Riz Khan at Al-Jazeera English has recently done a show on the challenges of portraying Islam by Muslims in big film projects. Khan spoke to Raja Sharif from Alnoor Holdings, which is producing a $150 million film (by Hollywood) on the Prophet Muhammad, Kamran Pasha, the author of Mother of the Believers about the life of Aisha, the prophet's wife, and Alt-Muslim's Editor-in-Chief, Shahed Amanullah. At the heart of this discussion was an interesting point about how Islam was revealed as art, in an unparalleled poetic fashion, and the role of Muslims today is to marshal the arts to tell the story of Islam, its prophets, and its civilization much like they did with sumptuous Islamic architecture. As you can see in the video, there are still some Muslims who are highly reticent about the extent to which Islam should be mediatized for entertainment even if it's a purposeful type of entertainment. I still believe that we've come a long way since Mustapha Akkad's film Al-Resala in 1977 which generated protests in some extremist circles for some baffling reasons (the film did not portray the Prophet but they were some largely unfounded rumors that Akkad had asked Charles Heston to play Muhammad). I'm sure  a few Muslims will gripe, and loudly so, for a while about this film as well, but for most this will be finally the time when Islam officially entered the age of global media. There are a number of media initiatives by individual Muslims here and there, many of which have been featured on this blog, but a big-budget movie like the remake of Al-Resala will open the door for countless other productions, pushing the boundaries of representation of Islam even further.