Mahmud Omid Djalili is a Muslim living in London with his wife and family in the movie The Reluctant Infidel. He discovers much to horror, that he was born to Jewish parents and adopted by a Muslim Pakastani family when he was two weeks old. The anguish of how to deal with this including how to tell ones loved ones. Especially when his son’s future father-in-law is a radical cleric from Egypt and needs to give approval for the wedding.

We all gain at least part of our sense of who we are from our ethnicity, our parents and our culture and possibly the religion of our parents and community. But what if there was a missing link on the way through like there was for Mahmud?  Would your whole sense of being be brought into disarray? Does it matter?

As it turns out (and we know this), Mahmud discovers it’s the same god, that actually Muslims and Jews have much in common and in the end he’s still the same father, businessman, husband and friend he was before he knew about his birth parents. Only he’s nicer. Aware of the absurdity of forced demarcation we get from religion, he brings the two together with new understanding and tolerance.

It’s a comedy, or more particularly a farce, but it’s got a great lesson in leadership about finding commonality by seeing through artificial contrivances and having the ability to laugh at ourselves.

It’s worth seeing!

Stephen