The president should confront Saudi leaders over the ludicrous fatwa against ‘The 99,’ a ground-breaking Muslim superhero comic.
President Obama did not go to Saudi Arabia this Friday to talk about comic books, but he should, because a new fatwa against them—specifically those showing right-thinking Muslim superheroes—underscores just how hard it is to sustain a positive relationship with Riyadh.

 Obama himself once singled out the remarkable comic book series in question, called The 99, for special praise. The superheroes have the attributes associated with the 99 names of Allah—words like “strength” and “light” and “wisdom”—and these characters team up to fight evil. Kuwaiti psychologist Naif al-Mutawa created them after the 9/11 attacks because he wanted Muslim children, including his own, to have Muslim heroes who were not suicide bombers and jihadists. Since then the comics have been the subject of a PBS documentary, and they’ve inspired the creation of Muslim heroes in mainstream American comics.

 “His comic books have captured the imaginations of so many young people with superheroes who embody the teachings and tolerance of Islam,” Obama told a group of young entrepreneurs in 2010. Obama alluded to his own 2009 speech in Cairo reaching out to the Muslim world to build a better future for all. After that, said the president, al-Mutawa “had a similar idea, so in his comic books Superman and Batman reach out to their Muslim counterparts,” the president said as the audience laughed warmly, “and I hear they are making progress, too.”

 But now it appears that that sort of progress, those sorts of liberal forward-looking ideas, are being suppressed once again in Saudi Arabia, where the grand mufti and his council recently issued a fatwa calling the comics and the television show based on them “evil work that needs to be shunned.”
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