No limousines pulled up yesterday outside the United Artists theater in Brooklyn Heights. There was no red carpet, not even a poster announcing the film that opened there and at 92 other theaters around the country.
But for thousands of Muslims who flocked to those theaters, the American premiere of the animated feature "Muhammad: The Last Prophet," was unquestionably a landmark cultural event.
"I've been waiting for this since I was 14," said Lebarron Edwards, 27, as he hurried into the theater on Court Street with his wife and four children. "Every other prophet has a movie. As a Muslim, you feel left out."
By almost any measure, the film's journey to commercial theaters in the United States was a long and arduous one, complicated by Sept. 11. Five years after the film went into production, it finally opened in the United States after a national grass-roots marketing effort that enlisted the help of mosques, Islamic schools, the Internet and Arab-language newspapers. And by late yesterday, the effort seemed to be paying off.
"Everywhere it's full, it's packed," said Oussama Jammal, the film's United States distributor. "It is just unbelievable. Phone calls every single minute, people still looking for tickets."
The 90-minute movie, which recounts the story of the birth of Islam, began as the dream of a Saudi real estate investor, Muwaffak Alharithy, who said he felt that his children and other Muslim youth had been shortchanged by religious film offerings of Hollywood and decided to remedy the situation himself.
In 1999, Mr. Alharithy hired a veteran director of Hollywood animated films, Richard Rich, whose movies include "The King and I" and "The Fox and the Hound." Mr. Alharithy said he ultimately spent $12 million to produce the feature, only to find American distributors hesitant in the aftermath of 9/11.
"What we found out in making the film is how little anybody knows about that religion and Muhammad," Mr. Rich said in an interview. "Here we thought that this film would at least open doors for that to happen, and then 9/11 seemed to close those doors for a while."
Mr. Rich said he was in the process of dubbing the film on Sept. 11, 2001. Fearing a backlash, Mr. Alharithy decided to wait before searching for a distributor in the United States. But he went ahead and released the movie, dubbed in Arabic and six other languages, in theaters in Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt and other countries.
It picked up several big-name distributors, including Columbia TriStar Film Distributors International, and performed as well as "The Lion King" in Lebanon, Mr. Alharithy said.
But when he finally searched for a distributor in the United States in 2003, he found no interest. The same thing happened in England, he said. Eventually, Mr. Alharithy approached Icon Productions, which produced Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ."
"I thought they might be bold enough," he said in a telephone interview yesterday from his home in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. "I never got an answer from them."
"Muhammad: The Last Prophet," a strenuously respectful cartoon rendering of the prophet's life, has little in common with both the controversial violence and explosive box office success of "The Passion," but both films depended on faith-based marketing efforts.
Last August, Mr. Alharithy hired Mr. Jammal, the president of a film production, marketing and distribution company in Bridgeview, Ill., to market and release the film. They chose yesterday for the opening because it fell on Id al-Fitr, the holiday that officially ends Ramadan.
Mr. Jammal rented screening rooms in theaters around the country for a five-day run, and sold the $15 tickets through his company, Fine Media Group.
With millions of Muslims living in the United States - some estimates put the number at seven million - Mr. Jammal's marketing strategy was widespread. He ran ads on the satellite channel Al-Jazeera.
Trailers of the film were shown in schools in Dearborn, Mich., which has a large Muslim population. Fliers and posters of the film were sent to thousands of mosques, including the Masjid At-Taqwa in Brooklyn, which bought blocks of tickets to screenings in New York.
After hearing reports of sold-out screenings yesterday afternoon, Mr. Jammal said he was already considering a re-run in some cities.
In New York City, women in headscarves and men in long, flowing robes hustled into theaters in Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan throughout the day, pulling along their children.
"It is so rare that we have this kind of showing in a mainstream film," said Mohamed Aftab Karimullah, an Ozone Park engineer who watched the film with his teenage daughter in Queens. "There is this mistaken notion, especially west of the Atlantic, that Islam is not part of the three religions of Abraham. Instead, it is seen as some strange phenomenon."
Several people, like 13-year-old Ahmed Aly, said they left the theater feeling hopeful that the film could have a fare-reaching effect." If the whole world saw this movie, there might be a change," he said. "They might think Islam's not a bad religion, it's good. And they might not think Muslims are bad people, and realize that we're also good."
Both local and national Muslim leaders said they hoped non-Muslims would see the film. Debbie Almontaser, a Brooklyn activist who teaches cultural tolerance in New York City schools and for the organization Women in Islam, said the fact that so many American theaters opened their doors was a good sign.
Dr. James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, said, "Islam is a part of America right now and America is increasingly becoming a part of the Arab and Muslim world."
He added:" This is what globalization is about. It's not a one-way sell. It's a two-way sell."
Mr. Alharithy said he hoped that the same curiosity Americans expressed about Islam in the weeks after Sept. 11 would lead them , three years later, to watch the film.
"The movie is such a bridge maker and it shows that this faith is a continuation of other faiths," Mr. Alharithy said. "And it surprises some people. They say, 'Oh this is Islam?' Yeah it's nothing drastic."