The Power of Media

A while back we wrote about the Muslim-inspired comic series “The 99” by Dr. Naif al-Mutawa.

It’s a really interesting way of using a popular medium to speak about real issues in a way that doesn’t feel heavy-handed.

Eboo Patel has also written about Naif’s venture and this passage in particular stands out:

“The fact that even Muslims were starting to believe that Islam was ugly was brought home to Naif in a lecture that he gave to students in Kuwait. He handed out two stories of religious extremism from the New York Times, blanking out the names of the religions and the places. One was a story of a group of thugs who violently shut down Valentine’s Day festivities, the other a story of a religious community oppressing its own women.

“Who did these ugly acts?” Naif asked. All of the students agreed the perpetrators must be Muslim. There was some disagreement over whether the acts took place in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan.

The actual communities were a Hindu group in India and a Jewish group in New York, respectively. But Naif was astonished. So deep was the belief that Islam violently destroys fun and oppresses women in these young people’s minds that when they saw such ugliness, the image of the perpetrator was Muslim.”

Read the rest of his article on the Huffington Post.