Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Suleiman Bakhit, and I am from Jordan. It's a privilege to be here.
Ladies and gentlemen, everything begins with a story. On the morning of 9/11, before I realized anything had happened
my father calls me, I was a student at the University of Minnesota at the time, and he says:
"Suleiman! If anyone asks you your name, tell them you’re name is Jose and you’re from Mexico."
I should have listened to him. Sometime afterwards, I got attacked by a group of men, for no other reason than being an Arab.
I had a decision to make at that time. I decided to fight that kind of racism and extremism.
And the best way to fight that kind of racism is to start with the young.
So I started going to schools around the university and talked to children ages 6 and 7 years old.
To spread a message of tolerance, that we’re not all terrorists.
In one of those sessions, a six year old girl stands up and she’s like "Suleiman! Suleiman! I have a question."
And she's like, "is there an Arabic barbie?" And the boys go crazy, "is there an Arab superman, is there an Arab batman?"
And I'm like, "no, there isn’t." And I couldn’t get the idea out of my head.
So I started teaching myself how to draw, and started working with other people
creating stories, and characters to try and answer that question.
One thing led to another. I dropped out of my master’s program, went back to Jordan
started a comic book company, and in 2010-2011, we published and sold 1.2 million comic books.
What started out as a simple question from a six year old girl ended up being a sketch
and by working with a team of creative artists from all over the world ended up being this.
What’s really funny is when I was 10 years old, my parents hired a private tutor
to try and teach me art and music. After one week, she gave me back all the money
and told me I don’t have a creative bone in my body.
I hope she’s watching this right now. And I have to tell you:
I took that money, didn't tell my parents, and ended up buying comic books.
This story right here is the story of Princess Heart, or, a modern retelling of the One Thousand and One Nights story.
The purpose of the story is to empower young women.
If you look in your bags, you’ll find a copy of this comic book
and I just wanna thank the OFF team in a special shout-out to them
because this is the very first comic book I’ve printed in the English language.
Thank you. Thank you.
So this right here is the story of Saladin 2100. It’s the first graphic, sci-fi novel in the Arab world.
And its set 100 years in the future.
Unfortunately I was not able to publish it, because it was deemed quote-unquote too “dangerous”
because I could not answer the question: "Who’s gonna be the leader one hundred years from now?"
Now you know why I don’t have any hair.
This story is the story of Section 9, it's the story of the first counter-terrorism unit that is all female.
This is a real unit active in Jordan. And this is an incredibly powerful and important story
to fight the narratives of misogyny in the Middle East.
And when I was doing a lot of research in textbooks, studying textbooks in schools
I found something incredibly alarming, and that's why I created this story.
And I'll just show you really quick, this is a photo of one of the text books.
And in it says, and I'm gonna translate to you, quote-unquote:
"Women are at a lesser level than men, because they are more emotional, weaker, less sensitive, and less smart."
These are the narratives that we’re teaching our kids in schools.
So, one of the things I do is I do a lot of focus groups.
And one of the focus groups is in a low income area in Jordan.
I went there and asked the kids: "Who are your heroes?"
And the kids looked at me like, "well, we don’t have any heroes, but…"
"we hear a lot about Bin Laden, about Zarqawi."
And I'm like, "Well, what do you hear about them?"
"That they defend us against the West, cause the West is out there to kill us."
And this is the terrorist narrative and propaganda 101.
So instead of arguing with the kids, I decided to give them comic books for free.
So I gave them some comic books, came back a few months later, asked them the same exact question -
Not a single kid mentioned the name of Bin Laden or Zarqawi. They’re all talking about the comic book characters.
And that's when it hit me: there's a huge appetite for an an anti-Bin Laden, an anti-Zarqawi.
for real, powerful heroes that can inspire the youth.
So I decided to embark on a journey to study extremist narratives, mythologies, and heroes
in order to be able to know how to prevent them.
See, it's very important to understand how they think about themselves
so we know how to fight them and prevent their narratives.
Now why are stories so important? Why are narratives so important?
Narratives, mythologies, stories that we tell ourselves, give us a compelling sense of purpose.
It drives our actions, drives our future actions.
Similarly, with extremist groups, it tells us a lot about their members
where they come from, where they're heading, what their goals, objectives even tactics.
So some of the most popular extremist narratives are the following:
The West is at war with Islam, and the West is out there to kill Muslims and humiliate us and shame us.
And according to Bin Laden, the only way to cleanse the shame is through violence and violent jihad.
Another extremely incredibly powerful narrative is the infidel invader narrative.
And this is a recounting of the crusader narrative, basically
that the West is just a bunch of crusaders coming to occupy our lands,
take our resources, shame us, humiliate us and kill us.
Another narrative is the hypocrite narrative.
And this is a narrative that they use on other Muslims who don't share their beliefs.
So this narrative basically says that there's a lot of Muslims who are Muslims on the outside
but on the inside they’re nothing but hypocrites who don’t believe or share their opinions.
What’s interesting about these two last narratives, is this is what we call in Arabic,
"takfir." And this is what they use to justify the killing of innocent people.
And the interesting psychological dynamic here is, when I call somebody an infidel
or a hypocrite, I am dehumanizing them. Therefore, I am shaming them
and they are no longer human beings at the same level that I am,
and I'm justifying violence against them.
Another important narrative that you see all over is the heroic journey.
Some of you might be familiar with Joseph Campbell, the legendary mythologist
who studied mythologies from all over the world and came down to the conclusion
that humanity has one single story, and that is the journey of the hero.
What's interesting about this story is there's three phases to the story.
One: departure, initiation and return.
The greatest heroic journey in our culture is the journey of the prophet Mohammed,
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 on him 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.
What's really interesting is Bin Laden emulates the journey, I mean, to the letter.
Bin Laden left his life of wealth and aristocracy in Saudi Arabia, went to the caves in Afghanistan
and emerged from these caves a new leader with a new vision to cleanse the shame
of the Muslim nation through violence.
This, similarly, this is the same message, the heroic message, that they push
to all of the terrorists in Western Europe, who go join ISIS.
And this is such a huge appeal for a lot of these youth unfortunately.
So, after publishing a few hundred thousand copies of comic books
I got attacked in Jordan by extremists. They attacked me with a razor blade
slashing me in the face.
So, something interesting happened then.
Rumi said that, the wound is the place where the light comes in.
I think he had it half right - it's also the place where the light shines.
Let me explain. Two things happened as a result.
One: my dating life improved exponentially.
Two and more important: In my culture, when someone attacks you with a razor blade
on the face in Jordan, we call that in Arabic "talimeh," which means to mark someone,
to mark them with shame. And I started thinking
"They're shaming me, they're transferring their shame on me and replacing that shame with pride."
So I started thinking, "is there a link here between shame and terrorism?"
So I decided to pursue a little more research on this topic.
So what do we know about shame?
Shame is the core feeling that I am bad. I'm not good enough, I'm not pretty enough.
I don't have enough hair, although, ladies and gentlemen, I have a lot of hair, just really bad distribution.
And it's important to distinguish between shame and guilt.
Guilt is the feeling that I did something bad. Guilt is about doing, shame is about being.
Now there's two types of shame, there's healthy shame. Healthy shame lets you know your limits, your boundaries.
It's the source of human connection, it lets you know that I need other people
it's the source of learning and creativity.
Toxic shame on the other hand, is the core feeling that I am defective as a human being
and there is something wrong with me. And when you have that feeling,
literally what that means is, I am no longer worthy of human connection.
What's really interesting about this is, throughout my research
if you take a heroic journey based on healthy shame, you end up with positive heroism.
But if you take it based on toxic shame, that's when you end up with what I call dark heroism.
Now another thing that we know about shame comes from the work of James Gilligan.
He’s an American psychologist who studied violent criminals and murderers
across the world, and in prisons all over the world, and came up with one conclusion.
And that is "The emotion of shame is the primary or ultimate cause of all violence
whether towards oneself or towards others.”
See when I feel intense amounts of shame, and when I commit violence against somebody else
especially murder and homicide, I am replacing my feelings of shame with pride.
The same thing applies to collective violence, as we see with ISIS, and other extremist groups.
As I mentioned earlier, one of their main, core narratives is that the West is at war with Islam,
because the West is humiliating Islam and Muslims all over the world.
And the way to deal with that is to cleanse that shame through violence.
Similarly ladies and gentlemen, Hitler came to power on the promise
to cleanse the shame of the Treaty of Versailles. And he directed that shame towards the Jews.
So, ladies and gentlemen, we have the biggest threat today in the Middle East, and that is terrorism disguised as heroism.
That’s why I started the Hero Factory project in Jordan.
It's a project dedicated to promoting heroism as an antidote to extremism.
We are developing a terrorism prevention program
that teaches young kids to take these heroic journeys based on healthy shame
creates shame awareness, based on positive narratives of hope, of resilience, of love,
of connection. But even more important, based on male and female heroes.
And one of the key factors who was developing heroism
is something that we call heroic imagination. And it comes down to this point.
If you don't believe in heroes, you will not find them, not even in yourself.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, right here, is the best technology we have to cultivate heroic imagination.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are the underdogs here. David beat Goliath with a slingshot. This is our slingshot.
This is a weapon that does not kill, however. It is a weapon of hope, it’s a weapon of inspiration
It’s a weapon of heroes. Thank you very much.