intertitles furnishing factual information.

Each person’s actions here are not theirs alone, but part of a network of complicated needs and conflicting ideologies that make up contemporary Pakistan. Some of the stories are difficult to hear, but they must be listened to.

The use of education as a tool to enforce an ardent religious ideology upon children is what’s most distressing here (remember Malala Yousafzai?), and the filmmakers back up their investigations with testimony from key speakers in the Pakistani academic communities and a young girl who ran away from her local madrassa training programme.

There’s little that’s not dispiriting about Among the Believers and its measured, direct entrée into a closed world of hopeless boys and girls memorizing the Koran, but forbidden from learning its meanings.

The directors let their subjects speak without overtly passing judgment.

Among the Believers is a step toward understanding how such a man can be entrusted with such a large percentage of a nation's children.

What I like about Among the Believers, a portrait of radical Islam in Pakistan, is how the first two-thirds of the movie strives to remain as balanced as possible.

By pointing their camera at the Red Mosque, Trivedi and Naqvi add surprisingly little to the conversation.