The boy is Adam, superbly played by Palestinian actor Tawfeek Barhom. A teenage diet of Egyptian films helped him capture the accents of an Egyptian fisherman’s son who wins a scholarship to Cairo’s Al-Azhar University.

For the boy the scholarship is heaven. Education offers boys from rural Egypt a path out of poverty. Education at Al-Azhar occurs in an internationally recognised centre of Islamic learning. Early scenes include Adam caressing the books shelved in one of Egypt’s finest libraries. Housed in three-tiered bunks, Adam and his fellow students learn Islamic calligraphy. Together they sit on stone floors to hear world-recognised faculty lectures on Islamic purity codes and Islamic history and compete against each other in adhan (daily prayer) competitions.

Yet places of heavenly purity house human power. The death of the Grand Imam requires an election from among the faculty. Each lecturer offers differing visions of Islam’s place in the modern world. Jihadists argue that human force is needed to hasten heavenly purity.

Centrists argue for co-existence between mosque and state to avoid civil war.

Outside Al-Azhar, state security works to manipulate elections in this ancient place of learning. The boy trained to fish, not to spy, finds himself flopping like a manipulated prawn in nets of religious and political intrigue. Dawn devotions become forums for recruitment. Lofty minarets provide tombs for fear, not havens of prayer. The superbly crafted plot was a deserved winner of Best Screen Play at the Cannes Film Festival 2022.

Interviewed at Cannes, director Tarik Saleh spoke of the influence of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a historical murder mystery set in an Italian monastery. Tarik Saleh could have spoken of other historical influences, including Augustine’s City of God.

Augustine contemplated divine power in response to the fall of Rome. He worked with a vision of two cities. Worldly power exists in the city of Rome, divine power in the New Jerusalem. Since Christ has acted to redeem earthly cities, we live in times slowly giving way to the eternal city. The different approaches at work inside Al-Azhar are contemporary wrestling with Augustine’s historical separation between two cities.

Inside Al-Azhar, the most intriguing approach comes from Sheik Negm, played by Markram Khoury. Blind yet intellectually brilliant, the Sheik offers himself as a scapegoat. Slowly Egyptian security realises that in their hurry to arrest the blind Sheik, they have become entangled in a long game. The Sheik’s act of sacrifice will require a public trial that risks exposing political interference.

Sheik Negm provides an approach to human power reminiscent of the Apostle Paul’s use of Christ as a fool, acting in ways that seem absurd so that those they serve might become wise in Christ (1 Corinthians 4:10). This results in an enthralling final plot twist as boy and lecturer, both imprisoned, apply religious history to the saving of life in the modern world.

Rev Dr Steve Taylor is the author of First Expressions (2019) and writes widely in theology and popular culture, including regularly at www.emergentkiwi.org.nz.