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

[MattBrady]

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. The writer was a Saudi and he was deported for writing it, and had his nationality stripped from him, and ended up dying in either Jordan or Syria.

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. The reality is, when Islam was at its height, people like the co-founder of Hamas were in prison.

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.

[Jigokuman]

I wish all the luck in the world to this guy.

[BlueThunderArmy]

Very intelligent interview and responses. I'll definitely give these books a shot.

[The Champion]

I like the fact that Al-Mutawa is not going to let the more extremist viewpoints of Islam dictate how the stories will be done. I wish them all luck with project.

Perhaps in the future we could even see some crossovers with the main Marvel Universe heroes.

[CitC]

This looks impressive. Good luck

comicsintheclassroom.net

[Jigokuman]

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

Euh... WHY?

[OM]

...Ok, does this mean that one of the attributes he'll use is that it's 110% to lie to the infedel, especially when telling the truth would benefit you both? And then there's this bit:

"Now, in 2006, we have 99 characters, half male, half female,"

...Lessee, 99/2 = 49.5. Which side of the gender fence got shorted?

[Grimm22]

The real problem I have with these Indy books is that a lot of the time they arent original. I mean I do like to keep an open mind with books especially with New Writers considering that I hope to one day get into writing comics (after I graduate that is).

I mean how many of these books do we need? Although I do like the idea of heros being actual regular people with powers.

I'll give it a try and if I dont like the first 2 issues then i'll drop it.

[Doc Holiday]

I agree that this man seems very intelligent. I am very interested in this series as a result. Isn't Virgin Comics also going to feature some Islamic heroes?

"Next Ramadan..." I would like to see some Islamic celebrations such as Ramadan depicted in the book. Might the creators parallel the western-based holidays such as Christmas with Eid and Ramadan specials?

I wish all involved the best of fortunes, and I will put the 99 on my pull list.

[Dilutral]

The book acyually sounds very interesting
but i dont know how it'll work without having a character that is always there
and then what if people like one of the caracters the most
and only get to see him once every year...

anyway Fabian is a good writer so its in good hands

wish em good luck in getting to the states

[Cray_ws]

This book has alot of potential, Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa has such a brilliant idea here. I think if they can maintain a regular monthly schedule, it will find many people's "pull-list". It doesn't hurt to have some experienced and widely known talent of Fabian Nicieza, Dan Panosian, and John McCrea working on this book.

I wish Matt would've asked him if they plan to reprint the series in TPBs. I certainly hope so, I would love to check this series out in TPB format.

[Northstar04]

This book seems very interesting, and I like the cast of characters. I will be giving this book an honest try.

[Excelsior!]

Best of luck to this project - hopefully things like this will portray a more realistic image of Islamic culture to the Western world. I see a lot of the current misconceptions of Islam as comparable to the whole of Britain being likened to football hooligans and the BNP - sure, they exist, but they're extremists, and they don't represent the majority of people.

On another note, my costume-sense is tingling - Mumita (the girl in the white and blue on the cover) must be one of the best examples of good costume design I've seen in a long while, apart from Gravity. Cool stuff!

[vanilla ice]

Will there be any female ninjas in the story.The women are wearing so little clothing I see a forearm there. How will this fly muslim countries when their playboy has their women wearing clothes .

[kyussfan]

WIll this be available in America? I saw the September bit, but I'm not clear ifthe US will get it then.

[BradyKiller]

I think this is probably the worst time to launch a new series - at least for me and my friends, our money together is tied up in 52, Civil War, OYL and its spin-offs - even if we wanted to try this book we'd have to cut something out of the budget.

The perfect scenario for these guys to launch would be to let the first few issues out for free on their website and build the buzz...then come out with them when the Big 2 dust has settled.

But either way, fans want to read good comics - if this is good comics then it will survive no matter what.

[KenButler3]

Originally Posted by BradyKiller

I think this is probably the worst time to launch a new series - at least for me and my friends, our money together is tied up in 52, Civil War, OYL and its spin-offs - even if we wanted to try this book we'd have to cut something out of the budget.

The perfect scenario for these guys to launch would be to let the first few issues out for free on their website and build the buzz...then come out with them when the Big 2 dust has settled.

But either way, fans want to read good comics - if this is good comics then it will survive no matter what.

Where do you get that? Plenty of good comics have been canceled.

I do wish Mr. Al Mutawa luck with this though.

[innocentboy]

interesting ...

hoping this is done right, and done good.

[Mister]

deleted by me for this place negative tool campaign against Superman Returns

[Sharcque]

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).

Diamond better get off their butts!

[Edward J Cunningham]

Originally Posted by Naif Al-Mutawa

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.

Although there is a tremendous benefit to fluency in English, Arab-speaking peoples should not be forced to learn English or other foreign languages to read important literature. The 99 is a step in the right direction, as is the Library of Alexandria. I wish Naif success in his efforts, and I intend to look for his comic book when it gets published later this year...

Eddie Cunningham

[Erik K]

Originally Posted by Jigokuman

Euh... WHY?

I guess that would be why you'd need to read the series. With proper storytelling, the question will be answered. Makes as much sense on its face as the stuff in the Da Vinci Code (perhaps more).

[Hamadah]

I've met Dr. Naif, and he truly is a smart man. He's actually doing something proactive with this situation we have here, while everyone else either bitches or falls into their assigned roles in society. I'll have to read the comic to see how well it turns out, but no matter how bad it is, I'm still going to think that it's a step that should've been taken here a very long time ago. All the luck to Teshkeel.

[Hamadah]

Wow. I was so happy when I saw this interview on here. I've met Dr. Naif, and he truly is a smart man, and it's good to see someone over here being proactive about the state of the region. While the premise for the comic does seem interesting, I don't know whow much can be accomplished in terms of character development with three characters appearing every issue. Despite the fact that it might not be the next Watchmen, I seriously believe it is a very big step forward, and wish Dr. Naif all the best. Now for an Arab version of Vertigo, so we can tackle some of the more seedy undercurrents of Arab and Muslim society.