Superheroes Powered on Islam
Nora Boustany

Naif Al-Mutawa was a businessman looking for financing. His idea was to create a line of comic books, nonreligious in theme, starring superheroes endowed with Islamic traits. But he needed a selling point.

To shock investors into action, Al-Mutawa would pull from his pocket an article about a Hamas supporter in the Palestinian territories who was making millions selling a children’s album with stick-on pictures of suicide bombers and other bloody scenes from the intifada. Something more positive was needed, Al-Mutawa argued in his sales pitch, to save the children from embracing a culture of violence and death.

His strategy worked. “That’s what is happening in a vacuum,” he told potential financiers. “Don’t sit back and complain or say we are getting gobbled up by globalism. Do something. We need to offer content that kids will gravitate to.”

His plan was to create an alternative pop-culture product that would sell all over the Muslim world, in Arabic and English, from Morocco to Bangladesh. In just one year, he had 54 investors on board from Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Egypt, Mexico and China. Al-Mutawa, 35, even collected $1 million from his classmates at Columbia Business School. “I am the only Kuwaiti who went to Beirut and came out with money,” he chuckled…

The Washington Post has another intriguing article today. An Arab entrepreneur has come up with a super-heroes comic book, The 99. This is not the same as an earlier effort to use comic books to prosyletize (reported here last year), but instead an attempt to teach Muslim kids–and others–that they have values that are worth keeping. The name of the series comes from the belief that God has 99 names, each extolling a attributes of which he is the ultimate exemplar. It seems to be a sort of X-Men with a more moral flavor, in that each character has a super power based on one of the virtues. There will be 99 characters–plus a hundredth as mentor–working in teams of three for the various stories. The first issue is due out in May, but the first story will appear on-line on March 10. I look forward to seeing it!

Newsarama, a website dedicated to comics, has a piece on this series, as did the January 22 issue of The New York Times

The Newsarama site also has a piece on another series, this one Egyptian, called AK Comics, which seeks to portray a non-violent Middle East. Clearly, these comics are not going to be portraying the Prophet. Offering role models for good behavior is certainly to be commended.