Shujaat Ali, cartoonist and Al Jazeera online co-founder, dies at 54
The Pakistani artist, credited with creating the first animated caricatures on the internet and later serving as his country's first court artist, died last week after a heart attack.
By Larissa Bell ·
Shujaat Ali, the Pakistani cartoonist who helped build Al Jazeera's online operations from their earliest days and was regarded as a pioneer of digital cartooning, has died at the age of 54.
Ali suffered a heart attack last week while making his way home from work. He was buried in Qasimabad in Rawalpindi, where his parents are also buried.
Credited with creating the first animated caricatures published on the internet, Ali worked for a number of media outlets in his native Pakistan and abroad over the course of his career, receiving several awards for his work.
He also broke ground at home as Pakistan's first court artist, using his pencil and his skills to document the course of a number of well-known cases. More recently, he had been working with the Pakistan Air Force, his son-in-law, Waqar Saeed, told the Dawn newspaper.
Before returning to his homeland, Ali spent many years at Al Jazeera, where he contributed as part of the founding team behind Al Jazeera Arabic's online services, developing cartooning to utilise the potential of the digital platform.
Ahmed El Amraoui, an editor at Aljazeera.com, remembered him as an artist far ahead of the curve. "I had the privilege of working with Shujaat during the early days of Aljazeera.com," El Amraoui said. "He was a very talented artist, but what made him stand out was how far ahead of his time he was."
Awad Joumaa, manager of Digital Programs at Al Jazeera English, described Ali's cartoons as "unlike anything we were used to seeing in a news organisation," adding: "He drew everyone from Arafat to George Bush to Osama bin Laden."
Joumaa said he could still recall "the pride in his voice" when Ali told him that presidents, prime ministers and rebel fighters passing through the newsroom would always stop to look at the wall where his cartoons hung.
Placing Ali within a longer tradition, Joumaa said: "We forget there is a whole tradition in journalism where a cartoon could make governments and world leaders shake. Naji al-Ali, the Palestinian cartoonist, was killed for his cartoons. That is how powerful they were. And Shujaat was an incredible voice in that genre."
