"I've always hoped I could do something that's serious and useful for Islam," says documentary film-maker Ahmed Kamel, who took his masters from the Adham Center in 1995. It seems he has found a good place to do so with his current employer, MBC's O3 Productions.

Kamel's first experience in the real world of journalism was a baptism by fire, however.

"My first day at work (as a freelance editor with WTN) was the day of the attempted assassination of President Mubarak in Ethiopia," remembers Kamel. "Every foreign journalist in Cairo was trying to get the story and I was in over my head. Then a reporter from New Zealand helped me to calm down and I got through it. I did twelve stories that day, but it was hell. That was when I learned that this is a serious profession and the people who work in it are tough."

The same year, Kamel moved on to ABC as an assistant to Middle East producer Hanzada Fikri, and gained invaluable experience working with leading Australian reporter Jennifer Byrne. Later, from 1994 to 2003, he worked as a freelance producer and cameraman for MBC's Cairo news office, as well as for BBC's Panorama, for BBC 4, and for Germany's ARD, where he was a cameraman on ARD's 2002 Grimme-winning documentary Die Todespiloten on the events of 9/11.

It was when he joined O3 Productions in 2003, however, that Kamel found the space to pursue his real interests. Owned by MBC and based in Dubai's Media City, O3 was founded at the same time as Al Arabiya to make and buy documentaries for that channel and for MBC. According to Kamel, the company seeks to make "serious documentaries on political, economic, social, and cultural topics relevant to the Middle East."

Following an initial documentary on Arabic calligraphy, Kamel worked on a two-part series on the Muslim pilgrimage, or Hajj. Unwilling to treat the subject as a simple account of the rites of the pilgrimage, Kamel sought a new angle and found it in what he calls "the failure of Islam to capitalize on the potential of the pilgrimage to bring Muslims of different backgrounds together. The Malaysians know nothing about the Egyptians and the Egyptians know nothing about the Turks. There is ignorance and there are even tensions." The experience, says Kamel, made him realize he could do a film with a "message," and he found himself increasingly drawn to Islamic topics.

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Kamel's most recent work is In the Footsteps of the Prophet ('Ala Khuta al-Rasul), airing on MBC in October 2004. Kamel describes it as "the only film to document all places and stories relevant to the Prophet Muhammad, including the mosques where he prayed in Mecca and in Madina, the route of the Hijra, Thawr Cave and the Mountain of Thawr, and the Jabal al-Nur. It also includes coverage of very rare stories such as that behind al-Sadana ("The Custodians"), the men who hold the keys to the Kaaba, and the well of Zamzam, and rare footage from the Hajj of 1929." Making the film also gave Kamel a cinematic first, when he claims that he became the only person to circumambulate the Kaaba with his camera running.

On Footsteps, Kamel has credits as director, producer, and cameraman, an achievement he says he would not have been capable of without the training he received at the Adham Center. "Everything I film I direct and everything I direct I film. And then I edit it," says Kamel. "That was the beautiful thing about what I learned at the Adham Centre. You learn everything that you need."

The opportunities to practice this knowledge have sometimes cropped up unexpectedly. Making Footsteps, Kamel found himself in the film studio of the Meccan sanctuary, which is equipped with sixteen cameras to transmit the daily prayers around the world - joystick-based equipment that Kamel had been trained on at the Center. "I found I remembered every button, even after twelve years, and I was able to film for two hours, obtaining wonderful footage for the documentary."

Kamel is currently working on a documentary on Islamic religious discourse after 9/11, and has a number of other projects in the hopper, including one on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.

Clearly happy in his work, he seems like a man who has found his niche.

-Humphrey Davies