Zabiha News

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Submitted by Zabiha News: Kuwaiti born psychologist, Dr. Naif Al Mutawa, has launched his ciritically acclalimed comic series book The 99.

“Al-Mutawa spent ten years working as a clinical psychologist at a Bellevue Hospital program for former political prisoners and victims of torture, among them Iraqi prisoners of the Gulf War and Kuwaitis who had been tortured by Saddam Hussein. “It got me thinking about what a hero is and what a hero does,” Al-Mutawa said in an interview with MediaGlobal.

The 99‘s story is distinctly its own. While Al-Mutawa worked with victims of the Gulf War invasion of Iraq, his comic begins with the pivotal moment of another invasion: the 1258 Mongol invasion of Baghdad.

“During the invasion, all the books from the Bait al-Hikma library, which was the biggest library in the city, were thrown into the Tigris River, which turned black with the ink,” Al-Mutawa explained. “Any school kid in the Middle East knows that story because it’s not my story – it’s history. What I did was rewrite history to say that the real reason for the invasion of Baghdad was to destroy the library – that that was their main intent.”

But in Al-Mutawa’s version of history, the knowledge of the library is not lost. A handful of librarians manage to escape the onslaught and magically condense the texts of the library into 99 stones.

The Bait al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) was unrivaled in the scope of its scholarship, housing texts on astrology, agriculture, medicine, chemistry, and philosophy. Scholars translated vast numbers of foreign texts into both Persian and Arabic. “The library was not just Islamic books – they were Jewish books, Islamic books, Christian books, Greek philosophers,” Al-Mutawa explained. “The power in those stones is not coming from Islam but from all ideas.”

Over the years, the caretakers of the stones diverge and wind up dispersed across the far corners of the world. The stones become lost, traverse continents and oceans, and make tumultuous odysseys of their own. Fast-forward a few centuries to 2008, and all the 99 stones have found their way into the hands of Al-Mutawa’s 99 heroes.

Recently, the comic book has gained licensing agreements in the United States, Japan, India, France, Malaysia, and Indonesia, among others. “The big news that’s coming up soon is that next year we’ll be able to announce who our animation partner will be,” Al-Mutawa said. “Right now, we can say it’s a very big global player that’s going to be co-producing with us.”