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BAETH THE SENDER

Real Name: Fadi Hassem
Home Country: Jordan
Age: 18
Height: 173 cm
Weight: 72 kg
Eye Color: Brown
Hair Color: Black
Base of Operation: Jordan
. . .

INSIDE THE 99 - TALKING WITH TESHKEEL'S NAIF AL-MU

May 1, 2006

www.newsarama.com

Earlier this week we took a preview look at Teshkeel’s Comics THE 99. Perhaps best known for publishing Arabic language versions of Marvel titles in the “MENA” region (Middle East and North Africa), this will be the publisher’s first original title, as well as the world's first superheroes conceived from Islamic culture.

As detailed with the preview, the concept of THE 99 is based on the 99 attributes of God in Islam. Many of these names refer to characteristics that can be possessed by human individuals. For example - generosity, strength, faithfulness, and wisdom are all virtues encouraged by a number of faiths.

Members of THE 99 are ordinary teenagers and adults from across the globe, who each come into possession of one of the 99 mystical Noor Stones and find themselves empowered in a specific manner. Dilemmas faced by THE 99 will be overcome through the combined powers of three or more members. Through this, THE 99 series aims to promote values such as cooperation and unity throughout the Islamic world. Although the series is not religious, it aims to communicate Islamic virtues, which are universal in nature.

A creation of Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa, Founder and CEO of Teshkeel Media Group, the series’ creative team is composed of comic book industry veterans familiar to Western readers, including Fabian Nicieza, Dan Panosian, John McCrea, and James Hodgkins.

We spoke with Naif Al-Mutawa for more details about the series that debuts in the MENA region on May 31st (Teshkeel is in active negotiations for a US distribution deal and hope to announce something soon).

Newsarama: To start, and going back to article in the Washington Post about your plans with Teshkeel and THE 99, were you actually carrying around the article about Hamas and how they recruit…basically kids to their cause by using media and materials aimed at them and using it as an example of why the world needed THE 99 to potential backers?

Naif Al-Mutawa: The article I was carrying around wasn’t specifically about Hamas, it was about an entrepreneur in the occupied territories who was doing that – he was selling sticker albums and giving away stickers of suicide bombers. There was an article earlier that came out in April of 2004 about it, and I closed a round of funding in June of that year, so anyone who I spoke with between April and June, I showed it to them. I didn’t find out about the other one until after I had raised the money.

NRAMA: But still, as you’ve explained it, that was something of the source of this – of what you’re looking to accomplish through THE 99 – to try and conquer the almost nihilistic view of the future that can serve as the impetus to push them toward more militant forms of opposition, wasn’t it?

NA-M: Exactly. That part of the world is kind of in an intellectual purgatory. Some things are taboo because they are coming from the outside, and therefore cannot be incorporated into long-held beliefs, and meanwhile, the materials that are coming from the inside is coming from people who were selected through negative selection. The people who end up wearing scowls all the time, and the people who we here in the United States see as shouting about fire and brimstone and the end of the world – the equivalent of those people are dictating content.

The idea was multi-fold – they don’t want Westernization, fine. But at the same time, we cannot afford to allow these people to set the agenda. We – me and others – have to step up. I grew up in a time when the only things I wanted to read was in English – things like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and stories like that. I kept telling myself that I wouldn’t enjoy reading stories in Arabic, due to the lack of any stories that would really interest me. I didn’t find out that there was, until I was 26 years old, when I came home with a book called Cities of Salt.

I came home with a copy of it in English, and my mother told me, “You are not reading that book in English.” If I wanted to read it, she said, I was going to read it in Arabic. That was the language it was written in, my mother told me, and that was the language it was intended to be written in. I resisted at first, because up until that point, I hadn’t read anything in Arabic that I didn’t have to read. But I did, and I enjoyed it.

NRAMA: How did that experience shape what you’re doing today?

NA-M: I don’t want my kids to grow up in a world where they’re primarily reading languages other than their own as a foundation. The unfortunate consequence for me is that I write in English – not Arabic. I don’t want that to happen to them. That’s the primary driver, the beginning of where we’ve come to now.

NRAMA: But that said, THE 99 isn’t your first time down this path, necessarily…

NA-M: Right. About ten years ago, I had an experience where I was frustrated by censors. I wrote and illustrated a series of children’s books. The first one won an award from UNESCO in 1997 for Children’s Literature in the Service of Tolerance. The book did pretty well in the Gulf, and sold over 30,000 copies, which is not a huge number in the U.S., but considering that it was being sold in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, it was a pretty good number.

My third book was frustrated by censors, and then my fourth book was frustrated by censors, and after that, I packed it in and didn’t write anything for four years. I only wrote for myself.

After that, I did my PhD in Clinical Psychology, and worked at Bellvue Hospital in the Survivors of Political Torture unit. The patients I worked with were tortured for their politics or religion. The patients I worked with, because I’m fluent in Arabic and proficient in French, came out of West Africa and the Middle East – predominantly Muslim populations. It was through that experience that I came to the realization that as a culture, we don’t have any heroes. We have historical figures that are revered, but we don’t have any modern-day heroes. It was then that I decided I wanted to do this – create heroes that are based on our culture, but not on our religion.

NRAMA: Playing the admittedly Western devil’s advocate, how do you do that? Obviously, living here in the United States, you know that Islamic religion and culture are rarely, if ever shown to be separate things…

NA-M: It’s the same way it’s done in Hollywood – it’s like communicating the New testament via The Matrix, or the story of Genesis in Waterworld, which was Genesis wrapped in secular robes. That’s how you do it – you don’t talk about religion, but you tap into an archetype that’s consistently used in the educational processes throughout the Islamic world. You take that as your start, but your final product is not religious.

For example, there was one man – who is very religious - who asked me when I was raising my money, “Are the characters going to pray?” and I said “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not a man of religion, I’m a man of culture.”

“But we’re all men of religion.”

“Okay, and we’re all men of business.”

“Yes.”

“Okay then, how are they going to pray?

“The Sunni way.”

“And we should ignore the Shiite population and that half of the Muslim world, and suggest that only Sunnis can be heroes? That’s not what this is about.”

At the end of the day, the attributes that our heroes have are not attributes that only Muslims share – generosity, strength, wisdom – there’s not a single culture in the world that doesn’t have those as positive elements, something to be desired in life.

NRAMA: So, by doing that, you’ll also be steering clear of what we’ve seen throughout the Middle East in reaction to the Danish cartoons as well, in that there will be no describing Islamic religion through imagery?

NA-M: Correct.

NRAMA: So – the characters themselves, the “99” – you’re not going to be showing them all…even in the first year’s worth of stories, are you?

NA-M: Right now, we’re revealing a character a week at our website, and the stories will have combinations of three characters working together. There are just under 160 thousand of three in 99.

NRAMA: So you’re saying that this is a finite series – only up until issue #160,000, and then it’s over? [laughs]

NA-M: [laughs] Right, Our grandchildren’s grandchildren can get the final issue. The idea though is that we’ll start out slow – each character will find their gem in a different way, and that will be the unifying element throughout, something like in Six Feet Under where a character died in a different way at the start of each episode.

The series will be plot-driven, so, depending on what the problem is, that combination will be the ones to get together to save the day. Some of the characteristics from the gems though are less action-oriented, so you need some characters who use their strength combined with characters whose aspects may include mental prowess – so that the collective power between the three of them is greater than the powers of any one character.

NRAMA: And the characters who do find the gems – they’re not exclusively Arab?

NA-M: Not at all. This speaks to the metaphor to Islam being a pluralistic, multicultural religion. THE 99 are from different countries. We have two American heroes that we’ll be releasing in the first year. There’s one from the UK, and one from South Africa as well.

When I turned on the television after Hamas won the election in occupied territories. Among several things, the co-founder of Hamas came on and, among other things, alluded to a conversation he had with Prince Charles about the time when Europe was in the Dark Ages and Islam was at its height, suggesting that this is the beginnings of a new golden age for Islam and a downfall for Europe and the West.

At the time of the Islam’s peak, there was acceptance of other people, their religions and ideas. This – what we predominantly see today is not what was there. For us then, the backstory of THE 99 takes readers back to that time – even though we don’t mention Islam in the book, we show what that time was like.

NRAMA: And so we’re all on the same page, when was that Golden Age?

NA-M: A period that spans pretty much between 1258 and 1492. We’re saying that when Baghdad was invaded, it was done in order to destroy the knowledge and power that was inherent in all of the books that had been collected and were studied there. The books, according to history, were thrown into the Tigris River. Where historical fiction comes in says that all the power and knowledge from those books were saved in 99 gemstones that were dipped into the Tigris and were them smuggled out of the city.

When Grenada fell in 1492, a third of them went West on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria and were spread throughout the New World. A third went on the Silk Road to China and were spread along the path through Asia and China, and the final third were scattered across Europe and Africa.

Now, in 2006, we have 99 characters, half male, half female, which, to my mind represents the pluralistic, multicultural community that was present in the Golden Age of Islam. And you know what? Some of the female characters will have more “masculine” aspects given to them. The girl from Portugal will be one of the physically strongest of them all, for example. This is not about stereotypes. Of the half that are female characters, five or six will cover their hair, and do it in a way that reflects their individual cultures.

We have one character, Batina, whose attribute is “The Hidden,” so she’ll wear the cover from top to bottom. The other 30-plus female characters will show their hair. Because as much as some would like you to believe that there is only one way to interpret that law, there isn’t.

NRAMA: But again, no religion or mentions of the Qu’ran?

NA-M: Nothing. Not a Qu’aan, no prayer, nothing.

NRAMA: From the preview pages, your creative team was revealed as Fabian Nicieza, Dan Panosian, and John McCrea. How did you get them attached to the project?

NA-M: I sold it to them. Sven knew them all and had a personal relationship with them, and they knew he wouldn’t lead them astray. Then, I sat down with Fabian and sold him on the project. I told him what it was about, what I was trying to achieve, and that I planned to be co-writing the first year with him to make sure it startrs off on the right course and cultural elements are included. He’s been fantastic so far – exactly what we were missing. He understood what we were trying to do – he took an inspiration and turned it into something workable.

NRAMA: What’s your timeline for launch looking like now?

NA-M: We’ve got the preview out which introduces the larger picture, and then, shortly, in May, we’ll be putting out #1, which will be evergreen – it will always stay in print. It has the first story, an origin, and ideas about how this all started, and then, in that, the tagline is, “Next Ramadan, the world will have new heroes.”

So in September, we go monthly.

NRAMA: Any spin-offs planned?

NA-M: The market will decide. We’ve got a lot of characters, and team possibilities all set.

NRAMA: How many languages will this be printed in?

NA-M: Thanks to the British, English is widely read and understood around the world, so English, and also in Arabic, and probably one or two other languages as we go. So hopefully, we’ll hit our audience, wherever they may be.

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