During my attendance at the Cairo International Film Festival for Children in 2012, a visit was arranged with Harf Information Technology, one of the biggest Islamic e-learning and multimedia organisations in the Arab/Islamic world. The company, started in 1985 as the Islamic Heritage Centre, has developed Islamic stories for children; it uses multimedia technology to design 2D and 3D cartoons, and uses the technology in the field to produce Compact Discs (CDs) that include animated cartoons, Islamic songs, games, comic strips, fables and novelties, combined with Islamic cultural and educational subjects. Most of these productions have been adapted from the Holy Qur’an and the prophets’ lives including the Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH). Moreover, most of Harf's products have been made in the
Arabic language and translated into English and other different languages.
The company has a big list of Islamic multimedia products, especially about the Prophet Muhammad’s biography and stories of other prophets such as Jesus and Moses. Most of these productions should get permission from the Islamic authorities in Egypt before their distribution. Harf received permission from the Islamic authorities for their projects; they submitted the scripts/videos to the Research, Authoring and Translation Department in Al- Azhar Islamic Research Academy in Cairo, Egypt. The main aim of this department is to examine religious literature and films, whether in Arabic or foreign language, to ensure their validity and that they are not contrary to Islamic law. This process is imperative to avoid conflicts with the Islamic regulations after screening the film or publishing the book.
According to the Islamic project manager at Harf, the Islamic authority usually gives their permission to Harf to produce their animated cartoons. Occasionally, the Islamic authority gives them some notes about the production, requiring re-editing to get their full permission. Harf is mainly located in Cairo, and it is practical for them to cooperate with the Islamic Academy unlike animation studios outside Egypt16. However, the Harf team did manage to tell stories of the prophets without depicting them in any form; but they found other solutions by creating fantasy characters. For example, they display stories related to the biography of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and other prophets, narrated by anthropomorphized
representation by objects and animals such as a rug, a purse, a well, a stone, a door, bellows and a sheep, and giving them human like characteristics (figure 35). The
anthropomorphism is a strategy of reporting and telling the stories that happened around the
16I had the chance to visit the Al-Azhar Islamic Research Academyin 2011, and there were no computers or internet
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absence prophets by the presence non-human witnesses, whether objects or animals, without including any pictures of the prophets.Figure 35.Different characters tell the biography of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).
Copyright © Harf Information Technology
Each character has a story to tell about their experience with the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). There are different methods available to these characters to tell the stories, such as talking directly to the viewers, or the characters having conversations with each other. For instance, the Rug (figure 36) character tells a story to viewers directly about Abed Almutaleb, the grandfather of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), when he used to put the rug in the shade of Kaaba to sit on it beside his grandson Muhammad (PBUH). The grandfather asked his son Abu Taleb to take care of his nephew Muhammad (PBUH) because he is an orphan child and then Abu Taleb died. Likewise, the most famous house in Islam (figure 37), which is represented by a door, tells the story about the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and his companions of Mecca meeting and praying secretly at Al-Arqam house in the beginning of Islam because it was far away from the non-believers’ eyes.
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Figure 36.The rug as narrator of the Prophet Muhammad biography directly to the views
Copyright © Harf Information Technology
Figure 37.Al-Arqam house, the prophet’s companion, talks directly to the viewers
Copyright © Harf Information Technology
Some of these fantasy characters have conversation with each other, for example the Purse (figure 38) has a conversation with other purses about the marriage of the Prophet to
Khadija, the woman merchant with honour and money who loved the Prophet Muhammad
(PBUH) because of his sincerity of speech, honesty, and generosity of morals. Also, the Well
tells a story to a pot (figure 39) about the history of the Well of Zamzam, a sacred place to Muslims, located in Kaaba.
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Figure 38.The purse of the Prophet Muhammad’s wife has a conversation with other purses
Copyright © Harf Information Technology
Figure 39.The well of Zamzam water has a conversation with a pot about its history
Copyright © Harf Information Technology
In addition, some of the imaginary characters are combined with human characters, like the Black Stone (figure 40) when it tells a story of the argument between tribes when they did not agree about who would have the honour to carry and set the black stone back in place in the wall of the Kaaba, until Muhammad (PBUH), before he became a prophet, came and
advised them to put the black stone on a cloth, and each tribe held a corner of the cloth and carried the stone all at once together. Harf also show more events of the prophets, such as the animated cartoons The Story of Prophet Musa (Moses) (2006) and The Story of Prophet Eisa (Jesus) (2007) to tell the stories of their journeys and miracles (figure 41, 42, and 43).
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Figure 40.The Black Stone was hold by multiple tribes
Copyright © Harf Information Technology
Figure 41.The Prophet Moses’ stick talks about the miracle of splitting of the sea in two.
Copyright © Harf Information Technology
Figure 42.A locust talks about its disaster as one of the plagues of Egypt.
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Figure 43.A palm tree tells Rashid and Zina (Bee) about the Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus, and how god provides
water and dates to Mary. Copyright © Harf Information Technology
The previous examples tell the stories of the prophets as interactive digital media for
children. The production process of the Harf team is to use 2D computer animation to create simple characters and backgrounds (vectors or pixels). All the scenes are free of lighting, shadows and do not give any impression of depth of field (DOP). In short, the animated videos offer limited interesting aesthetics. Anthropomorphism of animals that report the idea of the presence of the prophets was also a solution used by an Egyptian animated TV series The Animal Stories in the Qur’an (2011), directed by Mustafa El-Faramawi, which is based on the book Animals in the Glorious Qur’an written by Dr. Ahmed Bahjat (figure 44). The 30 episode series tells the stories of the animals mentioned in the Qur’an within realistic narrative structure. These animals played a role in religion history by helping the prophets and delivering the divine message, such as Adam’s sons and the Crow, Joseph and the Wolf, Jonah and the Whale, Solomon and the Ants, and many other stories. The creator of this series managed to show the religious stories combined with the science of animals and their behaviours. The technique is a combination of 2D characters and 3D backgrounds. The series was broadcast on satellite channels such as Al-Hayat TV and MBC3. Whittock
(1990:13) claims that the main aim of art is ‘never to reproduce reality but to understand it’. Thus, this strategy of storytelling provides an approach of understanding the story of the prophets, but still deals with the absence characters.