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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 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 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'd 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?"
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
Quran attributes to God, such as "The Powerful" and
"The Loving."
While Teshkeel has yet to turn a profit,
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.
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.
Hundreds of years later, the 99 stones are
found in different corners of the world by heroes who come
from 99 different countries, including the United States,
Saudi Arabia,
Portugal,
Hungary
and Indonesia.
Jabbar, the Saudi hero, is a
Hulk-like
figure whose name means "The Powerful." The
American hero,
Darr, or "The Afflicter," is a young man paralyzed from the
waist down when a drunk driver crashed into his car, killing
his family. His power is to take away or inflict pain.
While al-Mutawa used Islam as the basis
for his comics, none of the heroes prays or reads the Quran.
There is no mention of religion, and the characters are
roughly divided between men and women — one of the main
figures is Noora, an 18-year-old woman — and only a few of
the women in the comics wear the Islamic headscarf.
Such moves were calculated, said
al-Mutawa.
"Our (Islamic) story has become (more)
about what not to do, than about what to do," he said. "I
wanted to ... go back to the same sources others have pulled
out a lot of negative ideas from, and pull out positive,
tolerant, multicultural, accepting ideas.
"I'm not trying to sell religion here. I'm
trying to sell the idea that at the values level, we're all
the same."
The message has resounded in the
Muslim world
and beyond. About 1 million of the comics are distributed
monthly in several languages. The first of six theme parks
built around "The 99" is to open in Kuwait later this year,
and the superhero characters will appear on water bottles
under a deal signed with Nestle SA and at an Arab arts
festival next month at Washington's Kennedy Center.
While his comic books are broadening their
reach, the computer games developed by
Egypt's
Good News Group also have a potential for a widespread
audience.
Across
Cairo,
small storefronts and apartments are converted into video
game salons, where an hour in front of an LCD TV hooked to a
Playstation 2
console costs $1 to $5 an hour, doing brisk business
day and night.
"What else is there to do?" 22-year-old
Mustafa Abdel-Rahman said when asked why he was playing a
soccer video game at 3 p.m. on a weekday. "I've put in
applications, but still haven't found work."
Youths like Abdel-Rahman can be found in
large numbers in much of the
Middle East
where sluggish economies do not provide nearly enough jobs
to keep up with fast-growing populations. The situation
provides a healthy market for the Good News Group's video
games, said Ayman Shoukry, the company's managing director.
In Egypt alone, a country of about 78
million, "there are 40 million mobiles," said Shoukry,
referring to cell phones. "We don't have 40 million (other
types of) devices anywhere in Egypt. Not 40 million TVs, not
40 million washing machines."
Shoukry declined to reveal any revenue
figures from the games, saying only that they had registered
"hundreds of thousands of downloads."
Al-Mutawa, also the author of a
prize-winning children's book, said part of the motivation
for his comics was to introduce Arab youths who have grown
up in a world dominated by the West to heroic characters
similar to those from the Arabs' glorious history.
"I really think that we (Arabs) limit
ourselves with this catastrophic thinking that the world is
controlled by others and there is nothing we can do," said
al-Mutawa. "I think this is rubbish."
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