THE INDEPENDENT: Two directors are undertaking the delicate task of making films about the Prophet of Islam
There are controversial subjects, and then there is Mohamed. Yet the fear of controversy appears not to have deterred film-makers in Iran and Qatar, who are producing a pair of rival biopics of the seventh-century Prophet of Islam.
As a protagonist, the Prophet poses a unique challenge: much of the Muslim world forbids his depiction on screen. The Iranian director Majid Majidi, whose $30m (£19.8m) biopic began shooting last October, reportedly intends to show parts of the Prophet's body, though not his face. While Iran's Shia population may be flexible about such imagery, Sunni Muslims elsewhere are not. Cairo's Sunni-led al-Azhar University has already demanded the unfinished film be banned.
In December, in Sunni-majority Qatar, Alnoor Holdings, the media arm of al-Hashemi construction group, announced plans to spend $1bn on its own series of epic movies about the life of Mohamed. The team has hired the Islamic theologian Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Lord of the Rings producer Barrie Osborne as technical advisers. "They are being understandably very cautious," Mr Osborne told The Hollywood Reporter.
And so they should be. Last September, when clips from a low-budget US-made film about Mohamed surfaced on YouTube, there were angry protests across the Muslim world. Innocence of Muslims portrayed the Prophet in a negative light, yet even positive depictions have proved divisive. In 1977, the Syrian-American producer Moustapha Akkad was forced to go to the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to gather funding for his Mohamed biopic The Message, after Americans backed away from the project. » | Tim Walker | Sunday, March 17, 2013
