The Message sets itself a problem no biblical epic before it had faced: telling the founding story of a religion whose central figure cannot appear. Islamic tradition, resting on hadith concerned with avoiding idolatry, holds that Muhammad is never to be depicted visually, in painting, sculpture or film, so Moustapha Akkad's film builds its entire structure around an absence.
The camera stands in for Muhammad's point of view in several key scenes, characters speak to a space just off frame, and his uncle Hamza, played by Anthony Quinn, along with early companions like Bilal ibn Rabah, the formerly enslaved man who became Islam's first muezzin, carry the narrative weight instead. The same restraint extends to Muhammad's wives, his daughter Fatima and the first four caliphs, all of whom are either kept off screen entirely or shown only from behind or in silhouette, following a convention some later scholarship traces to Ottoman-era religious painting, which developed similar workarounds for depicting the earliest generation of Muslims without showing their faces.
Akkad, a Syrian-American director working with predominantly non-Muslim financing from Libya, Morocco, Kuwait and Britain, has described consulting extensively with scholars at Cairo's Al-Azhar University during preproduction specifically to make sure the finished film respected this restriction throughout, a level of religious consultation unusual for a commercial feature film of its era.