Faith & Spirit Quote by Moustapha Akkad

Akkad is talking like a filmmaker who’s tired of watching an entire civilization get reduced to a prop. The line carries the pressure of living as a Muslim in the West where “Islam” often arrives prepackaged: exotic when it sells, threatening when it scares, rarely ordinary, almost never authored from within. His insistence on “obligation” and “duty” is more than personal piety; it’s an artistic brief. He’s positioning cinema as a corrective to a media ecosystem that treats ignorance as a genre.

The phrase “tell the truth about Islam” isn’t naive about truth being singular or uncontested. It’s a rhetorical stake in the ground against what he implies is a louder, more profitable untruth. That’s the subtext: representation isn’t neutral, it’s consequential. When a faith with “700 million” adherents can still be “so little known,” Akkad points to a Western cultural imbalance where familiarity is granted selectively, and where the default narrator often isn’t the subject.

Context sharpens the urgency. Akkad built his career trying to mount large-scale historical epics about Islamic history (most famously The Message), projects that faced financing obstacles, political scrutiny, and outright threats. So this isn’t just identity speaking; it’s the cost ledger of trying to make a counter-image. The surprise he mentions is strategic, too: it invites the audience to feel implicated. How can something so big be made so invisible? That question is the engine of his work.