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These Amazing Classic Books Are So Short You Have No Excuse Not To Read Them.

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Scene from comic strip featuring Qahera
She’s got comic strip superpowers, fights for justice and gives bad guys a hard time. If this makes you think of Catwoman, then think again – for this is a new kind of superheroine with a visible difference.

Meet Qahera – the hijab-wearing Egyptian comic-book character fighting back against crime and prejudice.

She is the brainchild of a young Egyptian artist who created the first everEgyptian superhero in a web comic, and its picking up a growing fanbase.

“It all started as a joke with a group of friends,” Deena Mohamed says.

“It was my way to respond in my own way to things that were frustrating me at the time,” she laughs, “and when the idea of having superpowers was fascinating!”

But when Deena put the comic online a few months ago, she did not expect the scale of positive reactions.

“Start Quote

I wanted to send a message about the general Islamophobic backlash, and if I was going to address that, I needed to make a statement”

Deena Mohamed

Her website got hundreds of thousands of hits – more than 500,000 since September alone. Egypt is the top country of visitors to the site, followed by the US.

Deena also found enthusiasm among local publishers who asked her to create a printed version as well.

“It is insane. Way more exposure than I ever expected,” the 19-year-old art student says.

Inevitably perhaps, the creation drew some negative reactions, mainly from people not convinced about adopting the Western concept of a superhero.

Deena, though, does not agree.

“We are all exposed to the idea of comics and superheroes. We are exposed to Western media so often. So I guess I was just responding to that in my own way.”

Hijabi and strong

The name Qahera is the Arabic word for Egypt’s capital, Cairo. It also means the conqueror or the vanquisher.

Deena Mohamed 'self-portrait'
Deena says Qahera is aimed at shattering the stereotype that women who wear the hijab cannot be strong

Deena says she had her superheroine with the all-powerful name wear a hijab to combat a widespread stereotype that women wearing the Islamic attire cannot be strong.

“There is already so little representation of women who wear the hijab, although that is the majority of women I see around me, and it did not make sense not to make her wear hijab,” says Deena, who does not wear a hijab herself.

Hijab – the principle of modesty in Islam that includes manners of dress – is a religious obligation stipulated by the Koran, according to scholars at Al-Azhar, the highest seating of Sunni Islam.

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Sister, take off your oppression!”

Comic-strip character to Qahera

Deena says she had her eye on a Western audience from the beginning, another reason why her character wears a hijab, and episodes are written in English.

“I wanted to send a message about the general Islamophobic backlash, and if I was going to address that, I needed to make a statement.

“Women who wear hijab usually bear the brunt of Islamophobia,” she says.

One of her comics is tackling the Western misconceptions on submissive Muslim women.

“Look, it is a Muslim woman,” says one of the characters in a story featuring Western feminists.

“Sister, take off your oppression!”

But the superheroine reacts angrily to their call.

“You have constantly undermined women. You seem unable to understand we do not need your help!”

Street harassment

In the past few years, sexual harassment of women on the streets of Egypt has become a growing phenomenon.

While most women are usually helpless in this situation, Qahera does something about it.

Scene from comic strip featuring QaheraThe comic strip tackles the phenomenon of street attacks on women

Deena created an entire episode about harassment, where Qahera dons her long black hijab and carries a sword as she chases down male abusers, and flies to fight wherever a woman is mistreated.

“Never bother another woman again!” Qahera warns a beaten-up culprit.

The past few decades saw a majority of Muslim women in Egypt adopt the attire. On the streets of Cairo, there are few women with their hair uncovered.

But the modest Islamic attire fails to protect women from being abused.

The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women said in a recent report that 99.3% of Egyptian women have experienced some form of sexual harassment, whether physical or verbal.

Deena says the theme is based on real experiences with street harassment. However she does not encourage women to react the way Qahera does.

“If you are not alone and have enough support around you, you can call them out. But otherwise, you can just ignore it. It is really a difficult situation, and some women have to deal with it almost every day.”

‘Tribute to women’

Deena’s latest episode focuses on another issue that has been taking over the streets since the 2011 uprising – protests.

But she says it is less of a superhero comic and more of a tribute – to women who contributed to the revolution in so many ways.

“I remember at one point during the revolution, people would use statistics of attacks on women to discredit political movements – and Egyptians – at large. This keeps happening, consistently, both locally and internationally.

“People will abuse statistics as they see fit, but they will always ignore the women at the base of those statistics. So, politics and superpowers aside, here is my attempt at a tribute to real-life superheroes.”

 

2018 must be the final target for polio eradication.

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Since the eradication of smallpox in the late 1970s, no other diseases have followed suit; the goal that has come closest so far is eradication of polio. The development of vaccines in the 1950s led to cases of polio plummeting: whereas hundreds of thousands were affected annually in the middle of last century, in 2012 around 250 people were paralysed by the disease. But the final stages of eradication are proving more difficult than the early phases. The disease remains entrenched in three countries—Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan—where social, political, and logistical factors prevent effective vaccination campaigns and lead to export of virus to countries that have previously been free of the disease.

As Haris Riaz and Anis Rehman reported in the journal last month, the global polio eradication programme suffered a grave setback in December last year when seven vaccination workers were shot dead by terrorists as they took part in a 3 day campaign to deliver vaccine in Karachi and Peshawar. At the end of January, two more vaccine workers were killed in a landmine explosion in the Kurrum tribal region. These two latest casualties are not thought to have been directly targeted, but unwitting victims of sectarian violence.

Such events are not only tragic losses—people dedicating their time to a global health effort senselessly killed—but also they leave children who would have received vaccine unprotected and allow the virus to continue to circulate. The consequences of which can be extremely far reaching: in January, poliovirus related to strains circulating in Pakistan was detected in sewage samples in Cairo, Egypt, more than 3000 km away (the last case of polio in Egypt was recorded in 2004). No new cases of polio have been recorded in Cairo, but health authorities are surveying the impoverished districts of Al Salam and Al Haggana where the virus was found for recent cases of paralysis, and vaccination campaigns have been initiated.

In the middle of the 20th century, children in developed countries of Europe and North America would return to school at the end of the summer break and look around to see empty chairs of classmates who had not returned because they had been crippled or killed by polio. When the global polio eradication initiative (GPEI) was launched in 1988, the disease was endemic in 125 countries and caused paralysis in around 350 000 people every year. Recent events highlight how a threat that for many is thankfully a distant memory—or for younger generations in some developed countries unknown—remains a real and present danger.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the major contributors of financial aid to the polio eradication effort, and speaking recently in London at the Richard Dimbleby lecture, Bill Gates reiterated his commitment to wiping out the diseases, highlighting the new eradication target of 2018. On January 23, the GPEI published a draft Polio Eradication and Endgame Strategic Plan (2013—18). The plan has four main objectives and four milestones for eradication. The four objectives are, detection and interruption of wild poliovirus, strengthening of routine immunisation and withdrawal of the oral polio vaccine, containment and certification (enabling some facilities to store poliovirus and outlining the processes for certification of eradication), and legacy planning to ensure that resources put aside for polio eradication are repurposed when the goal is achieved. The milestones for the new strategic plan are for the last case of wild polio by 2014, withdrawal of type 2 oral polio vaccine by 2015—16, worldwide certification of polio eradication by the end of 2018, and cessation of bivalent oral polio vaccination during 2019.

This is not the first deadline for polio eradication. When the GPEI was set up, the planned date for eradication was 2000. As the cases become fewer, the problems become knottier, and hindrances to final eradication become ever more dependent on localised factors and characteristics of the virus’s remaining toeholds. As the saying goes, the devil is in the detail.

The new plan encouragingly contains intricate analyses of recent outbreaks in the three remaining countries, reasons for programmatic declines, and reflection on the lessons learned from success in India, which has not recorded a case in more than 2 years. It is an excellent example of how data, local knowledge, and experience can be synthesised to provide clear goals and realistic targets. 2018 seems soon, but for some children it will not be soon enough. And for the vaccination workers who have lost their lives, eradication of polio within 5 years would be a tribute to their efforts.

Source: lancet