In fact, because he approaches Islam with a clear compassion and level-headedness, I suspect many readers let Thompson off the hook for the Orientalist elements of the text. I applaud Thompson for humanizing a religion that many have been quick to vilify, and for managing to do it in a non-preachy way. On this mark, Habibi is a well-done and original contribution to the canon of contemporary Western comics literature. Thompson uses Habibi as a venue to argue that Islam and Christianity are not at odds with each other, but interconnected to one another. What he called “fast and loose,” I called cultural appropriation. And here was Craig Thompson some 80 odd years later, well intentioned, proposing a very similar project of creating a made-up Arab land of Wanatolia for the purposes of quelling his own guilt. I was about the spend a year abroad studying how The Adventures of Tintin is a Orientalist text precisely because Hergé rarely left the confines of Belgium while drawing the far off landscapes of India, Egypt, China, or made-up Arab lands like Khemed. As I sat in the audience I saw red flags going up. At one point he actively said he was playing “fast and loose with culture” picking from here and there in order to tell his story as he saw fit. Did he know Arabic? No, but he had learned the alphabet. Had he traveled much in the Middle East? No, except Morocco. There he explained (as he has in many venues since) that Habibi was going to be an expansive book about Islam and the idea was birthed out a place of post-9/11 guilt he felt in reaction to America’s Islamophobic tendencies. The fear sprang from the 2010 Stumptown Comics Festival - held in Thompson’s hometown of Portland, OR near the completion of Habibi - as I sat in the audience of a Q&A session with him about the processes of publishing and creation.

For well over a year, I approached its release with equal parts excitement and fear. It’s easy to inventory my feelings about Craig Thompson’s Habibi. Craig Thompson, PopTones Interview, September 1, 2011 But I was also having fun thinking of Orientalism as a genre like Cowboys and Indians is a genre - they’re not an accurate representation of the American west, they’re like a fairy tale genre. Edward Said talks about Orientalism in very negative terms because it reflects the prejudices of the west towards the exotic east.

Habibi comic