Word: islamics
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...comic-book series based on characters that each personify one of the 99 qualities that the Koran attributes to God, met early resistance in places like Saudi Arabia. Local authorities worried that the series might mock Islam. But after Mutawa guaranteed that he would remain respectful of religion and won backing from a major Islamic bank, the series took off around the Gulf. Initially given away for free with Arabic versions of Marvel comics (the license for which Mutawa owns in the region), The 99 is now a stand-alone success, with some 500,000 copies given away and sold...
While the 99 represent Allah's myriad attributes - everything from wisdom to faithfulness - there is no overt mention of religion in the stories. "When you read through the books, there is no mention of Islam, Allah or the Koran," says Mutawa. "I used an Islamic archetype, but the actual stories don't show any Islam, because they are based on values that we all share." Even Superman, Batman and Spider-Man, he says, "are based on religious archetypes. Like the prophets from the Bible, they are all orphans. Superman left his parents on the planet Krypton, and Batman sees...
...kind of release in the U.S., and his only impact on Hollywood movies was that he made a star of a young Egyptian named Omar Sharif. But at film festivals, Chahine was for decades the prime, often the only, representative of an entire continent, Africa, and a world religion, Islam--though his family was Christian and his heritage Lebanese and Greek. He was both a nationalist and an internationalist, both an art-house auteur and a director of movies that were popular from Morocco to Indonesia...
...Turkey's militant secularism dates back to the 1920s, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk created a modern nation-state on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Determined that Turkey's future lay with the West and that modernization was its priority, Ataturk shut down religious schools, abolished the caliphate - Islam's equivalent to the papacy - changed the country's alphabet from Arabic to Roman script and enshrined the separation of mosque and state as a founding principle...
...Still, political Islam never really went away. The AKP is the latest in a long line of faith-based parties banned by the courts, only to reemerge in a new guise on the back of a solid base of popular support. Unlike its predecessors, the AKP has steered clear of inflammatory Islamist rhetoric, pursued aggressively liberal economic policies and advocated for Turkey's joining the European Union...