Superheroes rescue Arab culture

CAIRO

Abu Essam’s footsteps echo loudly as he walks through the narrow alleys of Damascus’ old city. Around him in 1930s Syria, tall stone buildings block the scorching sun.

Cautiously, he walks on. Around the next corner he could find the key to the gate to free prisoners captured by Syria’s colonial ruler, France. Or he could face a shot from a French soldier’s rifle. As he turns the corner, a shot rings out - but it is the soldier who is dead.

This is not Syria of 75 years ago, however. It is a rolling, 3-D video game on Wael El-Zanaty’s cell phone, and his thumb is a blur of motion as he navigates the alleys and fires at soldiers.

“The best thing about this game is that this is something that Arabs can relate to,” said Mr. El-Zanaty, the technical director for Egypt’s Good News Group, which developed the game “Bab el-Hara” based on a hit television series that airs during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

“It’s about part of [Arab] history - the resistance to the French occupation.”

From video games like “Bab el-Hara” to a Kuwaiti entrepreneur’s comic book empire featuring Muslim superheroes, the Arab world’s private sector is leading a push to provide Muslim and Arab youth with homegrown heroes, something sorely needed as a bulwark against the trend toward radical Islam throughout the Middle East.

Clearly, heroes in games or comics won’t offset all the problems that stoke radicalism - anger at corrupt Arab regimes and at Israel over its treatment of Palestinians - but Mr. El-Zanaty said he hoped these pop culture characters could give young people a sense of hope and a positive image of themselves as Arabs.

“We wanted something that reflected our culture … developed with an Arab perspective,” he said.

In Kuwait, Naif al-Mutawa had a similar vision. The Teshkeel Media Group founder, a psychologist, drew some inspiration for his comic book empire from treating Iraqi soldiers suffering trauma after the first Gulf War in 1990. Some of these men told him they had been raised to view Saddam Hussein as an Arab hero.

“What kind of message are we sending to our children about what a hero is, and what a hero does?” Mr. al-Mutawa asked, seated in his Kuwait City office.

His “The 99” - as the comic book series is called - draws from the heyday of Muslim civilization. Each hero is named after one of the 99 qualities the Koran attributes to God, such as “the Powerful” and “the Loving.”

While Teshkeel Media Group has yet to turn a profit, Mr. al-Mutawa has raised about $23 million from investors, including a Bahrain Islamic Bank. The company also recently signed a multimillion-dollar deal with Dutch media giant Endemol - behind hit shows like “Big Brother”and “Power Rangers” - to animate “The 99” for global distribution.

Mr. al-Mutawa’s stories are based on a pivotal moment in Islamic history: the 1258 Mongol invasion of Baghdad that left the city in ruins and led to the dumping of books from its famed library into the Tigris River, with the ink by legend turning its waters black.

In his stories, some librarians escape and are able to place special stones in the river to suck up wisdom otherwise lost.

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