ABSTRACT

Responding to the question on the motivation behind The 99 – a comic book series (2006-present) about Muslim superheroes, and hailed by Forbes as one of the ‘top twenty trends sweeping the globe’ – Naif Al-Mutawa states that shortly after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, he decided to take Islam back from those who were holding it hostage, ‘the answer was staring me in the face. It was as simple and as difficult, as the multiplication of 9 by 11: 99’.1 Just as a combination of the same numbers can evoke either hatred or love, Al-Mutawa takes the Qur’an from which others sought violent messages, and effortlessly gleans messages of peace by basing his superheroes on the Qur’anic concept of the 99 names of Allah, ‘I would give my heroes a Trojan horse in the form of the 99. Islam was my Helen and I wanted her back’ (Sharma 2010). In his engagement to wrest Islam from those who had hijacked it, and forever painted Muslims as violent and hateful, the Columbia-educated psychologist from Kuwait created a comic book – a Trojan horse – of illustrations of the 99 names of Allah in the Qur’an.