Egyptian actor Amr Saad expressed his delight over the audience’s positive impact on his latest movie “Mawlana,” (the preacher) which depicts the lives of sheikhs and their relationship with their constituents.
“It is a turning point in my career. The reaction of the audience has surpassed all my expectations,” Saad said in an interview with Arab Today.
Adapted from a novel by prominent journalist Ibrahim Eissa, Mawlana tells the story of a popular television preacher who struggles to reconcile his religious principles with demands and pressures from politicians and security agencies as well as ordinary human temptations.
“My role in the movie was the biggest challenge in my life given that it tackles a very sensitive issue in the daily life of not only Egyptian people but other nations all over the world,” he added.
Directed by Magdy Ahmed Ali, the film's poster showcases Saad alongside a sentence reading: “There’s more than 120,000 preachers in Egypt's mosques. This is the story of one of them.”
The Egyptian box office hit has provoked a backlash from Sunni Muslim clerics, with some calling for the film to be banned.
“I have trained very well. I have met with several preachers and was trained how to recite Quran properly in addition to spending long time in several mosques in Cairo everyday for over 4 months,” Saad said.
Saad said that he plays the character of Sheikh Hatem. The movie shows lives of several sheikhs and calls for renewing religious discourse. He added that the movie will be shown in several countries, including China, Malaysia and Latin America.
Through the protagonist, a cleric from Al-Azhar, Cairo's 1,000-year-old centre of Islamic learning, the film lays bare the complex and troubling interplay between the state, religious establishment, mass media and Islamist extremism in Egypt.