November 11, the armistice day that marked the end of the First World War, has been commemorated each year as Remembrance Day in much of the British Commonwealth, and as Veterans’ Day in the United States.

And as of this year, after it was marred by a string of horrific terrorist bombings in Amman, Jordan, it will be remembered as the day the Arab world lost an iconic film director who had brought to the screen epics about the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Moustapha Akkad, 69, the Syrian-born American director of Al-Risala, The Message and Lion of the Desert and producer of a host of other motion pictures including the Halloween series, was in the foyer of the Hyatt Amman hotel waiting for his daughter when a suicide bomber detonated his charge.

Akkad’s daughter Rima, 34, was killed at the scene, while the auteur succumbed to his wounds less than 48 hours later. The triple bombings at three high-profile hotels in the Jordanian capital claimed the lives of 60 in total, including the Akkads and three suicide bombers.

Almost instantly, satellite channels scrambled to re-run interviews with him while others paid homage to his directorial genius.

Akkad’s contribution to cinema and Arab culture does not only resonate in his portfolio of work; his quiet journey from his beloved hometown of Aleppo to Los Angeles to study film was a quiet harbinger of the influence he came to wield in both North America and the Middle East.

Omar Mohsen Akkad shrewdly tapped in to the fears of teen babysitters with his blockbuster Halloween and its sequels.

I remember first meeting Akkad at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Cairo in November 2003 on the sidelines of the Cairo Film Festival, where we sat down for a lengthy interview. Egypt was then a transit stop on his way to the Gulf, where he hoped to secure financial backing for his new epic film Salahdin. Sean Connery had agreed to play the role of the Kurdish warrior who retook Jerusalem from the Crusaders.

Throughout his career, Akkad sought to create an atmosphere of understanding between East and West; his attempt to tell a different version of one of the most controversial chapters in the Crusades was but the latest chapter in a journey that began nearly three decades ago with 1976’s The Message and Al-Risala, two identical scripts with different casts shot simultaneously in English and in Arabic. Although famed in the West as the producer of Halloween, Akkad was proudest of his work introducing the Western world to the true compassion, mercy and justice of Islam.

But in the wake of 9/11, many wondered whether making a film about a Muslim hero such as Salah El-Din was really a good idea.

“They are afraid because during the times of Salah El-Din, the Muslim world was made of corrupt states working with the Crusaders and this is the situation we currently have in the Middle East — proxy agents of another power,” Akkad told me later in 2003, explaining why Arab financiers had declined to give him funding.

Would Akkad have eventually made Salahdin had he lived? I’m sure he would have, if only because he was not the type of man who would be daunted by challenges, however insurmountable they may have occasionally seemed.

Take, for example, his indomitable grit in finishing The Message.

Living in Hollywood, Akkad says he came to realize that Islam was misrepresented and misunderstood in the West. He felt in the early 1970s that it was time for a documentary on Islam until he ran into Irish-born scriptwriter Harry Craig, who liked the notion but felt it would be more commercially and artistically successful as a feature film.

A film about Islam was the perfect opportunity for Akkad to pass Arab values and the splendor of Islamic traditions on to his children, which he said encouraged him to bring The Message to the big screen.

“I wanted to teach my kids something about their culture, their religion and we used to criticize the Arab governments for not helping in this — the typical Arab mentality always pointing the finger at someone else — and then I thought all of a sudden, ‘I’m a filmmaker, this is my specialty. Why don’t I do something about this? Why don’t I make a film about this?’ And right away the idea clicked with me,” Akkad says.

Craig would eventually become one of the scriptwriters on The Message, but it took four years and constant shuttling between Beirut, Cairo and Riyadh to get the various Islamic schools of jurisprudence to sign off on the project. In Beirut, Shi’a scholars agreed to the script, while the clerical establishment of the revered Al-Azhar Mosque also gave the project a green light.

But it was in Saudi Arabia that Akkad ran into the most difficulty, as a number of Saudi scholars declared the idea of a film about the family of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) to be nothing less than diabolical. Akkad engaged them in the deep philosophical discussions at which he was so adept, but the clerical order in the Kingdom would not budge.

It was only with the influence of some in the Saudi court that Akkad finally got approval to start filming.

“I told them that with their way of thinking, they would have to change,” Akkad said, “or that they would be changed.”

Akkad shot The Message in Arabic and English simultaneously. The same scenes shot the same way, once with an Arab cast, the second time with an English-speaking one. The Arabic version starred Abdullah Ghaith in the role of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)’s uncle Hamza, the only influential character in the Prophet’s life the scholars could agree to allow depicted by an actor.

The English version was supported by an international cast including Oscar-winner Anthony Quinn as Hamza, and Irene Papas and Michael Ansara as Hind and Abu Sufyan, respectively.

Quinn later starred in another epic Akkad production — 1979’s Lion of the Desert, or as it is popularly known among Arab audiences, Omar Mukhtar. A film about the legendary Libyan teacher turned nationalist fighter, Omar Mukhtar, Lion was more than just a representation of the Libyan people’s struggle for liberty from the yoke of Italian imperialism at the turn of the 20th century, it was also a mirror of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The allusions and parallels are clear — a highly-modernized foreign army (European, in this case) lays siege to a simple folk, occupies their lands, and brings them under the yoke of the colonist taskmaster. With a star-studded cast that included Oliver Reed as the Italian General Graziani, Rod Steiger as Mussolini and Irene Papas as Mabrouka, the film won rave reviews in the Arab world but received little commercial attention in Hollywood.

“Lion of the Desert is definitely my favorite film,” Akkad told me with a smile. “In one of his TV interviews in the US when they did his life story, Anthony [Quinn] said his favorite role is that of Omar Mukhtar in Lion of the Desert.”

Shifting focus from the allure of the desert to the entanglements of Halloween gorefests, Akkad took on the screenplay of young horror-meister John Carpenter, who had written a story about a series of twisted, blood-soaked chop-’em-up murders.

This would set off one of the most commercially successful horror franchises in Hollywood history — the Halloween series of films which began with Jamie Lee Curtis and recently featured rap star Busta Rhymes in the eighth sequel (Halloween: Resurrection) in 2002, some 25 years after the original hit theaters.

“Donald Pleasance, one of the principal actors, who played Dr. Samuel ‘Sam’ J. Loomis, was once asked if he would always make Halloween sequels, and he said he would stop at number 23,” Akkad laughed. “Unfortunately, Donald died many years ago.

“John Carpenter convinced me to do it when he summarized the film in five words — ‘babysitter killed by the bogeyman’,” Akkad said.

These words provided the key to the film’s success: Just about every teenaged girl in 1970s America had at one time or another tried babysitting as a means of making a little pocket change; then along came a movie that depicted the babysitter in life-or-death situations.

No wonder it scared the living daylights out of teen America.

“It wasn’t the word bogeyman that attracted me,” Akkad said. “It was the babysitter.” And, the audience would be comprised of former babysitters.

It isn’t often that the Arab world is able to show off its best and brightest. Sure, Akkad was an American, but his soul was Arab and Syrian. He was buried in Aleppo, the city with which he carried on an affair for some 70 years.

It is difficult to ponder the criminal event which took Akkad from us. He had always been steadfast in rejecting terrorism and religious extremism of any kind, but it was terrorism that killed him in Amman, where he and his daughter had travelled to attend a wedding. (Rima was buried in her husband’s northern Lebanon hometown of Tripoli.)

In the Halloween series, the masked bogeyman Michael Myers is resurrected again and again. “Michael Myers will never die,” Akkad had told me as he fiddled with his signature pipe in hand.

The producer’s messages about inter-faith tolerance and cultural dialogue deserve similar (if more dignified) immortality. For his millions of fans across the Arab world, he was the true Lion of the Desert.  et