The Message (1976)

The Message sets itself a problem no biblical epic before it had faced: telling the founding story of a religion whose central figure cannot appear. Islamic tradition, resting on hadith concerned with avoiding idolatry, holds that Muhammad is never to be depicted visually, in painting, sculpture or film, so Moustapha Akkad's film builds its entire structure around an absence.

The camera stands in for Muhammad's point of view in several key scenes, characters speak to a space just off frame, and his uncle Hamza, played by Anthony Quinn, along with early companions like Bilal ibn Rabah, the formerly enslaved man who became Islam's first muezzin, carry the narrative weight instead. The same restraint extends to Muhammad's wives, his daughter Fatima and the first four caliphs, all of whom are either kept off screen entirely or shown only from behind or in silhouette, following a convention some later scholarship traces to Ottoman-era religious painting, which developed similar workarounds for depicting the earliest generation of Muslims without showing their faces.

Akkad, a Syrian-American director working with predominantly non-Muslim financing from Libya, Morocco, Kuwait and Britain, has described consulting extensively with scholars at Cairo's Al-Azhar University during preproduction specifically to make sure the finished film respected this restriction throughout, a level of religious consultation unusual for a commercial feature film of its era.

Before a single frame of The Message had been seen publicly, protests broke out in several countries, most seriously a 1977 armed takeover of buildings in Washington, D.C. by a group demanding the film be destroyed, on the strength of a rumor, never true, that Anthony Quinn would portray Muhammad on screen. The film does nothing of the kind; Quinn plays Hamza, the Prophet's uncle, and Muhammad is never shown.

The controversy nearly buried a film that was, by design, unusually careful about the religious sensitivities it was navigating. Akkad had secured a fatwa of approval from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the most prominent center of Sunni Islamic scholarship, before production began, precisely to avoid the outcome that nearly happened anyway once a false rumor took on a life of its own ahead of any actual screening.

Decades on, the film's reputation has settled closer to the intention behind it than to the panic that met its announcement. It airs regularly on television across much of the Muslim-majority world, particularly during Ramadan, and is frequently cited, including in retrospective American press coverage on its fortieth anniversary in 2016, as a rare case of a Hollywood-adjacent production that set out to depict a major world religion's origin story from the inside, on that tradition's own terms, and by most accounts succeeded.