The JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures anime has caused a furor on Muslim Websites because of a scene in which the villain of the story is depicted reading the Koran, then ordering the execution of the hero and his friends.  Protests, including calls for boycotts of Japanese goods, erupted after the depiction was noted in a posting of an illegal fansub in Arabic. 

Japanese publisher (and Viz Media parent) Shueisha, which published the manga on which the anime is based and approved the adaptation, has withdrawn sales of the anime as well as some of the manga volumes, which were determined to depict buildings that looked like mosques as battle scenes. 

Shueisha issued an apology on its Website, in which it explained that the use of the Koran in the anime was inadvertent, done by animators who couldn’t read Arabic and were simply looking for a book in Arabic to illustrate the scene.  The Koran did not appear in the manga. 

The U.S. company that produced a North American edition of the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures anime, Super Techno Arts, has taken down its Website and the DVDs are no longer available.  Viz publishes the manga here, but has not published any of the volumes that Shueisha pulled off sale in Japan, and has no plans to do so.