The 2017 film Bushwick begins like a lot of zombie flicks.

An unsuspecting couple is walking through a subway station in the working-class neighborhood of Bushwick in Brooklyn. The station is eerily empty. They hear gunfire outside. The boyfriend goes out to investigate, and you know from the conventions of a zombie film that this is a very bad idea. No need for a spoiler alert: he dies.

The girlfriend ventures out to find the residents of Bushwick fighting an invading horde.

But it’s not a horde of zombies, even though they are committed to the same relentless violence. The invasion force turns out to be a right-wing paramilitary bent on securing the secession of Texas and most of the South from the United States.

Why are they in Brooklyn? That’s not entirely clear. The grunts, all dressed in identical black riot gear, are just following orders. They didn’t expect resistance, but the diverse community has banded together, African-Americans and Orthodox Jews and bearded craft beer connoisseurs. So, like zombies, the militia members are killing every resident they encounter.

Militia violence. Rejection of the federal government. Right-wing crazies promoting a civil war. Bushwick was made at a time when Hillary Clinton looked like she’d be the next president and right-wing resistance inevitable.

Instead, the Electoral College tilted toward Donald Trump. As the new head of the federal government, Trump preempted the worst-case scenario. His more extreme followers wouldn’t weaponize their grievances as long as one of their own was “running” the country.

At the same time, Trump implicitly promised to maintain this tenuous status quo as long as he won reelection. In the first presidential debate, Trump told the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group, to “stand back and stand by.” The extremists waited, locked and loaded.

A landslide — against Trump and against his Republican Party enablers — might have put this worst-case scenario to rest. Instead, with Trump refusing to concede the election and the Republican Party celebrating its congressional and state house victories, the country is now inching ever closer to the Bushwick plotline.

Accelerationists like the Boogaloo Bois, who want to bring down the existing system through a violent race war, are chomping at the bit. A raging pandemic has separated Americans into the cautiously masked and the defiantly maskless, further undermining what remains of the country’s cohesion.

As for zombies, they have rampaged across American popular culture at least since Night of the Living Dead hit movie theaters in 1968. They have now lurched off the page and out of the multiplex into real life. For how else would you describe the millions of Americans who deny the effects of a disease that has killed nearly 250,000 people and the results of a free-and-fair election that repudiated Donald Trump?

Jeez, something must have eaten their brains.

The Disease Spreads

In 2016, the virtual equivalent of zombies — bots operating through social media and the comment sections of websites — intervened in the presidential election. In 2020, those bots were less influential. But who needs virtual zombies when Americans themselves have become so willing to spread disinformation?

The Russian intention back in 2016 wasn’t so much to get Trump elected. No one, including Trump himself, thought there was much chance of that. Rather, the disinformation campaign sowed doubt about the political system more generally.

What started out as marginal hobbyhorses became widespread delusions. Don’t trust the candidates, the media, the NGOs. A conspiracy lurks behind the façade of normalcy. The Democrats are actually pedophiles (the Pizzagate conspiracy), the financiers are actually Nazis (the Soros conspiracy), and government officials are part of a deep-state resistance to Trump’s agenda (the Fauci conspiracy, among others).

And then there’s the One Conspiracy that Rules Them All.

The QAnon notion that all the world’s a Satanic child-trafficking ring — Pizzagate raised to the nth degree — is so absurd on the face of it that no reasonable person could possibly entertain it. But plenty of people have embraced equally wacky theories. L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics has been a bestseller for decades, and all too many Americans were willing to believe that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Of course, it’s a lot easier to deny the existence of something if it remains far away in time or space. Those who live far from the ocean can blithely refute the evidence of the rising waters. That’s not so easy when those waters have reclaimed your land and your house tumbles into the sea.

Misinformation about COVID-19 — that masks are not necessary, vaccines should be avoided, or herd immunity is a viable strategy — has been lethal. That denialism should have disappeared as COVID-19 infection rates began to spread to every corner of the United States before the election. The increasing proximity of the threat should have motivated Americans to come together as one to fight the virus.

At the very least, fear should have kept people at home instead of venturing out to the potential super-spreader events that President Trump was sponsoring as campaign rallies before the election.

But no. Thousands still showed up to what Democrats should have called Trump’s “death rallies.” Even more unbelievably, Trump went on to defeat Biden in those parts of the country hardest hit by the virus. According to the Associated Press, “in 376 counties with the highest number of new cases per capita, the overwhelming majority — 93 percent of those counties — went for Trump, a rate above other less severely hit areas.” Even in hard-hit areas that ultimately voted for Biden, Trump often improved his showing from 2016, NPR reports.

Well, zombies don’t know that they’re zombies. One day they’re ordering BLTs and the next they’re eating their next-door neighbor. They’re completely unaware of how the abnormal has become normal.

The “Stolen” Election

A coup requires at least some public support. The Thai military could count on the Yellow Shirts. The Egyptian military relied on those fearful of the religious leanings of the Muslim Brotherhood. Pinochet courted the rich and middle class.

Where public support is lacking, coups often wither. That’s what happened in the Soviet Union in 1991. This week in Peru, the would-be president who forced the resignation of anti-corruption campaigner Martín Vizcarra stepped down after only a week in office, as protests continued to roil the country and the police killed two demonstrators.

Trump has the backing of millions of Americans who have bought into his allegations of a “stolen” election. As importantly, only a minority of Republican Party grandees has bowed to the inevitable by acknowledging Biden’s victory. That includes a mere four Republican Senators (Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse, Mitt Romney, and Susan Collins).

A number of Republican candidates in this month’s election, including those who were beaten by large margins, are also refusing to concede. Errol Webber, who lost his bid to unseat Karen Bass in a California congressional seat by an astounding 72 percent, now claims election fraud and won’t back down. He’s not alone in his delusions.

The question is: how far will Trump and the Republican leadership go?

It’s not likely that the Pentagon would support a coup, even after the removal of Mark Esper. The militia movement is armed and dangerous, but it’s not even close to being as organized as in the Bushwick scenario. The “Million MAGA March” fell short of its goal by 980,000 people or so.

Trump just doesn’t have the numbers — not the votes to reverse the election results in a recount, not the judges to overturn the decision through a legal strategy, not the support in state legislatures to replace the Electoral College delegates, and not the people on the street for a popular uprising.

That doesn’t mean he can’t still do damage. Just this week, he announced that the administration would sell new leases to oil and gas companies to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. He fired the Homeland Security official who declared the election secure, and narrowly failed to install wacko Judy Shelton on the Federal Reserve board. And he came close to starting a war with Iran just to destroy any last chance of salvaging the Obama-era nuclear deal. His advisors reportedly persuaded him that it would be unwise to bomb the country’s nuclear facilities.

Meanwhile, as I explain in a new article at TomDispatch, not only is Trump throwing sand in the wheels of transition, the Republicans are gearing up to block just about everything the Biden administration will try to do from January on. The Republicans have transformed themselves into a zombie party that relies on a narrow base of zombie support. The party effectively died as a viable political force — absent gerrymandering and voter suppression — before Trump brought it back from the dead.

In films, zombification is a one-way street. Once you start twitching and slavering, there’s no going back. Let’s hope that the analogy doesn’t hold in American politics.

De-Trumpification

In 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev gave a secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress entitled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.” Today, the speech seems rather boring, full of jargon and acrobatic attempts to separate Stalin’s crimes from the Soviet system. But at the time, it shocked the Communist Party zombies who’d hitherto been unaware (or pretended not to know) of Stalin’s crimes.

Most of those who were well acquainted with Stalin’s crimes were already dead of famine, war, or murderous purges. That’s the thing about plagues: by the time you’re finally convinced of their lethality, you’re on your deathbed. For some, even death is not enough. Compare the Stalinists who proclaimed love for their leader as they were being executed with the COVID-19 patients who continued to deny the disease with their dying breaths.

The Party speech was the first major step in the de-Stalinization campaign that Khrushchev waged into the 1960s. The campaign produced some liberalization of Soviet society, but the Thaw came to an end in a Brezhnev backlash that lasted effectively until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 (and finally published Khrushchev’s 1956 speech for all to read).

Unfortunately, the de-Stalinization that Khrushchev started in 1956 didn’t completely discredit the Soviet dictator. Indeed, according to recent polls, an astounding 70 percent of Russians approve of Stalin’s role in Soviet history.

Trump’s personality cult exerts a similar effect. His adherents are incapable of seeing that the man’s evil extends far beyond his intemperate tweets. No speech by Joe Biden is going to make any difference. Not even denunciations by former Trumpers — Michael Cohen, John Bolton, John Kelly — have done much of anything. Trump’s support only grew from 2016 to 2020.

So, what will it take to avoid the Stalin scenario? In an article about three historical parallels — Reconstruction, de-Nazification, and de-Baathification — I conclude that a mere speech won’t do the trick.

Because Trumpism is a cancer on the body politic, the treatment will require radical interventions, including the transformation of the Republican Party, a purge of Trumpists from government, and the indictment of the president and his top cronies as a criminal enterprise. To avoid a second Civil War, however, a second American Revolution would need to address the root causes of Trumpism, especially political corruption, deep-seated racism, and extreme economic inequality.

In this way, the leader can be properly stigmatized while the followers can be progressively de-zombified.

One thing is for certain: If the Biden administration doesn’t take firm and decisive action against the illegalities of the Trump team, if Biden doesn’t address the root causes of the zombification of half the electorate, the new president will be eaten alive.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Featured photo: h/t PXHere .

A teenager held her phone steady enough
to capture the final moments of George Perry Floyd’s life as he apparently suffocated under the weight of a Minneapolis police officer’s knee on his neck. The video went viral.

What happened next has played out time and again in American cities after high-profile cases of alleged police brutality.

Vigils and protests were organized in Minneapolis and around the United States to demand police accountability. But while investigators and officials called for patience, unrest boiled over. News reports soon carried images of property destruction and police in riot gear.

The general public’s opinions about protests and the social movements behind them are formed in large part by what they read or see in the media. This gives journalists a lot of power when it comes to driving the narrative of a demonstration.

They can emphasize the disruption protests cause or echo the dog whistles of politicians that label protesters as “thugs.”
But they can also remind the public that at the heart of the protests is the unjust killing of another black person. This would take the emphasis away from the destruction of the protests and toward the issues of police impunity and the effects of racism in its many forms.

The role journalists play can be indispensable if movements are to gain legitimacy and make progress. And that puts a lot of pressure on journalists to get things right.

My research has found that some protest movements have more trouble than others getting legitimacy. My co-author Summer Harlow and I have studied how local and metropolitan newspapers cover protests. We found that narratives about the Women’s March and anti-Trump protests gave voice to protesters and significantly explored their grievances. On the other end of the spectrum, protests about anti-black racism and indigenous people’s rights received the least legitimizing coverage, with them more often seen as threatening and violent.

Forming the narrative

Decades ago, scholars James Hertog and Douglas McLeod identified how news coverage of protests contributes to the maintenance of the status quo, a phenomenon referred to as “the protest paradigm.” They held that media narratives tend to emphasize the drama, inconvenience and disruption of protests rather than the demands, grievances and agendas of protesters. These narratives trivialize protests and ultimately dent public support.

Here’s how this theoretically plays out today:

Journalists pay little attention to protests that aren’t dramatic or unconventional.

Knowing this, protesters find ways to capture media and public attention. They don pink “pussy” hats or kneel during the national anthem. They might even resort to violence and lawlessness. Now the protesters have the media’s attention, but what they cover is often superficial or delegitimizing, focusing on the tactics and disruption caused and excluding discussion on the substance of the social movement.

We wanted to explore if this classic theory fit coverage from 2017 – a year of large-scale protests accompanying the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency.

To do so, we analyzed the framing of protest reporting from newspapers in Texas. The state’s size and diversity made it a good proxy for the country at large.

In all, we identified 777 articles by searching for terms such as “protest,” “protester,” “Black Lives Matter” and “Women’s March.” This included reports written by journalists in 20 Texas newsrooms, such as the El Paso Times and the Houston Chronicle, as well as syndicated articles from sources like the Associated Press.

We looked at how articles framed the protests in the headline, opening sentence and story structure, and classified the reporting using four recognized frames of protest:

• Riot: Emphasizing disruptive behavior and the use or threat of violence.

• Confrontation: Describing protests as combative, focusing on arrests or “clashes” with police.

• Spectacle: Focusing on the apparel, signs or dramatic and emotional behavior of protesters.

• Debate: Substantially mentioning protester’s demands, agendas, goals and grievances.

We also kept an eye out for sourcing patterns to identify imbalances that often give more credence to authorities than protesters and advocates.

Overall, news coverage tended to trivialize protests by focusing most often on dramatic action. But some protests suffered more than others.

Reports focused on spectacle more often than substance. Much was made of what protesters were wearing, crowd sizes – large and small – celebrity involvement and flaring tempers.

The substance of some marches got more play than others. Around half of the reports on anti-Trump protests, immigration rallies, women’s rights demonstrations and environmental actions included substantial information about protesters’ grievances and demands.

In contrast, Dakota Pipeline and anti-black racism-related protests got legitimizing coverage less than 25% of the time and were more likely to be described as disruptive and confrontational.

In coverage of a St. Louis protest over the acquittal of a police officer who killed a black man, violence, arrest, unrest and disruption were the leading descriptors, while concern about police brutality and racial injustice was reduced to just a few mentions. Buried more than 10 paragraphs down was the broader context: “The recent St. Louis protests follow a pattern seen since the August 2014 killing of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson: the majority of demonstrators, though angry, are law-abiding.”

As a consequence of variances in coverage, Texas newspaper readers may form the perception that some protests are more legitimate than others. This contributes to what we call a “hierarchy of social struggle,” in which the voices of some advocacy groups are lifted over others.

Lurking bias

Journalists contribute to this hierarchy by adhering to industry norms that work against less-established protest movements. On tight deadlines, reporters may default to official sources for statements and data. This gives authorities more control of narrative framing. This practice especially becomes an issue for movements like Black Lives Matter that are countering the claims of police and other officials.

Implicit bias also lurks in such reporting. Lack of diversity has long plagued newsrooms.

In 2017, the proportion of white journalists at The Dallas Morning News and the Houston Chronicle was more than double the proportion of white people in each city.

Protests identify legitimate grievances in society and often tackle issues that affect people who lack the power to address them through other means. That’s why it is imperative that journalists do not resort to shallow framing narratives that deny significant and consistent space to air the afflicted’s concerns while also comforting the very comfortable status quo.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Jan. 16.

[Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.]

Danielle K. Kilgo, Assistant Professor of Journalism, Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Washington Post: “Protesters and residents reflect on a night of upheaval in Minneapolis”

“French grafitti artist ‘Combo’ got beaten for a graffiti of himself in Arabic clothes with the world ‘coexist’, with symbols of three different religions instead of some of the letters.”

RT: “Beaten over call for co-existence: French artist’s religious graffiti”

Many years ago, I was the volleyball counsellor at a summer camp in New England. It was 1990 and I was fit for five minutes. It seems there’s always an injury I can blame my (lack of) fitness on. That summer was no different.

Running into the lake, I slipped. My hands instinctively shielded my face from hitting the lake bottom and my elbows jerked back and got caught in the sand, sending my right shoulder out of its socket. I popped it back in. It was painful. I had to rest for a week before seeing a doctor. And then, on the way to the clinic, I had a terrible car accident that meant I completed my journey to the hospital in an ambulance. I’ve had my share of car accidents. Two of them were not my fault. This was one of those. It involved being shunted by a Mack truck while I was stationary at a traffic light.

At the hospital I was told that my shoulder had popped out again and that the boot of my car had been compressed to within inches of my head. I was lucky.

It was there I met an ambulance chaser, which was a first. I got his card. I got his pitch. I told him there and then not to bother: if the lorry driver who had written off my car had money, I reasoned, he would have had brakes too. I also told him I did not want to live my life by taking something away from someone else. I wanted to create rather than destroy. I did not want to be associated with a bottom feeder.

A few weeks later, a six-year-old boy sneaked up on me while I was brushing my teeth and said: “You don’t have a country … you don’t have a country …” A fellow counsellor who had roughly the same intellect as the young boy was hiding behind a tree. He had put the child up to it. It was surreal.

I called my father in Kuwait and he casually explained to me that Iraq’s invasion was a routine matter that would solve itself in a matter of days. It didn’t. The things fathers say.

Now, many years later, I have spent the summer recovering from another painful injury (giving me another excuse to explain away why I’m still not fit).

Last summer, as I was leaving my children’s summer camp in New England, I missed a step on an outdoor staircase and got my leg caught between a step and a tree root. I went in one direction and my leg in another. I broke my leg so badly my bones came out of my body for a breath of fresh air. My surgeon referred to my fracture as Humpty Dumpty. It took several surgeries and months of physical therapy to start to feel normal again.

While I recovered, another bottom feeder made his way into my life, this time forcefully. A man whose view of reality is narrow and violent, sued me for heresy and went around submitting false accusations to various institutions asking for a fatwa on my work with THE 99, a super-hero cartoon series I created based on the 99 attributes of God.

Sadly, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia and the ministry of Islamic affairs in Kuwait did not do their homework and issued fatwas condemning THE 99 based on false accusations and misstatements provided by this ambulance chaser. This is after THE 99 had been broadcast daily for two years all over the world.

The United Nations, the World Economic Forum, world leaders including president Barack Obama, the emir of Kuwait and many others endorsed my work for bridging cultures and tolerance.

In fact, THE 99 has been approved by the ministries of information in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and was funded by a Saudi Islamic Investment Bank with its own Sharia board.

This accusation opened up a Pandora’s box and led to an avalanche of extremists each trying to outdo one another. It led to fatwas and more recently death threats from Twitter accounts linked to ISIL and Al Qaeda.

You can imagine the call I had with my parents and my children when the front page of Kuwait’s leading daily newspaper quoted various death threats. Look on the bright side I told my parents. This shows the impact of THE 99.

My son, who is a summer camp counsellor this year, called me in a state of panic. His friends told him I was dead or that I was going to jail. I tried to allay his fears by telling him it was routine. The things fathers say.

But that is not the end of the story. The early 1990s witnessed Disney releasing their smash hit Aladdin. The opening lyrics of the song entitled Arabian Nights were: “Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place, where the caravan camels roam, where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face, it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.”

Having released it on the heels of Desert Storm, Disney thought they could get away with the lyrics. They couldn’t. Protests led to changing the lyrics on the video and DVD versions. I was among the protesters.

Last week I took my children to watch Aladdin the Musical on Broadway. And as I sat in the audience I couldn’t help wonder should those lyrics have been changed? Should I have protested against them? Isn’t someone trying to cut off my head because they don’t like the way I think?

As I write this I am considering going to Kuwait to answer charges of heresy. The ministry of information has turned a number of production companies over to the public prosecutor for violating the audio-visual media law.

May God bless Kuwait and may the forces of darkness not muffle innovation and creativity. And may the ministries start to understand that in the name of protecting our culture they are responsible for killing it by scaring off the content creators and the content investors.

Why would anyone invest in media content if the producers can be sent off to the public prosecutor’s office and potentially serve jail time. Isn’t it just easier to keep dubbing Turkish, Mexican and American dramas?

And if we keep doing that, aren’t we diluting our culture? And if we do, then whose fault is that? Perhaps the ministries were not set up to protect our culture after all.

_______
Naif Al-Mutawa is a Kuwait-born, U.S. educated psychologist who created “THE 99,” a comic book about a group of superheroes based on Islamic archetypes. See http://www.al-mutawa.com/

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Related video added by Juan Cole

IIP CONX: “Superheroes@State”

A. David Lewis

Muslims don’t present a problem for superhero comics. They present a solution.

A previous installment of “Comics & Dialogue” addressed an apparent awkwardness for Muslims as superhero characters. How could they fulfill the generic role of a typical superhero, while also being true to Islamic principles of heroism — the same principles, in fact, that divide American heroes from its superheroes?

As discussed previously, there are two sources for this clash between the concepts of heroism and superheroism, between hero and superhero.

First, superheroes save the world, but they don’t change it. Heroes, as in Joseph Campbell’s monomyth or “Hero’s Journey,” save the world and then change it. (see video explanation by Christopher Vogler below) Or, arguably, they save the world by changing it. Second, whereas superheroes may die a thousand deaths, heroes are mortal, risking real injury and permanent death through their noble actions.

We are accustomed to seeing American superheroes overcome death in a near-godly manner. My forthcoming book American Comics, Literary Theory, and Religion: The Superhero Afterlife details a myriad number of superheroes’ journeys into death and then back to life. In fact, I go so far as to suggest that virtual immortality — the ability to return from death itself — is becoming an almost expected element of the superhero genre.

While heroes can and do die, superheroes are able to overcome finality, always eventually rising again (in, admittedly, in a highly Christological fashion but also found in the Egyptian, Greco-Roman, and Nordic systems, to name a few).

If Muslim characters are to remain both traditional heroes and, therefore, humbly human, they will be relegated to the status of merely mortal sub-superheroes alongside their immortal superhero colleagues — misfits in a genre that mis-fits.

Perhaps, though, Muslim superheroes offer a way to close the divide, to force the superhero to embrace his or her “hero” side. Does the superhero, in fact, need saving? And, if so, how?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his meditation on heroism, suggests a sort of triumph of the will that takes place in all heroes. Heroism “is a self-trust,” he states, “an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual’s character.” In particular, he calls out Thomas Carlyle’s own meditations on heroism — Carlyle had devoted a whole chapter to Muhammad — as being too focused on the Prophet’s being “manly and daring in character;” in effect overlooking that that manliness or daring might come from some core source or virtue. This central self-trust so empowers the hero that he even acts in what Emerson calls “contempt of some external good” — that external good often being his or her own self-preservation. (When one is a superhero, there can’t be any real need for self-preservation, because one’s life is not actually at stake.)

But take Carlyle’s daring or Emerson’s will and mesh it with writer Shahnaz Husain’s image of personal jihad (the aim of which is also to “oust disobedience”), and the genre could realign what it means to be a superhero.

A superhero, particularly a Muslim one, would have his or her influence on the community by maintaining a status quo that serves such obedience. This wouldn’t be the superhero’s automatic default back to a “normal” society; this would be the Muslim superhero maintaining a culture that is already on a steady, godly path — a society built on honored virtues.

So, rather than contrasting heroism with superheroism, it might be more comfortable and conducive to view them both in terms of shared virtues. Superheroes and heroes differ in significant ways, but their shared virtues are what might keep them aligned. And Muslim superheroes can embody those same virtues. Even if a superhero doesn’t change society like a hero would, they can instill or maintain certain virtues in society.

Which values, specifically? Well, in Islamic Legends: Histories of the Heroes, Saints and Prophets of Islam, Jan Knappert sketches Islamic heroism in terms of “twin virtues most prominently advocated by these tales[:] bravery in battle and honesty in one’s dealings with fellow men.” That is, bravery and honesty are the hallmark virtues of the Muslim hero. So, too, are they crucial in contemporary assessments of heroism anthropologically, reports Eranda Jayawickreme and Paul Di Stefano in their 2012 article How Can We Study Heroism? In their catalogue, “the strengths listed under courage”—namely “bravery and integrity”—“are most relevant for understanding heroic behavior.” They further qualify integrity as “speaking the truth as well as self-presenting in a genuine manner.”

Muslim Green Lantern Simon Baz does not exclusively trust in his superpower to see him through.

If Muslim superheroes can both represent themselves honestly — without any obfuscation of their submission to Allah— and authentically risk their lives in a way their fellow superheroes cannot, then they might succeed as both hero and superhero. They might outdo the current notion of a superhero in their willingness to risk death and surrender to an afterlife worthy of such bravery and honesty. They would force the superhero genre to stop making immortality a given.

What can one risk that is greater than his or her own life? Perhaps one’s faith. Perhaps one’s soul. Perhaps one’s community or ummah. By risking something of genuine value, the Muslim superhero can still demonstrate bravery in a genre that has reduced mortality to a pantomime. And, in doing so, this shared Islamic and traditional Western principle can help realign the genre —reintegrate it back with the Hero’s Journey rather than the ‘Superhero’s Never-Ending Odyssey. Ultimately, there is not just a place for the Muslim superhero with its adherence to heroic principles but, in fact, a need for the Muslim superhero: to save the superhero.

A. David Lewis, Ph.D. is the co-editor of Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels, co-author of “Some New Kind of Slaughter” from Archaia Entertainment, and a founding member of Sacred & Sequential, a collective of religious studies and comics studies scholars. He currently teaches at colleges throughout the Greater Boston area, including Northeastern University, Bentley University, and MCPHS University, and has previously lectured at Boston University, Tufts University, Merrimack College, and Georgetown University. He is a steering committee member for the American Academy of Religion’s “Death, Dying, and Beyond” Group as well as co-editor of the forthcoming Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age. You can follow him on Twitter @ADLewis. Continue to watch this space for his ISLAMiCommentary column “Comics & Dialogue: Islam in Graphic Novels.”

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This article was made possible by the Transcultural Islam Project, an initiative launched in 2011 by the Duke Islamic Studies Center — in partnership with the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations and the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies — aimed at deepening understanding of Islam and Muslim communities. See www.islamicommentary.org/about and www.tirnscholars.org/about for more information. The Transcultural Islam Project is funded by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Mirrored from IslamiCommentary

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Reuters: “Marvel Comics introduces its first Muslim teenage girl superhero”

Harvard confirms antique book is bound in human skin (via AFP)

Harvard University scientists have confirmed that a 19th century French treatise in its libraries is bound in human skin, Harvard University said this week, after a bevvy of scientific testing. Arsene Houssaye’s “Des destinees de l’ame” (On the destiny…

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related video

RT America: “Book bound in human skin found at Harvard library”

Ben Affleck Might Drive A Hybrid Batmobile (via Gas 2.0)

Ben Affleck is slated to be the next Batman, and the Batmobile could get a major overhaul too. A hybrid Batmobile? Even the Dark Knight is going green. Yesterday director Zack Snyder tweeted the above teaser picture of the next Batmobile, and later…

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Details on Batman and the new Batmobile

Seven years ago, THE 99 [super-hero comics] were granted approvals to Saudi Arabia. What began as a suspicious relationship, my not expecting approvals to begin with, and their suspicion of the subversive nature of the content we were at loggerheads. It turned out that the solution was simple. I had to first get approvals from a religious authority for my superheroes to fly in the Kingdom.

I was specifically skeptical about getting approvals in the beginning because when THE 99 was an abstract idea, I was worried I would be limited by the imagination of the person I spoke to. But by 2006, THE 99 was no longer an abstraction. It was as real as the air I breathed and I could get an opinion regarding my creation, then in comic book form. The most practical solution was to seek a round of financing from a Saudi owned Islamic Investment Bank.

The bank, Unicorn, was intrigued but the process wasn’t easy. We were scrutinized as to what was Islamic (to them) and what wasn’t. They had an illustrious Sharia board. This was a stamp of legitimacy. Media plays that are Sharia approved are few and far between. The space is coveted. The game is all about mindshare. He who gets the most adherents to his philosophy wins. And there are lots of philosophies within Islam, it’s just that some are not as well funded as others. We had to sell an asset at a loss due to its’ non-Sharia compliance. The asset in question was Cracked Magazine, and only a moron would argue that Cracked had value to Islam (or any civilization that existed outside of a boys locker room for that matter). So it came to pass that we were put under the scrutiny of a Sharia microscope and remained compliant thereafter.

The journey with THE 99 has been long and arduous, but, ultimately fulfilling and certainly impactful. Today, 11 years after THE 99 were born, we have completed our mission and created an internationally recognized award winning concept with close to 50 comic books worth of content (including a series where they work with Batman and Superman) and 52 half hour episodes (the prize number all producers seek to get to) of an animated series. Season 1, the first 26 episodes, have been airing on television in excess of 70 countries from the US to China and most places in between for over two years. Not only did we become the first media property from our region to go global, we were basing it on values that Muslims share with the rest of humanity to boot and competing with the negativity that all too often is used to reflect our culture. We were giving children alternative role models whose values were universal in nature yet rooted in Islam. We were making a difference. And, finally, the global media was taking notice and reporting on the good within Islam.

So you can imagine my surprise to wake up to a Fatwa from the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia himself along with the rest of the Higher Council of Clerics calling my work evil. I couldn’t believe it. Why? And more specifically, why now? Why 6 years after THE 99 has been selling in Saudi Arabia with full support and approvals from the Saudi Ministry of Information and two years after THE 99 started airing in Saudi Arabia on television, and ironically months since the last episode aired. Why would the Grand Mufti ban a show that was no longer airing?

One of the lessons my mother taught me was that your enemy is never the person that talks about you behind your back. Your enemy is the person who brings you that information. Context is key. And the intent of the message bearer is tantamount to how the information is spun. In this case my enemy and the Grand Mufti’s enemy is one. It is the person that purposefully took misleading information to him for him to give a Fatwa based on. It might surprise you that I actually agree with the contents of the Fatwa. It is Islam 101.

The question asked of the Mufti was couched in negatives and misstatements perhaps purposefully and maliciously, perhaps out of ignorance. For example, it was alleged that I had created 99 characters all of who had one of Allah’s divine attributes to the extent that Allah had them and they were going to get together to become a deity and that this would confuse children and take them away from the unity of God. If I had done that, it would indeed be blasphemous. But there are less than 40 members of THE 99 and in the first interview I gave about THE 99 in the New York Times in 2006, I specifically said that it’s doubtful we’d get close to 99 as some of the attributes are simply not amenable. However, some of the attributes are human if not in their absolute form (like being generous or being strong). And some are human in abstraction. It was also said that MBC3 was still airing the show. This is an untruth as they stopped airing months ago due to the cyclical nature of programing. Lastly they said there was music. Of that I am guilty. I like music. A lot. So of the three parts in the question posed to the Grand Mufti the only truth was that there was music.

What is being attributed to THE 99, by the person who asked for the advice of the clerics, is simply untrue. All anyone would have to do is watch the show or read the comics to see that. But people have been judging books by their covers long before ink was created. It is truly disappointing that after years of hard work, THE 99 was judged as an abstraction, as an idea, rather that as a body of work that has made global impact. But I understand that that is the nature of the beast. When asking for a Fatwa, the seeker asks a question, and the clerics answer based on the wording of that question.

So now it is my turn to seek a Fatwa from the higher council of clerics. And here are my questions.

Your Eminences, what is your ruling on a concept that has created positive role models for children all over the world, using Islam as a base for its storytelling? What is your ruling on a concept that is based on values that are human manifestations of less than 40 of God’s 99 attributes like generosity, and mercy and others that human beings can have in lower doses and that good citizens of the world should aspire to? What is your ruling on an Islam inspired series that has gained favor in the living rooms of millions of children from China to the United States? What is your ruling on a series that has inspired major media companies to launch their own Muslim Superheroes, instead of the Muslim Super Villains that was so often the case before THE 99? What is your ruling on a series that has changed the face of how Islam is represented in global media by highlighting the tolerant, friendly sides of the faith and making (some) people more accepting of Islam?

Prophet Mohammed PBUH states in a hadith that all work is judged by its intent. My intent has been clear and consistent and public since I started. But there have always been those that have been suspicious of me. That is their right. Having a healthy dose of doubt is needed in life. But like everything else in life, moderation is important. To those that doubt the intent of THE 99 and choose to do so without watching the series or reading a comic book I leave with you with these words from the Holy Quran “Oh you who believe! Avoid most of suspicion, for surely suspicion in some cases is a sin.”

May God reward us all based upon our intentions.
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Naif Al-Mutawa is a Kuwait-born, U.S. educated psychologist who created “THE 99,” a comic book about a group of superheroes based on Islamic archetypes.

A version of this article was published in The National on Sunday, April 26 2014
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Some Gaza youth did a cover of Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” to show a different side of the 1.7 million people in the Gaza Strip:

#Happy (#Gaza version) – #Pharrell Williams