Moustapha Akkad

Born

1930, Aleppo, Syria

Died

11 November 2005, Amman, Jordan

Nationality

Syrian-American

Known for

The Message (1976); Lion of the Desert (1981); executive producer, the Halloween series

Spelling

Moustapha — the French form used in Mandate-era Syrian records

From Aleppo to Hollywood

Akkad left Syria as a teenager to study film in the United States, taking a degree at UCLA and postgraduate work at the University of Southern California. He worked in American television through the 1960s before turning to the project that would define him: a film that would present the life of the Prophet Muhammad and the beginnings of Islam to audiences who had never seen the subject on screen.

His name is spelled with the French ou and ph because Syria was governed under a French mandate until 1946, and Syrian documents of his childhood were issued in French. He kept that spelling throughout his American career — which is why the Moustapha form is familiar to English-speaking film audiences at all.

The Message

Released in 1976, The Message (also distributed as Mohammad, Messenger of God) dramatizes the early years of Islam in Mecca and Medina. Akkad's central problem was religious: Islamic tradition prohibits depicting the Prophet, so the film was constructed so that Muhammad never appears on screen, is never heard, and is not represented by an actor — events are staged from the viewpoint of those around him, with the camera itself standing in his position.

Akkad shot the film twice over, in English with an international cast including Anthony Quinn and Irene Papas, and in Arabic with a separate Arab cast, to reach both audiences without dubbing. He sought and received guidance from Islamic scholarly authorities during production, though the project still drew controversy on release. It remains one of the most widely seen films about the origins of Islam.

Lion of the Desert — and Halloween

Lion of the Desert (1981) told the story of Omar Mukhtar, the Libyan teacher who led resistance to Italian colonial rule and was executed in 1931. Anthony Quinn played Mukhtar and Oliver Reed his Italian adversary. The film was expensive, financed largely from Libya, and had a difficult commercial life; its reputation has grown considerably since.

Akkad funded such projects partly through work of a completely different character. He was an executive producer of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and remained the driving producer behind its sequels for the rest of his life — an unusual double career in which the profits of American horror underwrote historical epics about the Muslim world.

Death

Akkad and his daughter Rima Akkad Monla were caught in the coordinated hotel bombings in Amman, Jordan, on 9 November 2005. She was killed at the scene; he died of his injuries two days later, at the age of 75. He had been developing a long-planned film about Saladin at the time.

Relation to the name

Akkad is the most prominent bearer of the Moustapha spelling in the English-speaking world, and a useful illustration of how the variants arose: he and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk carried the identical Arabic name, مصطفى, written differently only because one man's papers were French and the other's Turkish. The mechanics are set out in the spellings guide.

His career also sits at the center of the name's cultural footprint — the subject of Mustapha in music, film and literature.

More profiles: famous Mustaphas · Mustapha Mond · Mostafa El-Sayed