By Emily Geminder
28 August 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: When Kuwait born writer and entrepreneur Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa launched his critically acclaimed series of comic books The 99, he decided that by the next Ramadan, the world would have new heroes.
At the time, the scene for children’s and young adult literature in much of the Middle East was grim. While many children, including Al-Matawa in his youth, were avid comic book readers, they seldom saw themselves reflected in their pages. The few Arab characters that made their way in were all too frequently cast as the villains. Al-Mutawa’s heroes, on the other hand, come from all corners of the world – 99 countries, in fact – and each one embodies one of the 99 attributes of Allah.
The 99
Though the series is based on an Islamic archetype, it is not overtly religious – the comics make no mention of faith or prayer. Rather, its characters reflect the diversity of the regions they come from, and ultimately, Al-Mutawa believes, the attributes they embody – qualities such as wisdom and mercy – are not only Islamic values, but human values.
Before embarking on his career as a comic book writer, Al-Mutawa spent ten years working as a clinical psychologist at a Bellevue Hospital program for former political prisoners and victims of torture, among them Iraqi prisoners of the Gulf War and Kuwaitis who had been tortured by Saddam Hussein. “It got me thinking about what a hero is and what a hero does,” Al-Mutawa said in an interview with MediaGlobal. “Here we have Saddam, who was considered a hero in his country and who then tortured his own population. I started thinking: what kind of message are we sending our kids about what it means to be a hero and about what they can aspire to?”
While the experience, Al-Mutawa said, planted an initial seed in his mind, it was not until after he departed from psychology and completed a master’s degree in business administration that the idea for The 99 took its current form. “I was sitting in a cab with my sister, and she was asking me what I was going to do and trying to get me to go back to writing,” recounted Al-Mutawa, who was 32 years old at the time. He had received critical notice in his youth for a series of children’s books that dealt with religious discrimination but had given up writing when the last of the series was blocked by a Kuwaiti censor. “I told my sister, ‘After all this education, if I go back to writing, it’s got to be a concept that has the potential of Pokemon,’ which was quite big then. Then I started having this series of thoughts: first, that Pokemon had been banned in some Islamic countries – there was a fatwa against it. Then I started thinking, ‘My God, what’s happened to Islam?’ and thinking how disappointed God must be. Then I began to think about how God has 99 attributes in Islam, which, ironically enough, led me full circle back to Pokemon, which is a concept of 300 attributes. By the end of the cab ride, I had the basic idea for The 99.”
While Al-Mutawa grew up in Kuwait, he spent most summers of his childhood at a predominantly Jewish outdoor camp in the United States, where his parents sent him to lose weight but where he primarily developed a voracious appetite for Marvel and DC comics. The experience not only informed his writing sensibilities, but exposed him to a world which would lead him to challenge religious stereotypes.
The 99 is firmly grounded in the legacy of Marvel and DC Comics Al-Mutawa discovered in his youth; its writers’ and illustrators’ backgrounds include stints working for legendary names such as Batman and Superman. But The 99‘s story is distinctly its own. While Al-Mutawa worked with victims of the Gulf War invasion of Iraq, his comic begins with the pivotal moment of another invasion: the 1258 Mongol invasion of Baghdad.
“During the invasion, all the books from the Bait al-Hikma library, which was the biggest library in the city, were thrown into the Tigris River, which turned black with the ink,” Al-Mutawa explained. “Any school kid in the Middle East knows that story because it’s not my story – it’s history. What I did was rewrite history to say that the real reason for the invasion of Baghdad was to destroy the library – that that was their main intent.”
But in Al-Mutawa’s version of history, the knowledge of the library is not lost. A handful of librarians manage to escape the onslaught and magically condense the texts of the library into 99 stones.
The 99
At the time of the invasion, Baghdad was the largest city in the world, renowned as a hub of intellectual innovation. The Bait al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) was unrivaled in the scope of its scholarship, housing texts on astrology, agriculture, medicine, chemistry, and philosophy. Scholars translated vast numbers of foreign texts into both Persian and Arabic. “The library was not just Islamic books – they were Jewish books, Islamic books, Christian books, Greek philosophers,” Al-Mutawa explained. “The power in those stones is not coming from Islam but from all ideas.”
Over the years, the caretakers of the stones diverge and wind up dispersed across the far corners of the world. The stones become lost, traverse continents and oceans, and make tumultuous odysseys of their own. Fast-forward a few centuries to 2008, and all the 99 stones have found their way into the hands of Al-Mutawa’s 99 heroes.
“All the strip’s stories, in one way or another, draw on these ideas of international cooperation and tolerance,” Al-Mutawa said. In many ways, the series’ efforts for global collaboration mirror the difficulties of their real world counterparts. “Each hero has a unique power, and each problem requires a combination of powers. But sometimes there’s quibbling over whose power is used. There’s a lot of negotiation and conflict resolution that happens.”
The strip has drawn critical praise – and a wide female audience – due to its strong women characters in leading roles, such as Noora from the United Arab Emirates, who has the ability to see the “light of truth” in others and to help them find the truth in themselves. Another female character, Mumita, is known as “The Destroyer.”
The 99
The 99 was launched primarily in the Middle East and North Africa in 2006, where it now routinely outsells its better known and long standing competitors. Recently, the comic book has gained licensing agreements in the United States, Japan, India, France, Malaysia, and Indonesia, among others. “The big news that’s coming up soon is that next year we’ll be able to announce who our animation partner will be,” Al-Mutawa said. “Right now, we can say it’s a very big global player that’s going to be co-producing with us.”
Response to the comic book has not always been receptive. Many religious conservatives view The 99 as a distortion of Islam and have accused it of diluting the message of the Qur’an in order to market Islam to the West. The 99 was banned for two years in Saudi Arabia, but the ruling was overturned in February. The series has been on the Saudi market ever since.
The comic book, in its willingness to gamble on the improbable, is, after all, a resilient medium. Channeling the hopes and dreams of a new generation, Al-Mutawa seeks to reflect its readers back at them – revealing them to be the harbingers of their own improbable worlds.