Ra's against the Axis

In Son of the Demon, Ra's and Batman team up to fight his former associate, Qayin, whose parents were Ra's' operatives during World War II. "During the last World War, I had an organization of my own, which I often used to combat the Axis Powers," he explains. "We had much to fight for in those days. Years earlier, my trusted Lieutenant, Landor, had been blessed with a son, and I had been made his godfather. I cared for him when his parents were off on missions, such as the mission I sent them on to the Japanese city of Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945. A date of some historical significance, I think you will recall, Detective."

Mike W. Barr and Jerry Bingham, Son of the Demon (1987), p. 27.

Both the text and the illustrations frame Ra's as heroic. His statement that his organization "had much to fight for" implies not just a cynical support for the Allies, but also an emotional and moral commitment, while the sunset tones and superimposition of Ra's, his then-wife Melisande, and baby Talia, over the US bombing of Hiroshima invoke Romantic pathos in the vein of a classic war movie. Ra's is our hero who fights for his family and does what is right, even if it costs the lives of innocents (Qayin's family and, perhaps in a more politically progressive interpretation than I should credit comics with, the residents of Hiroshima). It is interesting to note that, while Ra's wears a stylized military uniform, he's never identified as being with the Allies (and indeed, he seems to have no fore-knowledge of the bombing of Hiroshima), only against the Axis.

In any case, the bombing of Hiroshima is not presented as a point of political radicalization for Ra's. It does not change his views on the United States, war, or mass violence against civilians (as interesting as that would be). Instead, it is Qayin who is transformed by grief, becoming "moody, fatalistic, [and] obsessed with the subject of death," until eventually he kills Melisande (SotD 28).

When we catch up with him in Son of the Demon, he's thrown in with "General Yossid of Golatia," a fictional country situated at the real-world intersection of Turkey, Iran, Armenia, and Iraq. Yossid took power in a coup 10 years ago, and has "recently signed a pact with America after years of courting both the USA and the USSR" (17). This imaginary conflict is in dialog with the very real Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). During this war, both the US and the USSR sold arms to both Iran and Iraq. If you don't know what the Iran Contra scandal is, you should probably stop reading comics and pick up a book, but news of it broke in late 1986. Son of the Demon was published in December the next year.

The point is that, in this story, Qayin is the one who is identified as "a terrorist and a murderer" (17), aligned with an undemocratic Middle East regime prone to Cold War flip-flopping. Yossid's ambition is to "no longer have to curry the Americans' favor for protection from the Soviets;" he wishes to "have power of [his] own!" (35). Ra's and Batman ally against him. Indeed, while Ra's regrets the destruction a device in Qayin possession that generates natural disasters on command, a device which "would do much for [his] cause to see the planet purified…made new" (72), he ultimately destroys it, preventing Qayin from provoking the US and USSR into nuclear war. Then, Ra's makes Qayin a very Batman offer: give "the authorities" your knowledge of terrorist networks, and they may spare you (of course Qayin refuses and is killed, 74).

Ra's Allegiances at Other Points in World History

A brief (lol from the editing desk) aside that's not related to World War II, but does support my final point. In Talia's first appearance in Detective Comics #411, she's identified as a student at the University of Cairo, where she studies medicine. This issue has a cover date of May, 1971, which positions it at a crucial time for US-Egyptian relations during the Cold War.

Neal Adams and Denis O'Neil, Detective Comics (1937) #411, May 1971, p. 8.

After the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970, his successor, Anwar Sadat, began a program of reforms that largely oriented Egypt away from pan-Arabism, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Soviet Union. The most dramatic of these changes (normalization of diplomatic relations with the United States and recognition of Israel) were yet to come, but at this point Sadat was still seen as a moderate in comparison to Nasser; putting Talia in Egypt in 1971 has far fewer anti-American political connotations than it would have even a few years prior.

Batman: The Chalice gives us another interesting data point. During in 1812, during the Peninsular War (1808-1814), which was itself part of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), Ra's sought the Holy Grail (look it's still comics) "at the head of another man's army. Once again it disappeared almost within my sight and my rage was great at being three times cheated. The city that sheltered the cup from me paid in rapine and slaughter that is still remembered today" (37-38).

Chuck Dixon and John van Fleet, Batman: The Chalice (2000), p. 37.

The "other man" is Arthur Wellesley, the Earl of Wellington, which means that Ra's is fighting against Napoleon here. Obviously, that does nothing to diminish the fact that Wellesley's forces raped, looted, and ultimately killed thousands of Spanish civilians after taking the city, but it's still significant to me that Ra's is positioned against one of history's stock "overzealous conqueror" characters.

Dixon, who wrote The Chalice, would later go on to further complicate Ra's relationship to French politics. In his Bird's of Prey (1999) run, we learn that Ra's purchased the title of "Comte de Renaut de su Mer" in 1612 (#32, August 2001, 11). In the next issue, it's revealed that Ra's "was the leader of the blood cult who broke from the Toltecs. And…also the Castilian nobleman who came centuries later to end to reign of murder with more murder. And it was [he], as a deserter from the French Foreign Legion of Napoleon III, who led a contingent here, to slaughter the villagers who settled in this place so that it may forever be forgotten to all but me" (#33, September 2001, 19).

Chuck Dixon and Butch Guice, Birds of Prey (1999), #33, September 2001, p. 19.

I earnestly do not want to get into centuries of French and Spanish politics, so what's important here (besides the casual anti-Indigenous "Nahua peoples loved to do blood sacrifice" racism), is that Dixon is establishing Ra's as a character who will play both sides of a political issue to protect his personal interests (in this case, a Lazarus Pit). Ra's was a French nobleman who later fought against France in the Napoleonic Wars. Then, half a century later, he allies first with Napoleon's nephew, Napoleon III, during the second French intervention in Mexico (1861-1867), only to later desert and pursue his own aims, again killing civilians to do so. Dixon has him pulling a similar switch in alliances between the Toltec (and their Aztec successors) and the Spanish conquistadors.

Ra's as a Nazi

While the above examples demonstrate in-continuity flip-flopping/disloyalty on Ra's part, his later reinvention as a Nazi is fully a ret con. It comes in the Death and the Maidens book, in 2004, which invented a second (but older) daughter for Ra's, Nyssa. Nyssa is Jewish, and is taken prisoner by the Nazis after the Battle of Kiev in September 1941; at this time she is estranged from her father. By 1945 she is imprisoned at Ravensbruck, where Ra's comes to visit her.

Greg Rucka and Klaus Janson, Batman: Death and the Maidens (2003), #5, February 2004.

In this encounter, we learn that Ra's is allied with Hitler. Though he was not directly responsible for Nyssa's imprisonment, nor the rape and murder of her children, he has the power to free her and her surviving family members, but refuses, telling Nyssa that the deaths of her family (his own family), as well as millions of others, are "a necessary evil" and "sacrifices…for the greater good." Though he claims to "care nothing for Hitler of his agenda…his war will kill millions and that leaves millions less for [Ra's] to deal with" (#5). He has meta-textually switched sides.

Academic Scholarship

To conclude, I want to investigate the potential reasons behind this change. Obviously, on a very basic level, making Ra's a Nazi makes him more evil in a way that is very intelligible to American readers. However, it's notable to me that, between 1987 and 2004, Ra's went from fighting Nazis and terrorists to being one himself. There's obviously a lot going on here with the War on Terror and post-9/11 perceptions of the Middle East, but my point of interest is earlier. In this final part of the post, I'm going to apply ideas about and legal frictions experienced by Muslims in Europe to Ra's. While he's never textually identified as a Muslim, Ra's is patently an orientalist caricature, in the vein of Said, who in 1978, established "Orientalism" as a critical concept referring to an imagined "Orient" (nebulously, the "Middle East," a term which itself was not popularized until the mid-1900s, North Africa, and Asia) which exists only in the minds of (and media produced by) Westerners (we don't have time to do a full breakdown of Orientalism either but remember when I told you to read a book earlier? This one would be a good start). Therefore, as a cultural product, his characterization is influenced by the interpretation of real historical events.

In her 2021 book, Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe, the historian Emily Greble identifies two points of contact between Muslims in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (so, Europe), and the occupying Axis powers that are useful to me here. First, for Muslims, identity was linked to religion, not race, ergo conversion could meaningfully change an individual’s status. Therefore, under Islamic legal principles Muslim Roma, or converts from Judaism to Islam, should not be subject to deportation. The Nazis occupiers and their Ustaša (Croat nationalist) allies disagreed, and went forward with deportations. While some Muslims "participated in and benefited from the new system...many others vehemently rejected the idea that an outside, secular government could subdivide Muslims into different kinds of categories and unilaterally decide those categories mattered more than the shared bonds of Islam" (219).

Second, as war in the Balkans continued, Muslims were disincentivized from participating in anti-Axis resistance groups, which, no matter their political or ethnic orientation, were anti-Muslim. This drove Muslims to seek state protection, "proposing the creation of an autonomous Nazi protectorate" in occupied Croatia, and securing "the formation of a Bosnian Muslim Waffen SS unit" in 1943 (220), which the Nazis would go on to propagandize "as part of a global alliance between Muslims and the Third Reich" (221). I want to stress that it is not Greble's desire (nor mine) to call Muslims Nazis, or to imply that they allied with them for antisemitic reasons--that is not the case. Rather, she is making a more nuanced argument that Nazi conceptions of race as biologically innate directly contradicted centuries of Muslim law, which privileged religious affiliation (which was changeable) as the determiner of identity. Furthermore, at the time of World War II, and since the retreat of the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans, Muslim law and community autonomy in Europe had increasingly been undercut by successive state regimes. Muslim community leaders came to (correctly) view state sponsorship and institutional power as a necessary means to the preservation of their religion and way of life and, lacking any other allies during the occupation, turned to the Nazis, whose support for them was short-lived and superficial.

Conclusion

How does this relate to comics? Well, Ra's al Ghul is a character who was born before the concept of the Western state. The League of Assassins is incompatible with the legal concept of the bordered nation-state, and indeed with race-based notions of citizenship more broadly. However, under the lens of orientalist stereotype, this epistemology looks like an incompatibility with modernity. It looks like political fickleness--playing both sides during the colonial conflicts, during centuries of French history, and during the Cold War. It looks like supporting the Axis for pragmatic reasons, even as the Clear-Eyed and Rational Western reader shakes his head. "The Nazis don't actually think you're Aryan either!" he smugly declares. "They're going to kill your whole family, and then Batman's gonna beat you up and bone your hot daughter!"

Still, it takes him a while to get there. In Son of the Demon, Qayin is our Muslim-coded character who, lacking any values but his own self-aggrandizement, plays the US and the USSR off each other, content to sacrifice millions of innocent lives. Likewise, Talia was only located in Cairo after Nasser's death, and the end of the pan-Arabist threat to the superpower-dominated Cold War status quo. Muslim-coded characters are never allowed to pursue their own autonomy or independence.

By the 2000s, Ra's disloyalty to various historical causes, both intentional and retroactively canonized, ultimately serves to characterize him as untrustworthy, a born-betrayer, incapable of pursuing anything besides his own self-interest. However, his lack of belief is also his downfall. His changeable ways are passed down to his daughters, both of whom betray him eventually/repeatedly. He is not a sly, double-crossing fox, but rather a fool whose own shortcomings prevent the realization of his utopian civilization. He is both fundamentally evil (a terrorist and a Nazi*) and completely facile--deserving of violent recompense and no threat at all, the perfect foil to Batman's "morally correct" Western values, which are at once righteously violent and unassailably clever.