- From Bitter Lake, a firsthand account of war-torn Afghanistan
“Increasingly we live in a world where nothing makes any sense. Events come and go like waves of a fever, leaving us confused and uncertain. Those in power tell us stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality, but those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow. This is a film about why those stories have stopped making sense and how that led us in the west to become a destructive and dangerous force in the world.”
Central to Lake is the specter of Wahhabism, “a violent, intolerant, and above all backward-looking version of Islam,” per Curtis’s narration. The film introduces Wahhabism early on, identifying the roots of its malignant growth at a 1945 meeting between Franklin Roosevelt and King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia at the Bitter Lake that forms part of the Suez Canal. Roosevelt wanted to use his political power “in an extraordinary way, to remake the world,” and in order to do this he needed access to the Saudis’ oil reserves. In exchange for oil, he promised to provide the Saudis with money and military support and not to interfere with the nation’s religious affairs. The King then sponsored Wahhabi training centers across the country—to distract public attention, Curtis argues, from his controversial efforts to Westernize the country. Future Saudi rulers would take this mission one step further, sponsoring Wahhabi schools abroad. The spread of Wahhabism would lead to the formation of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Isis, the latter of which dominates the film’s despairing final sequence.
