On Thursday, August 27, 2015, the first part of Iran’s most expensive movie trilogy, “Muhammad, the Messenger of Allah,” opened nationwide in Iran. It took more than eighty months for this movie to be completed. Its primary goal, according to its director Majid Majidi, “is to reclaim the rightful image of Islam, which he said extremists have distorted.”

The Iranian state has partly funded the film, most likely in an attempt to promote a Shiite understanding of the narrative of Muhammad’s life. This, of course, triggered controversy among Sunni Muslims. Al-Azhar University demanded that “Iran refrain from releasing the movie, so that an undistorted image of the prophet can be preserved in the minds of Muslims.”