Muhammad: The Messenger of God (2015)

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Muhammad: The Messenger of God set out to do something no Iranian production had attempted at this scale: dramatize the childhood of the Prophet Muhammad on a reported forty million dollar budget, the largest in the country's film history, with the celebrated Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, an Academy Award winner for Apocalypse Now and The Last Emperor, shooting it. Director Majid Majidi conceived it as the opening chapter of a planned trilogy, covering the years from Muhammad's birth in Mecca through his adolescent caravan journey to Syria, where tradition holds that a Christian monk named Bahira recognized signs of his coming prophethood.

The film's hardest technical problem was never plot. Mainstream Islamic practice holds that Muhammad should not be depicted visually, and Majidi built the entire production around honoring that while still making him a felt presence on screen. Storaro's camera repeatedly adopts Muhammad's own point of view, moving as he would move; light and shadow fall in ways that obscure or turn away from his face at the exact moments a conventional biopic would frame a close-up; a child actor, Alireza Jalili, plays him physically without his features ever resolving into a shot. Majidi later put the choice plainly: hiding the face, he said, would make the character more intriguing to the viewer, not less present.

Reviewers split sharply on whether the approach worked as drama. The Guardian called the result intellectually honest, committed and poetic, awarding it four stars; Variety found it stiff and awkward, judging that the film was burdened rather than elevated by the weight of its own subject. Both readings agree on what made the film unusual in the first place: a lead performance built entirely around never showing the lead.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Opposition to Muhammad: The Messenger of God began years before most objectors could have seen it. In 2012, while the film was still in production, Egypt's Al-Azhar University, one of the most influential centers of Sunni religious authority, formally asked Iran to withhold its release, arguing that any dramatization risked distorting the Prophet's image regardless of what precautions the filmmakers took. When the film opened in 2015, Al-Azhar renewed its objection, and Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdul-Aziz ibn Abdullah Al Shaykh, condemned it for depicting Muhammad in what he called an untrue light. The Muslim World League added its own objection to scenes involving Muhammad's body and physical presence, notwithstanding that his face is never shown.

Majidi rejected the criticism as premature. At his first press conference in January 2015 he said he was aware of the concerns but wondered why critics were condemning a film before watching it, and he later invited Al-Azhar's scholars to view it directly rather than judge it from reputation. He insisted publicly that the film contained no sectarian argument and no difference between Sunni and Shia perspectives, describing his goal as introducing the Prophet's life to a wider audience in a positive light.

The controversy reached beyond the Middle East. In India, the Sunni Barelvi organization Raza Academy issued a fatwa against Majidi and the film's composer, A. R. Rahman, and pressed Maharashtra authorities to block a planned 2020 online release. A 2024 peer reviewed article by Nacim Pak-Shiraz later situated the reception within a longer pattern: Shia Iranian cinema's attempts to depict sacred Islamic history are read differently, and often more skeptically, by Sunni authorities than the filmmakers intend.