Almost a decade ago, a group of men at the University of Texas at Dallas made headlines when they formed the first “Muslim-interest” fraternity in the country. As these college students explored what it meant to form a Muslim-American brotherhood, two Dallas filmmakers, Dylan Hollingsworth and Wheeler Sparks, followed the growth of the fraternity, Alpha Lambda Mu. Their documentary, Kufi Krew: An American Story, the result of several years of gathering footage, was released last month on several streaming platforms, including Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+.
The film is as much about the students’ faith as it is about universal themes such as forbidden romance and family tensions. Even so, several founding members — often clad in red kufi caps, the garment for which the film is named — discuss struggling to allow their American and Muslim identities to coexist.
“When you’re in America, people, they ask you where you’re from, they don’t expect you to say America. And when you’re in Pakistan or when you’re in Egypt or you’re in Syria or Jordan, and they ask you where you’re from, they don’t expect you to say Syria, Jordan or Pakistan. They expect you to say America, right?” founder Ali Mahmoud says in the documentary. “We’re constructing a new identity.”
The filmmakers, neither of whom is Muslim, say they had an overwhelming sense of gratitude at the chance to observe this burgeoning brotherhood, which now has chapters across the U.S.
“It was an honor for us to get to have a front-row seat to something that was pretty different than how we grew up,” Hollingsworth says.
