The Amazing al-Mutawa

Educated at Tufts, he now is writing Islam-inspired comic books that give the Middle East - and the US - a surprising band of superheroes.

By Jake Halpern | October 14, 2007

The hottest-selling comic book throughout much of the Middle East - other than Spiderman - is a series called The 99, featuring 99 superheroes whose powers are firmly rooted in the teachings of Islam. The comic book's creator, a 36-year-old Kuwaiti native named Naif al-Mutawa, spent 10 summers as a boy at Camp Robin Hood, a predominantly Jewish summer camp two hours north of Boston, and went on to attend Tufts University and Long Island University, obtaining a doctorate in psychology. After a time working with torture victims from the first Gulf War, he took pen in hand and set out to change the world's conceptions and preconceptions of Islam. This week, an American version of The 99 is scheduled to be released.


What set this man's story into motion was not lofty ideals, or wanderlust, or a special fascination with New England. It was the simple fact that, as a boy, he was chubby. So chubby that his parents forced him to look through a book of summer camps and enroll in one that had a strong emphasis on sports. Al-Mutawa, who was just 8 years old at the time, liked the idea of a rustic, pine tree-filled camp in Freedom, New Hampshire. Growing up, he spent two months there every summer, and, while he never managed to lose his potbelly, he did gain a new perspective on the world - a perspective that caused problems for him each fall when he returned home.

"I grew up in a time when there was still some anti-Semitism in the schoolbooks," says al-Mutawa. "I chose to challenge that, and I got thrown out of class a few times." He recalled one exam where he was asked: "What are the basic characteristics of people who are Jewish?" Al-Mutawa wrote a terse answer: "They have two eyes, two ears, and a nose." Of course, al-Mutawa says, he knew what kind of answers his teacher was looking for, but he refused to play along. "Basically," he says, "you grow up and you decide you want to stand up for something."

Al-Mutawa's decision to attend Tufts was also somewhat random - he followed the footsteps of a cousin - and, once there, he resumed his status as an iconoclast. He wrote a column for the The Tufts Daily in which he took a variety of positions on political issues, mostly having to do with the Middle East. "He was very smart and open-minded, and he had an excellent sense of humor," recalls novelist Jonathan Wilson, who was one of al-Mutawa's English professors at Tufts. "He liked to take positions and make waves, but if he made a factual error, he was open to correction and was delightful in that way." According to al-Mutawa, his opinions often drew ire from all sides. "The Arabs called me a Zionist, and the pro-Israeli groups called me an anti-Semite."

Perhaps the defining moment of his college career occurred at a friend's apartment, when al-Mutawa overheard a fellow Muslim student talking about people who had died in flooding along the Mississippi River. "This guy was saying things like 'It's a good thing those heathens died,' " recalls al-Mutawa. The real shocker was the discovery that this same person was an officer in the Tufts Islamic Society. "So at the end of the night, I walk up to this guy and say, 'You have convinced me to join the Islamic Society.' The guy replied, `Welcome. Thank you. I knew it . . .' But I said, `Let me finish my sentence. I am joining with the sole intention that you are taken out of your position.' " And this is exactly what al-Mutawa did.

In many ways, the vision for The 99 grew out of this moment. Al-Mutawa's hope is that the comic book - introduced in the Arab world in the summer of 2006 - will showcase a positive, tolerant, and heroic side of Islam that rarely gets much attention. Many of the characters have Arab-sounding names, and the series' premise derives from the 99 positive attributes of Allah, but there are no prayers, nor passages from the Koran, nor dialogues filled with religious jargon. Unlike the efforts by some evangelical Christians to co-opt pop culture (like rock music) and use it as a tool for proselytizing, al-Mutawa's agenda is subtler, and his emphasis remains on telling a good story. "I'd prefer you talk to me about how I feel about Islam, rather than the people who keep showing up in the media cross-eyed and angry," says al-Mutawa. "But if you are a moderate, you are not much of a story to the media, and this is part of the problem." Fortunately for al-Mutawa, the real story is in his comics, and they pack plenty of punch.

Jake Halpern lives in Connecticut. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.

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