It appears as if Dio, the main baddie from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has pissed off an entire real world religion by reading the Qur’an while vowing to kill Jotaro. This forced Abdul Hamid Al-Atrash, of Al-Azhar University to say, “The scene depicts Muslims as terrorists.” This is an enemy not even Dio can win against, so Japanese publisher Shueisha halted all shipments of the anime and manga in order to fix this problem.

This all happened in the sixth episode of the newest OVA series. The animators wanted to make the book Dio was reading look Arabic, so they unknowingly put pages from the Qur’an to fill this void. This isn’t a new pratice, try reading the large blocks of English text in an anime, you will be surprised. For example, in an episode of Gundam Wing one such blocks of text was taken directly from an Adobe Photoshop manual.

Now Shueisha is reviewing the entire series and manga to find problematic scenes that might insight more anger, specifically changing buildings that might look like mosques. What’s next, Dio was looking in the general direction of a mosque when he punched Jotaro?

Dio wasn’t being anti-Islamic, he was just reading a book, while speaking to Jotaro at the same time; there is no hate in that. This was simply a mistake by the animators. But is it so wrong for him to be reading the Qur’an in the first place? Since Dio was in Egypt at the time, it would be likely that he would run into the book sooner or later.

[Via Ann]

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