What does Arab comics culture look like?
Scholars and artists recently met at Brown University for an afternoon symposium about “Arab Comics: 90 Years of Popular Visual Culture”.
Nadim Damluji said that when he first began investigating Arabic comics, he saw two distinct periods in production: An early period where distinctly Arab comics were being produced and a shift in the 1960s to translated works. But he still said that we “can’t escape the fact that American comics may have pre-empted a wholly Arab form of comics.”
Lina Ghaibeh lectured on the path from nationalist propaganda in state-sponsored comics to religious propaganda in privately-sponsored comics by bother Christian and Muslim groups. Through the middle of the twentieth century, Arabic comics developed an immense popularity. Aware of that,Ghaibeh said, “Syria went as far as banning all comics other than their own comic, Osama.” Other comics had to be smuggled in from Lebanon.
Many Arab dictators also had comics created to celebrate their rule, including the fictionalized Saddam story at right. Religious organizations saw the utility of comics and also began to sponsor their own.
Another thread in the discussion was whether an Arab comic written in French or English was still an Arab comic. In the end, there was no singular representation of what it meant to be an Arab comic, although hope that the Internet has allowed Arab comic artists to “see each other,” and possibly to move forward on different, organic comics styles.
Source: Your Middle East
Yemen Bombing: It's not ISIL and it's not Sunni-Shiite Conflict
The massive twin bombings at mosques in the capital that shook Yemen on Friday, killing over 100 and wounding many more, were immediately claimed by Daesh (ISIS, ISIL). Since the mosques were largely attended by members of the Houthi movement in Zaidi, Shiite Islam and Daesh is ultra-Sunni, the bombings also suggest Sunni-Shiite conflict of the sort that has characterized Iraq’s recent sectarian violence.
But Daesh doesn’t in fact have a toehold in Yemen, and it clearly is not only franchising itself to Muslim radicals but also making grandiose claims to be behind everything any of them does.
“When religion is deployed for political purposes and there is no separation of religion and state, religion acts like a political movement and throws up political opposition. Where politics is violent, so is religious politics. Countries were there is a separation of religion and state have much less religious violence, because there is no point in deploying religion for political purposes where religion is barred from attaining them,” says Juan Cole.
Source: Informed Comment
The spy that fooled the Assad regime
In a highly successful double-cross, a senior army officer from the Assad regime secretly gave Western-backed rebels vital intelligence that led to critical losses for government forces in southern Syria, Phil Sands and Suha Maayeh report.
The defeat at Tal Al Harra, an electronic warfare station 50 kilometres south of Damascus, sent president Bashar Al Assad’s mukhabarat, or secret police, on a hunt for the source of the leaks and resulted in the killing of dozens of military personnel wrongly accused of treason.
The fog of conspiracy unleashed by the secret defection of General Mahmoud Abu Araj also helped spread discord between regime forces and their Iranian allies – and may have inadvertently played a role in the undoing of one of the Middle East’s most infamous intelligence chiefs, Syria’s Rustom Ghazalah.
Source: The National
