Coming soon to a screen near you:  not one but two biopics about the life of Muhammad.  One from Iran, one from Qatar.  In other words:  one Shia, one Sunni.

Oy.

And double oy.  Because how do you make a movie about someone you can’t show on the screen?  Images of Muhammad are a no-no in Islam.  Though a few medieval Persian miniatures do show his cloaked figure, his face is blanked out — a white oval in the otherwise vividly colored painting.

No surprise, then, that there hasn’t been a feature movie about Muhammad since 1976, when Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi — yes, that Qaddafi — funded “The Message,” starring Anthony Quinn (shown here at left) as Muhammad’s uncle Hamza.

Who played Muhammad?  Nobody.  The solution was not to show him at all.  Instead, the camera acted as his eyes.  When the camera panned, you were supposed to think that this was what Muhammad was seeing.  The result was… less than convincing.

What was all too convincing was the violence surrounding the movie’s planned US debut in 1977.  Twelve Nation of Islam extremists not given to fact-checking heard a rumor that Quinn had played not Hamza, but Muhammad himself.  They laid siege to three buildings in Washington DC, where they held 149 hostages and killed a journalist and a police officer until they were persuaded by the combined efforts of the Egyptian, Pakistani, and Iranian ambassadors to surrender.  (The whole miserable story is here.)

Of course the hostage-takers hadn’t seen the movie.  If they had, they might have been amazed by its stereotypical blandness.  And they’d never be aware of their ironic role in ensuring that the director, Moustapha Akkad, gave up on religious-themed movies after “The Message,” made a small fortune directing Jamie Lee Curtis in the famed “Halloween” sequels, and then in 2005 went to a wedding in Jordan and got blown up by a suicide bomber.

If it seems way past time that a better film about Muhammad be made, the question remains how it can be done without violence.  And the problem remains of how to do it without showing him.

The highly regarded Iranian director Majid Majidi (“Children of Heaven,” “Color of Paradise”) began work on his $30-million movie last October, and reportedly intends to show Muhammad’s cloaked figure, but not his face.  In short order, an outraged denunciation came from Cairo’s al-Azhar University, followed by the announcement of plans for a rival movie from Sunni-majority Qatar,  with the blessing of a top Muslim Brotherhood theologian and a budget ranging, in various reports, from $200 million to $1 billion.

So how will the two movies differ, aside from the obvious lavishness of production moola and the issue of cloaked figure or no figure?  If you’ve read After the Prophet, you’ll know that the Iranian movie will likely give a far greater role to Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali, whom Shia believe Muhammad designated as his successor — his first khalifa, or caliph.  The Qatari movie will just as likely give a heftier role to Muhammad’s father-in-law abu-Bakr, who in fact became the first caliph of Sunni Islam.  In other words, the two movies are likely to act out the Sunni-Shia split.

I guess acting it out with cameras is far preferable to doing so with guns, but the risk of course is that angry denunciations such as that of al-Azhar will only encourage the latter.

Meanwhile, Hollywood seems determined not to be left out of the prophets (and, of course, the profits).  Two biopics of Moses are reportedly in the works, with names like Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, and Ang Lee being bandied around with Hollywood abandon and zero confirmation.  And gird your loins for a biopic of Noah due for release next year, with the ark-builder being played by the star of “The Gladiator,” Russell Crowe.

Somehow I can’t quite imagine Russell Crowe with an olive branch…

• What inspired you to write The First Muslim?Basically, frustration! I’d read several biographies of Muhammad as background for my previous book, After the Prophet, but though they seemed to tell me a lot about him, they left me with little real sense of the man himself. There was a certain dutiful aspect to them, and this made them kind of… soporific. Which seemed to me a terrible thing to do to such a remarkable life.

  There was a terrific story to be told here: the journey from neglected orphan to acclaimed leader—from marginalized outsider to the ultimate insider—made all the more dramatic by the tension between idealism and pragmatism, faith, and politics. I wanted to be able to see Muhammad as a complex, multidimensional human being, instead of the two-dimensional figure created by reverence on the one hand and prejudice on the other. I wanted the vibrancy and vitality of a real life lived.

  But of course I was also impelled by a certain dismay at how little most of us in the West know about Muhammad, especially when Islam is so often in the headlines and there are so many competing claims to “the truth about Islam.” This one man radically changed his world—indeed he’s still changing ours—so it seemed to me vitally important that we be able to get beyond stereotypes and see who he really was.

  What are some of the biggest misconceptions about Muhammad?

  Let’s take just the two most obvious stereotypes: the lecherous polygamist, and the sword-wielding warmonger. In fact Muhammad’s first marriage, to Khadija, was a loving, monogamous relationship that lasted 24 years, until her death. The nine late-life marriages were mainly diplomatic ones—means of sealing alliances, as was standard for any leader at the time. And it’s striking that while he had five children with Khadija—four daughters and a son who died in infancy—he had none with any of the late-life wives.

  As for the warmonger image, Muhammad maintained a downright Gandhian stance of passive, nonviolent resistance to both verbal and physical assaults for 12 years, until he was driven into exile from his home in Mecca. The psychology of exile thus played a large role in the armed conflict over the subsequent eight years, until Mecca finally accepted his leadership in a negotiated surrender, with strong emphasis on avoiding bloodshed.

  Is there anything you had to leave out?

  I know there’s a tendency to elide certain issues of Muhammad’s life, not least among them the rapid deterioration of his relations with the Jews of Medina, which was especially hard for me, as a Jew, to write about. But to evade such issues seems to me to demonstrate a certain lack of respect for your subject. A biographer’s task is surely to create as full a portrait as possible. If you truly respect your subject, you need to do him justice by according him the integrity of reality.

  What alternative title would you give the book?

  Perhaps “Seeing Muhammad Whole.” Or “A Man in Full.” But since Muhammad is told three times in the Qur’an to call himself the first Muslim, I knew early on that this would be the title.

  Did you have a specific audience in mind?

  It kind of hurts to think of intelligent, open-minded readers as a specific audience…

  Are you hoping to just inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off?

  Far more than inform! The pleasure for me lies in the “aha!” of understanding, of grasping the richness of reality, with all its uncertainties and dilemmas. It’s in the practice of empathy—not sympathy, but empathy, which is the good-faith attempt to understand someone else’s experience. Those who nurture images of Muhammad as the epitome of either all evil or all good may well be disconcerted, but then that’s the point: empathy trumps stereotype any time.

  What’s the most important take-home message for readers?

  The First Muslim isn’t a “message” book. If anything, since I’m agnostic, you might call it an agnostic biography. But I think many readers may be surprised at Muhammad’s deep commitment to social justice, his radical protest against greed and corruption, and his impassioned engagement with the idea of unity, both human and divine—major factors that help explain the appeal of Islam.

  How do you feel about the cover?

  I loved it the minute I saw it. Riverhead brilliantly avoided all the usual obvious images—domes, minarets, crescent moons, camels, and so on—and opted instead for the understated elegance of this classic “knot” tile design.

  Is there a book out there you wish you’d written?

  On Muhammad? No, and that’s exactly why I wrote The First Muslim. The book I wish someone else had written didn’t exist—one that brought psychological and political context to the historical and religious record, and one I actually wanted to read instead of feeling that I should.

  What’s your next book?

  I’m thinking it’s time to explore exactly what I mean by being an agnostic, and how this informs my ongoing fascination with the vast and volatile arena in which religion and politics intersect.

• 

Library Journal’s Barbara Hoffert chose The First Muslim as one of her picks for January 2013.  This is what she wrote:

Understanding Islam would seem to mean understanding the life, the times, and the beliefs of its founder, but there don’t seem to be a lot of universally acknowledged biographies of Muhammad around.  I’ll go out on a limb to highlight this one, because Hazleton, who reported on the Middle East for over a dozen years, wrote the well-regarded After the Prophet: the epic story of the Shia-Sunni split, a PEN-USA Book Award finalist that won praise from several quarters.  Hazleton aims to examine how the man Muhammad — an orphan, a merchant, and an exile — upended the established order and became the Prophet.  Keep your eyes peeled.

No comment on that phrase “universally acknowledged,” but to get such a nice nod so far ahead of publication is much appreciated.

I know you probably don’t have time for this long a video, but for the record, here’s my February 19 keynote speech at the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, MI — on fundamentalism, stereotyping, and (with suitably Jewish agnostic chutzpah) religion, as well as on the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia and the effect they may have on American attitudes toward Islam.

The occasion, at the largest Shia mosque in America, was the celebration of the birthday of Muhammad.   The still shot has a somewhat disturbingly preacher look to it, so please tell me I’m not preaching, just talking…

(The sound comes in fully after about 45 seconds.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-hTxDvRVlo]

Wow!   ‘After the Prophet‘ is a finalist for the 2010 PEN-USA nonfiction award, official announcement to come September 1.  Am honored and psyched, especially since the paperback is due out September 7, making this lovely timing.

The new paperback cover is on the left, the hardcover one on the right:

I much prefer the new cover.  Mere authors don’t get much of a say on such things, so I have serious reservations about those sand dunes and the ‘barefoot peasant garb,’ both of which are Western stereotypes.  I’d say try walking barefoot on hot sand, but you really don’t want to do that.  And while photographers love sand dunes for obvious reasons,  most of the Middle East desert is either stony, dusty steppe-land or bare, jagged mountains.

Still, I do like the idea, however staged for the camera, of the two walkers going off on separate ways and yet in the same general direction.  It’s a more graphic representation of the split, rather than the somewhat generic another-book-on-Islam feel that I get from the hardcover jacket.   And it seems to convey more of a dramatic sense, raising the question of how come they’re going their separate ways and implying that there’s a tragic story to be told — which is what I did in the book (check out the website here, and the Gallery section of it here).

My friend and IT guru Olivier disagrees, and prefers the hardcover jacket.  What do you think?

What art can do:

gently, provocatively, and in its own way reverently — recreate the sacred.

The image on the right is a devotional poster of Imam Hussein, Muhammad’s grandson, whose death in Iraq in the year 680 became the crystallizing point of the Shia-Sunni split.   While Islam formally frowns on figurative art,  popular Islam throughout the Middle East revels in it.   Markets, kiosks, pavement stores, homes are full of such brightly colored posters.  They show everything from popular shrines to the revered Shia Imams to the horse Muhammad rode on his night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem.

The deliberate mirror image on the left is of a contemporary Iranian woman.  What you see here is just a still:   the actual piece is a video portrait, and the woman moves slightly and breathes as the camera runs.  The five-foot high portrait, called “Icon #3.” is part of an exhibit by Iranian-born filmmaker Shoja Azari, running in New York through Friday (details and more info here).

In making this particular image, Azari — the partner of Shirin Neshat, director of the movie “Women Without Men” — was thinking of Neda Soltan, the student killed last June in Tehran during the protests following Iran’s disputed election.  Her image as she lay dying, blood streaming from one eye, from her nose, and from the corner of her mouth, became an instant icon in itself.

I am stunned by Icon #3.   I love the traditional posters and would have included them in “After the Prophet” if Doubleday hadn’t gasped at the expense (you can see a few here), but what Azari has done is give them fresh meaning and relevance.  He honors the iconic images even as he adapts them.

And no, there’s no question of sacrilege.  In fact Azari is solidly in the tradition of Islamic protest.  Iconic images were similarly adapted during the 1979-80 Iranian Revolution, and are still being used in posters of such contemporary political figures as Muqtada al-Sadr, head of Iraq’s Mahdi Army, and Hassan Nasrallah, the Lebanese head of Hizbollah.

If you can make it to the “Icons” exhibit, which for some reason is only up through this coming Friday, I am incredibly envious — for once I wish I was in New York!   And if you go, do please report back here to this envious Accidental Theologist.