The director of Jerusalem — A Journey Back in Time, Anwer Jafri adds, “When the project came under discussion with Dr Iftikhar it was a simple slide show with narration, basically a compilation of his lectures which Janum wanted to work around for their fund-raising evening. We took our time (two/three months) to be precise to mull over it as it wasn’t even remotely theatre. It was such a concept for us but we took it as a challenge. We tackled it with an open mind and the more we thought about it the more we liked it because there were immense possibilities in the story of Jerusalem.

“One could talk about religious tolerance; atrocities that the Zionists had committed in Israel and Palestine. Take that violence as an example and convey that religion is not an issue it is the attitude of the people who convert religion into a conflicting idea and use it for other ends. Through this performance I wanted to comment that all Jews, Christians or Muslims are not bad. There are just a handful of bad people in every race, religion and nations. Slowly these ideas gelled into this kind of programme which became slightly more entertaining than a Power Point slide show.” — U.M.