Suleiman Bakhit - سليمان بخيت - Superheroes Against Extremism

In this speech at the 2014 Oslo Freedom Forum, Jordanian comic book artist Suleiman Bakhit explores the power of narrative in the struggle against extremism, discrimination, and misogyny. Against the backdrop of his art, Bakhit explains how he launched a comic book company as a way to spread tolerance, empower women, and counter extremist narratives by providing Arab youth with positive role models.

Bakhit creates Middle Eastern stories that are an alternative to terrorist ideologies. His field research has included surveys of children in economically poor neighbourhoods in and around the Jordanian capital of Amman and in Syrian refugee camps. All this, he says, has given him an insight into what fuels terrorism and an undertanding of the propaganda strategies of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL), and how they differ from those pioneered by Al Qaeda. Where Osama bin Laden once lectured in didactic videos, ISIS has young jihadists speaking to potential recruits in their native tongues, whether English, French or Arabic, and connecting on an emotional level. They "preach terrorism as a heroic journey," Bakhit said in an interview with The New York Times. "The biggest threat in the Middle East is terrorism disguised as heroism....The greatest heroic journey in our culture is the journey of the Prophet Muhammad, who left his village to go meditate in a cave in the middle of the desert. He was meditating, and there the archangel came down and gave him the message of Islam. He came out of that cave transformed with a new vision of Islam and united all Arabs around that vision....[T]his is the same message, the heroic message, that they push to all the terrorists in Western Europe who go join ISIS. And this has such a huge appeal for a lot of these youth, unfortunately."

Bakhit says he believes that comic books and video games can provide an antidote, coupled with the right storytelling, and he started a company in 2006 called Aranim Media Factory - Aranim being a fusion of the words "Arab" and "anime" - to produce them. As part of the process, he conducted focus groups with Jordanian children from different economic classes. He asked them about their heroes. They said they didn't really have any, though they heard a lot about someone called Osama bin Laden. "Talking to those kids, what it showed me is there's a huge appetite for positive role models, real heroes," he explained in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR) in the United States. Hence, his project was born.

Bakhit's early comics were about Jordanian war heroes. Then he began to expand his company's range, creating stories like the one about an all-women military unit, and he hired web developers to create games for Facebook. One of Jordan's royal foundations and the education ministry paid for Bakhit to produce the printed comics that are distributed to schools; more than a million copies were distributed.

In the video, Bakhit emphasises the importance of studying and understanding extremist heroic narratives in order to successfully counter them using both male and female superheroes. Bakhit says that cultivating heroic imagination among kids is the best technology for defeating terror.