Singled out by President Obama as an unusual and important entrepreneur, Mutawa of Kuwait has retreated to his practice as a psychologist in the face of multliple threats to his life.
Seven years after Mutawa first launched his comic book series based on the 99 attributes of Allah, he’s facing a sudden onslaught of death threats, fatwas and lawsuits. His US distributor, meanwhile, continues to sit on a TV deal, in part because of pressure from conservative bloggers who object to any positive description of Islam.
Mutawa says his cartooning days are behind him and he’s focused on treating patients at his private clinic and teaching at Kuwait University’s faculty of medicine. Yet, he’s drawn back again and again into the fray over Islam and what it represents, a bespectacled superhero of sorts against intolerance.
“I finally went in to answer the charges of being a heretic,” Mutawa said nonchalantly about his visit to a Kuwaiti police station earlier this month. “Leading up to it, there’s been a whole series of death threats.”
Mutawa is facing a lawsuit by a self-proclaimed defender of the Sunni faith as well as a recent fatwa from the Grand muti of Saudi Arabia, both of whom have attacked “THE 99” for allegedly disparaging Islam — even though both the Saudi and Kuwaiti governments gave their blessing for the project years ago.
“I went there with my lawyer and when I was asked the question at the police station, I just burst out laughing,” Mutawa said. “It’s just so ludicrous what’s happening. I’ve been giving Islam a good name for over 10 years. They keep honoring me from here, and then they sue me from here — it’s like they don’t know what to do with me.”
More serious are reports that the Islamic State has called for his head on Twitter. But Mutawa doesn’t seem overly concerned about that either, despite the group’s grim record.
“It could be a 13-year-old girl in her closet,” Mutawa shrugs. “The cybercrimes unit in Kuwait … has said that these threats on Twitter have come from outside Kuwait. And Twitter has killed the hashtags, which took a couple of months of me going directly to talk to them and saying: ‘Hey, there’s a hashtag #whowillkillNaif. Not cool’.”
It’s not just at home that his work has sometimes gotten a cool reception. Despite the worldwide accolades that greeted “THE 99” when it first came out, The Hub — a network owned by the Discovery Channel and toy-maker Hasbro — never delivered on its plans to air the show, although two seasons did make it onto Netflix.
Mutawa blames pressure from a handful of conservative bloggers, whose campaign against the project took off after US President Obama praised him as “perhaps the most innovative” entrepreneur in the audience at his 2010 Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship.
