Director and producer Parvez Sharma and co-producer Sandi Dubowski[11] raised more than a million dollars over a six-year period to make the film.

[2][17] Sharma compiled 400 hours of footage of interviews throughout North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

[19] The Guardian said, "Dignity and despair are woven tightly together in A Jihad for Love, a six-year endeavour by Indian film-maker Parvez Sharma that explores Islam and homosexuality.

[20][21] The film also helped to launch the career of South African gay Imam Muhsin Hendricks by putting him and his work on the international map.

In 2004, when the film was still in production, The New York Times profiled the filmmaker (it would do so again in 2015)[24] and said:[25]Given the hostility toward homosexuality in some Islamic factions, Mr. Sharma has gone to great lengths to reassure many of his interview subjects that they will remain anonymous.

Sharma was forced to employ guerilla filmmaking tactics in Islamic countries where he knew he would never be granted government permission for his taboo subject matter.

Luckily, Sharma managed to extradite his footage, over 400 hours worth, to the United States, where he whittled the secret lives of his subjects down to an eighty-minute film.Cinema Politica in a review said, "A Jihad for Love is Mr. Sharma's debut and is the world's first feature documentary to explore the complex global intersections between Islam and homosexuality.

It was also co-produced with and broadcast on Logo, UK's Channel 4, Germany's ZDF, France's Arte, and the Sundance Documentary Film Fund.

In a piece entitled "Two tickets for Jihad Please", which is a direct quote from Parvez Sharma's interview with the Black Filmmakers Collective, the journalist also noted that the film was "critically acclaimed".

He declares that his religion was hijacked by extremists who preach violence and hatred, and he is not referring to Fox TV or George Bush.

"I find that gay cinema has been in decline ever since the great films of the '80s like The Times of Harvey Milk," Sharma observed.

As a screen remedy, Sharma unveils a diverse range of practicing Muslim women at different stages of acceptance with their sexual orientation.

"[61] After the film, the filmmaker for three years went on a nationwide speaking tour of college campuses including University of Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, NYU, Columbia, UCLA and more.

The film seeks to reclaim this concept of personal struggle, as it is used by the media and politicians almost exclusively to mean "holy war" and to refer to violent acts perpetrated by extremist Muslims.

Producer DuBowski's previous film, Trembling Before G-d, on Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, also included the name of God, written with a hyphen as in Jewish tradition.

"[18] The spokesperson of the Singapore Board of Censors, Amy Chua, said to The Straits Times, "The film was banned from screening at the 2008 Singapore International Film Festival in view of the sensitive nature of the subject that features Muslim homosexuals in various countries and their struggle to reconcile religion and their lifestyle.

On November 2, 2004, the New York Times said,[18]On Sharma refuses to associate homosexuality with shame, but recognizes the need to protect the safety and privacy of his sources, by filming them in silhouette or with their faces blurred.

In another example, one of the associate producers, an Egyptian gay man, chose not to be listed in the credits for fear of possible consequences.The film was banned in Singapore and many Muslim and some Arab nations.

"NDTV's broadcast has in effect made the film available to over one billion viewers in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the UAE, and large portions of the Middle East and Africa – many of which continue to experience tension along religious lines.

[66][41][67][44][68] Sharma has praised the NDTV for taking the "bold and courageous step" to broadcast the film "in a time when India's draconian Section 377 of the penal code that makes homosexuality illegal has been successfully challenged in the Delhi High Court.

Egyptian activist and blogger Ethar El-Katatney wrote the following from Cairo on February 15, 2008,[70]Homosexuality is not a comfortable, much less a popular, topic among Muslims.

Broach the subject in the Middle East, and you're likely to hear a response like the one Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave US audiences last year: "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country."

Filmmaker Parvez Sharma had dual motivations: first, to challenge the mindset that Muslim and gay are mutually exclusive, and second, to challenge the Western world's own Islamophobia.The Arab media including Katatney and Egypt Today then reported "A Jihad for Love has polarized the discussion of homosexuality among Muslims.

They also accuse Sharma of bias: "As a gay Muslim man, they argue that he began the project with prejudices and a predefined position on homosexuality."

[71][72] The New York Times said "After A Jihad for Love, Mr. Sharma was labeled a Kafir, and in the intervening years, he has gotten more death threats than he cares to recall.

The New Yorker said,[74]Sharma, the filmmaker, grew up twenty minutes from the Darul Uloom, an important center of Islamic learning in Uttar Pradesh, in northern India.

He invented this model sending unmarked DVD's of the film with friends and colleagues to Muslim capitals across the world with full permission to sell pirated copies.

To reach them, he's "smuggled tapes into Iran and Pakistan," leafleted mosques, blanketed MySpace, and "hosted a screening at a home in Astoria for fifteen key progressive Muslim leaders."