Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is the producer and director of the short film titled Innocence of Muslims. He masquerades as Sam Bacile, a realtor who could have been discriminated or mistreated by Muslims in Egypt. It is a film that insults Islam as a religion by featuring Muhammad as a cynical character. This paper analyzes the film in terms of its audience and purpose. The paper takes the dimension of critiquing the ideas about Islam offered in the film since most of them are not founded on facts but rather on malice.
The controversial film was uploaded on Youtube in 2012 as a trailer for a movie that was in its production. There were two versions of the videos one titled Muhammad Movie Trailer and the other The Real Life of Muhammad. The videos were dubbed in Islam’s common language: Arabic. This point leads us to know who the intended audience was. The film was intended to gain viewership in the Islam world as a way of criticizing their religion. It is also arguable that other religions such as the Jews and Christians would be subscribed to the video in huge numbers as it talks negatively about Islam which is supposedly an enemy to their religions. Actually, there were suspicions that the film could have been funded by the Jewish fraternity.
Throughout the plot of the ‘trailer,’ the actors make inflammatory remarks about Muhammad while others defend him. Muhammad himself is presented as a bloody killer and thug, child molester, homosexual and a polygamous man who mishandles his wives, and is a child of unknown parentage. In his marriage, he is chased away by his wives by his wives who are aggrieved that he favors one of them instead of practicing equality in handling them. In his presentation as a pederast, Muhammad takes Aisha, his nine-year-old daughter for a wife.
The intentions of the film producer could only be explained as malice. He only aims at stirring