To tackle the narrative of the birth of a monotheistic faith—aniconic by dogma and by essence—through the most iconic of languages, the cinema, is a Promethean wager, an artistic oxymoron that verges on conceptual blasphemy. And yet, it is precisely within this apparent theological-visual short-circuit that Moustapha Akkad sculpts his masterpiece, "The Message," a work that transcends the historical-religious epic to become an almost metaphysical essay on the representation of the unrepresentable. The film is built upon a void, a calculated absence that becomes its narrative and aesthetic center of gravity: the Prophet Muhammad is never shown, nor is his voice ever directly heard. This is a prohibition that Akkad does not circumvent, but rather transforms into a directorial device of dazzling intelligence.

The solution lies in the point-of-view shot, but not the voyeuristic gaze of noir or the disorienting perspective of horror. Here, the camera is the Prophet. We, the spectators, see through his eyes; we are the vanishing point toward which the gazes of the other characters converge. When Hamza, the warrior uncle played by a telluric and charismatic Anthony Quinn, speaks to his nephew, he is addressing us. When the first followers convert, their faith is manifested in a direct dialogue with the lens. This radical choice produces an effect of representational vertigo: we are not mere observers of a historical event, but are cast in the role of the narrative’s sacred catalyst. The film forces us to embody the absence, to become the invisible fulcrum of a world that is changing forever. It is an immersion whose formal audacity is reminiscent of the total subjectivity of Robert Montgomery’s "Lady in the Lake," but stripped of its "gimmick" and imbued with an incalculable spiritual weight.

The structure is that of the grand Hollywood epos, a direct descendant of the biblical epics of Cecil B. DeMille. As in "The Ten Commandments," we witness the genesis of a people through persecution, exodus (the Hijra from Mecca to Medina), and the final battle for the promised land. Maurice Jarre, already a bard of the sands with his score for "Lawrence of Arabia," provides a soundtrack that would not be out of place in a David Lean film, bestowing upon the arid desert landscape an epic and poignant sweep. And yet, beneath the skin of the peplum, an unexpected heart beats: that of the twilight western. The first Muslims, outcasts and persecuted in opulent, corrupt Mecca, are a band of moral outlaws, united not by blood but by a revolutionary idea. Their flight to Medina is the quintessential journey to a new frontier, a place to found a society based on new principles. Hamza, with his fierce loyalty and warrior skill, is an archetype halfway between an Apache chief and a redeemed gunslinger embracing the cause of oppressed farmers.

The greatness of Akkad's undertaking also lies in its titanically ambitious production, an odyssey in itself worthy of a film. Aware that he had to speak to two worlds, the Syrian-American director simultaneously shot two versions of the same picture: one in English with an international cast ("The Message," with Quinn and Irene Papas) and one in Arabic with actors from the Arab world ("Al-Risālah"). A specular diptych, an unprecedented experiment in cultural and cinematic translation. Anthony Quinn, who had already embodied the Bedouin outsider in "Lawrence of Arabia" and the Greek peasant of Dionysian vitality in "Zorba the Greek," lends Hamza a larger-than-life physicality, the aura of a Homeric patriarch that serves as a perfect bridge for Western audiences. Alongside him, Irene Papas is a Hind of tragic, furious intensity, a Clytemnestra of the desert whose vengeance against Hamza takes on the contours of a pagan rite destined to be swept away by the new faith.

The film is a profound meditation on the power of the Word. In a universe dominated by stone idols, commercial interests, and tribal laws, Islam erupts as a primarily acoustic event: a recitation, a message whispered and then shouted. The violence of the Quraysh is directed not just against the people, but against the words they carry. The torture of the first martyr, Bilal the Abyssinian, forced to lie on scorching sands with a boulder on his chest, is an attempt to physically suffocate his profession of faith, "Ahadun Ahad" ("One, and One only"). It is the Word made flesh and, for that reason, becomes a target. In this, "The Message" distances itself from the spectacle of the visual miracle typical of biblical cinema—the parting of waters, the burning bushes—to concentrate on the subversive and unifying power of an abstract idea.

Akkad places his work in the geopolitical context of the 1970s with the clear intention of acting as a "cultural bridge." In a decade marked by the oil crisis and a growing misunderstanding between the West and the Arab-Islamic world, the film was a bold act of cultural diplomacy, financed in part by Gaddafi's Libya after Hollywood capital had withdrawn. It is an attempt to tell a foundational story "from the inside," but using the universal and accessible language of great popular cinema. Akkad does not engage in militant hagiography; his is a rigorous, almost documentary-like staging in its initial phases, which shows the fragility, the doubts, and the human cost of a faith’s birth. The battles of Badr and Uhud are filmed with a tactical expertise and physical brutality that anticipate the realism of many later war films, underscoring how this faith had to be defended with blood and steel.

The film's aesthetic is a triumph of composition and restraint. Jack Hildyard’s cinematography captures the oppressive and purifying vastness of the desert, which becomes not just a backdrop but an actor in its own right, a crucible in which the old tribal society is melted down to forge the new Ummah, the community of believers. The choice not to show the Prophet, born of a theological imperative, reveals itself to be the most powerful of aesthetic intuitions. It is an exercise in negative theology applied to the mise-en-scène: the sacred is defined by its absence, its greatness perceived through the impact it has on those who surround it. The face of Muhammad is the enraptured face of a follower, his hand is the outstretched hand of an ally, his house is an open door through which the camera enters. Akkad, like a secular demiurge, understands that to show the ineffable would be to diminish its power.

"The Message" remains a unique cinematic object, an almost-impossible epic that succeeds in being both a didactic introduction for the uninitiated and a gripping saga for anyone who loves a grand narrative. It is a film that speaks of faith without ever imposing it, that shows history without claiming to be the only truth, and that manages, in the secular miracle of cinema, to give visible form to a story that rejects images. It is a work that, nearly fifty years after its release, retains its formal majesty and its courageous, radical artistic intelligence intact.