The Satellite, the Prince, and Scheherazade : The Rise of
Women as Communicators in Digital Islam
By Fatema Mernissi
 |
copyright Ruth V. Ward
|
A professor
at Mohamed V University in Rabat (Morocco), Fatema Mernissi is
currently a full-time researcher at the IURS (Institut Universitaire
de Recherche Scientifique) where she splits her time between
animating writing workshops for civic actors seeking to influence
public opinion through publications and conducting her own
field-work based analysis of Moroccan society. When MBC, the first
satellite-TV, hit the Moroccan sky in 1991, she switched from the
study of the Harem (a world view where space is sexualized-the
private is confused with femininity and the public with
masculinity-which is the theme of her early publications such as
'Beyond the Veil,', 'The Veil and the Male Elite' and 'Forgotten
Queens of Islam'), to the study of the 'digital umma,' where she
focuses on the new sexual and political game produced by the new
communication technologies demolition of frontiers. Her latest book,
"Les Sindbads Marocains:Voyage dans le Maroc Civique"(Editions
Marsam, Rabat, March 2004), describes how the previously isolated
desert youth in the South of Morocco are transforming themselves
into skilled navigators on the internet in
cyber-cafés.
During Ramadan
2002, I realized that I was becoming a stranger in my own land and
that the old Arab world I was born in and could decode and
understand has vanished forever. Women managed to shock the digital
Umma (the new satellite-connected Muslim community) not only by
belly-dancing in the most popular television series, but also as
producers of films and as talk show anchors. "In spite of the great
variety of their topics, the Ramadan television series have one
thing in common, regardless of whether their subject is social,
historical or religious: the unavoidable belly-dancer who has become
a pivotal creature in the events unfolding in these shows," explains
Mohammad Mahmud, the columnist who reports on talk shows in the
prestigious weekly Al-Ahram Al-Arabi. What surprised him most was
her versatile dimension: "The belly-dancer is the key figure who
helps businessmen rise to the top or pulls them down to the abyss.
In one television drama, the belly-dancer plays the heroine of the
popular struggle for liberation, in another, she backs a Zionist
movement supporter.... Does this extraordinary presence of the
belly-dancer in the Ramadan television shows reflect reality or is
it simply a seductive maneuver on the part of the producers to
attract audiences?" (1) One has to sympathize with the Al-Ahram
columnist, because it is not belly-dancing he is complaining about
per se; as everyone knows, unlike some puritanical Christian
Scandinavians or Americans, Arab men in general, and Egyptians in
particular, are thrilled by such a sight. What he is worrying about
is that the ever present-belly dancer interferes seriously in the
spiritually-inclined believer's capacity to transcend the
voluptuousness of the senses and concentrate on more esoteric
blessings. To help man reach harmony (wasat), that, is to
develop a balanced set of defense mechanisms which allows him to
resist temptations without drifting into ascetic extremisms, is
after all the key ideal Islam has been promoting for the fifteen
centuries of its existence (the year 2002 corresponds to the year
1423 of the Muslim calendar). But Arab satellite-television somehow
seems to capture the intoxicating pre-Islamic spell of women and
fuels it with an alarming glow.
1. Women's
Aggressive Invasion of The New Public Space of the Satellite-Wired
Umma
After asking
the questions, Mohammad Mahmoud reminds everyone that Ramadan is
indeed a fantastic opportunity for film producers because during
that month hungry believers rush to their homes to break the fast
and are therefore easy prey for television programmers. He proceeds
to quote Taha Hussein, one of the twentieth century's most
remarkable Arab thinkers, to make his point clearer: "Is not Ramadan
the month of spirituality and the occasion to get nearer to Allah?
Should we not expect the television drama during this sacred month
to nurture our pious cravings?"
But the
belly-dancers were not the only aggressive women who managed to
invade the political space created by satellite television. One of
this Ramadan's highly polemical and most challenging, as well as
popular, television series was not the controversial "Rider without
a Horse" (Faris Bila Jawad), which was identified as
anti-Zionist and condemned by many American and Israeli media
organizations. Instead, it was a film by a female movie director,
In'am Mohammad Ali, about a highly controversial Egyptian male
feminist, who wrote "The Liberation of Women" (Tahrir
al-Mar'a), a vitriolic pamphlet on sexual equality which was
perceived as scandalous by Arab rulers in the 1930s. The man's name,
Qasim Amin, is also the title of the television series which
competed for stardom with "Rider without a Horse" on many of the
fifty or so Arab satellite channels during Ramadan. Both films are
set during the 1930s British occupation of Egypt and both take their
viewers into politically entangled romantic tales set in the harems
of the corrupt Turkish Sultan who then ruled. But while the hero of
"Rider without a Horse" mingled with the British upper class and
tried to profit from it in an opportunistic way, "Qasim Amin" forces
the viewer to reject that ruling class as inhuman, because he
identifies "with his humiliated mother and with one of her
co-spouses who were suffering from the arrogance of the harem
master." What made male viewers very attentive to Qasim Amin was
that its female movie-maker, one of Egypt's most talented
professionals, "showed, through her film, that when a competent
artist decides to take us to navigate in the past, it is not so much
to seek an escape from reality as to enlighten it".(2) The film's
key message was that in 1930s Egypt just as today, to liberate women
is the best chance to empower the country and release Arabs'
energies. While "Rider without a Horse" identified a Zionist plot,
that is, an external force, as the reason for Arab weaknesses, the
Qasim Amin serial focuses on the internal mechanisms of
powerlessness, on the psychological dimensions of Arab weakness, and
is, according to many media commentators, a much more corrosive
invitation to an exacting self-introspection.
However, the
aggressive invasion of Arab media by women as actresses and
producers of films and shows as well as directors of television
channels did not start with this Ramadan. "The Empire of Women" was
the scary magazine cover story which revealed to male Egyptian
citizens that "of the 80,000 persons working in the radio and
television, 50,000 are women." (3) The article went on to explain in
detail "how clever women were strategizing to obtain
(istiyad) top positions in management hierarchies as well as
radio and channel leaderships." 3/ The fact that women were visibly
present in Arab media was not really the breaking news. What rang
strange bells in that sacred month was that the extraordinary appeal
of the female hostesses of Al Jazeera was due to their breaking of
sexual taboos.
2. The Big
Satellite Scare: Al Jazeera Women Probe Sexual
Inadequacy.
This summer, I
became terribly jealous of Muntaha al-Rimhy, one of Al Jazeera's
most intellectually sharp anchor women: men were talking non-stop
about her all along the sandy Atlantic beaches around Casablanca I
visit regularly. The reason was the talk show she devoted to probing
"the reasons for the lack of sexual desire among spouses." And since
the talk show's name is "For Women Only," what scared the male
viewers was that only she and her three female guests were voicing
opinions on this troubling phenomenon which they described as
widespread and statistically alarming. "Muntaha al-Rimhi," comments
Ali Aziz, a male television columnist "decided to break a taboo on
her Al Jazeera show, by inviting her all-female guests to probe the
lack of sexual appetite (futur) between spouses. The three
guests went into detail with their hostess, diagnosing the problem
which is growing in prodigious proportions, according to them, and
identifying its superficial and deeper reasons. The women dived into
psychological explanations, unearthing the emotional as well as the
educational dimensions of the problem." The word chosen by the
show's hostess was a tricky one. She deliberately avoided talking
about sexual impotence ('ajz) and used the wicked
futur," which literally means "a loss of energy level, a
sudden weakness." This left male viewers wondering. As one of my
university colleagues remarked, "I wish Muntaha had chosen to speak
about straightforward sexual impotence, because when a woman speaks
about futur, the man immediately feels guilty and
inadequate." My Moroccan colleague was right, because what made the
Egyptian columnist feel uneasy was simply that women were talking
publicly about sexuality in the absence of an important actor-the
man. "Although the non-expert male viewer did not get enough
information from the show to make up his mind," explains Ali Aziz,"
it was nonetheless quite an impressive display of acute analysis and
perspicacity. You really need to see only three women sitting
together, even if silent, to make you realize the gravity of such an
impediment as the lack of sexual appetite." (4)
Yes, the new
information technology is definitely producing cataclysmic
psychological changes in Arab self-perception, but what is more
astonishing is that the invasion of women as aggressive participants
in the new satellite TV is only a mirror of what is happening
everywhere, in a less visible way, such as the more intimate surfing
on the net in the dark corners of the mushrooming
cyber-cafés.
3. "Is
Internet Chat Licit (Halal) During Ramadan?" Teenage Girls Ask Azhar
Sheikhs.
This Ramadan was definitely very different,
considering the request for a fatwa from Egyptian sheikhs on the
following issue: "Is chatting on the Internet forbidden during
Ramadan?"(5) Unlike what we think today, fatwa in early Islam had no
power connotation. Fatwa meant simply that "you ask a question" to
inform yourself, explains Ibn Manzur in his 13th century Lisan
al-Arab ("The Tongue of the Arabs"), which is still used
today.(6) If there is to be fear, it should be on the part of the
religious authority whose duty is to put its expertise at your
disposal to help you solve your problem. The fatwa is a test for the
authority, not for the questioner. Thus Egyptian youth's inquiry
about chat rooms supposes that the sheikhs at al-Azhar University
are digitally competent. Indeed, the internet is reviving the oral
tradition of Islam begun by the Prophet in Medina. Asking for a
fatwa was part of the constant interactive dialogue technically
known as jadal, which helped the prophet build a formidable Muslim
community in less than a decade (between 622 and 632). (7)
The
challenging Ramadan question about internet chat was accompanied by
a huge picture of two adolescent girls surfing on computers and a
discreet caption which makes us realize the gravity of the inquiry:
"Many youths are forced, because of their jobs, to surf the internet
... How is their fasting affected, for instance, if they happen to
encounter, by chance, a pornographic website?" (8) This is one of
the delicate questions which Jamal al-Kashki, editor of the Ramadan
issue of the widely circulated Egyptian magazine Al-Ahram Al-'Arabi,
identified as significant for al-Azhar sheikhs to answer, if they
wanted to stay credible in the eyes of the blushing teenagers. And
don't make the mistake of thinking that those who claim to speak in
the name of Islam are technologically backward and that they are
internet and satellite illiterates. Believe it or not, it is the
most conservative of all, the Iranian Ayatollah of the Center for
Islamic Jurisprudence of the city of Qum, one of Shi'a Islam's
capitals, who first rushed to the web with the strategic intention
of outdoing their fifteen-century-old Arab Sunni rivals. "Several
thousand texts, both Sunni and Shi'a, have been converted to
electronic form," explained one of the contributors to a 1999
retrospective on Digital Islam. "While Sunni institutions tended to
ignore Shi'a texts, the Shi'a centers are digitalizing large numbers
of Sunni texts in order to produce databases which appeal to the
Muslim mainstream, and hence capture a large share of the market for
digital Islam." (9) However, here, I want to focus on the impact on
one single dimension of the new information technologies which seems
to me particularly exciting, namely satellite broadcasting, because
it creates the highly political public space where the entire
community is gathered to debate vital issues. By contrast, the
internet, which is basically more of an individual experience, does
not have that theatrical public dimension, so central to Islam,
where the sexes are not supposed to have the same access and the
same behavior. Let's not forget that the Umma, the very concept of
the community in Islam, does not refer so much to a static entity as
to a dynamic communication-fueled group.
4. The
Umma-the Muslim Community-Refers to a Communication Synergy, Not to
a Static Entity
Let's not
forget that the Umma, the very concept of the community in Islam,
"means a group moving towards the same goal." (10) Constant
communication within the community is what enhances its dynamism,
which is why satellite broadcasting transforms the Muslim dream of a
debate-linked planetary community into a virtual reality. But by so
doing, satellite broadcasting challenges the behavioral code which
sets different rules not only for the sexes but also for religious
and political minorities. It is this challenge which explains both
why Muslims have become so intoxicated with the new technologies and
why focusing on the satellite's impact is the best angle from which
to decode the digital Islam puzzle. Yet, as enigmatic as the future
of this digital Islam might look to us today, one thing is certain:
most key players, from orthodox (Sunni) Saudi oil princes to Shi'a
Iranian ayatollahs, have grasped that power will belong to
satellite-equipped communication wizards. And this explains the
discreet but nevertheless ferocious race for digital power among
Muslim countries where even elementary notions such as
"center-periphery," which should give a geographical advantage to
the Middle East, are challenged. "A country such as Malaysia,
usually considered to be on the margins of Islam both in terms of
geography and religious influence, has invested heavily in
information and networking technologies." (11) The Iranian
ayatollahs rushed to invest in the new technologies in the early
1990s but Saudi oil princes were more cunning in that they realized
early on that they had a fantastic advantage over Iranians and
Indonesians. Since the Arabic language happens to be the sacred and
common medium, investing in satellite communication was the shortcut
to global supremacy. Saudi Arabian propagandists were the first to
create planetary media lobbies; in the l980s, they armed themselves
with digitally printed transnational newspapers and satellites.
5.
Advocates of Islam from Saudi Princes to Hezbollah are Armed with
Satellites
The two most
widely circulated Arab newspapers are the London-based and digitally
printed Al-Hayat ("Life") and Asharq al-Awsat ("The Middle East").
Both are controlled by Saudi princes: Al-Hayat by prince Khaled Ibn
Sultan, the son of the Saudi defense minister who led his country's
troops during the Gulf War, and Asharq al-Awsat, which has a staff
of 150, sells 80,000 printed copies, and is accessible to 100
million readers on the Internet; the latter belongs to another Saudi
prince, Salman Ibn Abdelaziz, the governor of Riyadh and the brother
of the King of Saudi Arabia. But you only get an idea of the scope
of the Saudi princes' investment in the new information technologies
if you remember that MBC (Middle East Broadcasting Center), the
first satellite channel to hit Arab skies, in 1991, belongs to
"Walid al-Ibrahim, a brother-in-law of King Fahd Ibn Abdel Aziz
al-Saud" and that the next to follow two years later, ART (Arab
Radio and Television), is "owned jointly by the Saudi entrepreneur
Sheikh Saleh Kamel and Prince Al Walid bin Talal Ibn Abd Al-Aziz, a
nephew of King Fahd." (12) It is not therefore surprising to
discover that the Iranian Ayatollahs made the same calculation when
Iran backed Hezbollah and helped it launch the Arabic-speaking Al
Manar channel. This channel "belongs, via the Lebanese Information
Group headed by Nayef Krayyem, to Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed
Lebanese Shi'a Muslim group founded to resist the Israeli occupation
of Lebanon in 1982. Hezbollah started terrestrial broadcasting in
1991 and eventually gained official broadcasting licenses for the
al-Manar television channel and the al-Nur radio station."
(13)
I mention this
merely to caution the reader to avoid the stereotype which links
Islam with archaism. This is a fatal strategic mistake, not only
because the new technologies are being used as instruments by its
advocates, but also because the competition in the market for
digital media products is forcing the producers to shift to free
speech and interactive dialogue. Since the September 11 attack, all
media lobbies, be they Saudi or Iranian-owned, who used to scorn
Arab citizens and club them with one-sided propaganda, are now
shifting to interactive programming to please viewers who can surf
freely and zap between channels because satellite broadcasting has
destroyed state boundaries and empowered illiterates. Satellite
broadcasting "by passes the two most important communication
barriers-illiteracy and government control of content." stresses
Hussein Amin. This revolution is radically changing roles: citizens
have shifted from being manipulated pieces on the chessboard to
becoming its major players.
Zapping among
channels has become an Arab national sport. Empowered by cheap
satellite household dishes which allow them to surf between
fifty-plus Arab satellite channels, previously passive Arab viewers,
of whom half are women, have become ferocious "zappers" and choosy
audiences difficult to please. Consequently, you can no longer have
access to Arab oil by manipulating only Arab heads of state,
diplomats and army generals. The new information technology is
forcing all Middle East chessboard players, local and foreign,
including Americans, to create Arabic channels. The decision of both
Iran and the United States to launch Arab satellite channels to
communicate with the masses, illustrates this digital
technology-induced shift of power from the states' bureaucratic
elites and private oil lobbies to citizens. Hussein Amin has
predicted in his "Arab Women and Satellite Broadcasting" that this
new technology "has the potential to empower Arab women in the
exercise of their right to seek and receive information and ideas."
(14) His prophecy seems to be starting to materialize and change
reality.
6. The
Planetary Race to Create Arab Satellite Channels: Iran and the U.S.
Search for Skilled Male and Female Journalists
One of the
booming businesses in the Middle East region since the September11
attack has been the recruitment of intellectually powerful men and
women with adequate training in both writing and communication
skills. They are needed because Arab audiences have deserted
entertainment channels for the "24-hour news" channels, such as Al
Jazeera and more recently Al-Arabiya. One of the reasons which
explain the Saudi MBC's catastrophic loss of audience, and its
consequent financial troubles, was the fact that Arab audiences were
fed up with its mix of entertainment and religious propaganda and
deserted it as soon as Al Jazeera started its 100% news channel in
1996.
During the
Moroccan elections in the fall of 2002, the gripping headlines were
not about who lost seats in the parliament but the fact that Iranian
ayatollahs had sent their agents scouting our country looking for
the best of the local television journalists, offering them huge
salaries. "Iran is launching an all news satellite channel which
will be broadcasting in Arabic from Teheran ... Many of the Moroccan
journalists approached by its recruiters were hesitant at
first...but succumbed when Iranian investors offered salaries as
high as 3,000 dollars a month." (15) The other gripping event
heavily commented on in the entire Middle East press, was the
decision of the Bush administration to invest $500 million in Arab
satellite TV and the subsequent rumors of its "buying" brainy Arab
journalists from the prestigious London-based newspaper Al Hayat and
training them in TV broadcasting in the Beirut-based channel LBC
(Lebanese Broadcasting Center). (16)
7. The
Lebanese are Helping Americans to "Buy" Eloquent Arabs from Al-Hayat
to Staff their Washington Channel
One of the
most "shocking" rumors after September 11 was that of the sudden
merger between the Saudi-owned newspaper Al Hayat and LBC (Lebanese
Broadcasting Corporation), "which started as a Maronite militia
channel in the civil war," (17) according to some analysts and is
"controlled by a board dominated by ministers and officials close to
the Syrian government" (18) according to others. It was formed to
help Washington recruit competent communicators for its new Arabic
channel-hence the suspicions raised by this business deal, which is
considered by many a conspiracy that ought "to be evaluated in the
light of the latest media wars in the region ... starting with the
American decision to launch an Arab channel as part of its
post-September 11 communication strategy." (19) It is true that one
of America's main problems since the September attack is how to
communicate with Arabs. How to sell America to the Arabs has become
a strategic concern: "The Bush administration has been looking at
new ways of combating anti-Americanism." (20) David Chambers
explains in his article, "Will Hollywood Go to War?" that "a new
consideration starting in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is
a bill called the '9/11 Initiative' to invest $500 million in a
pan-Arab satellite TV channel to combat the media influence of the
increasingly successful Al Jazeera and to target Muslim youth." (21)
But to communicate with Arabs, buying the hardware and access to
satellite platforms is not enough. It is rather more difficult to
find convincing communicators like Al Jazeera's who win audiences by
transforming talk shows into "boxing rings."
8. Ghada
Fakhri or How Scheherazade Got on the "Wanted" List
Iranians,
Americans and Saudi Emirs look for very specific types of
journalists to recruit: intellectuals who are trained in writing
techniques and also have television experience. Ghada Fakhri is such
a person: "Ghada Fakhri used to work with Asharq al-Awsat, then she
worked for Al Jazeera as a correspondent in New York, followed by
being a correspondent for Abu Dhabi Television before we succeeded
in tempting her to join our project." The man talking with so much
enthusiasm about the talents of Ghada Fakhri is Salamah Nemett, a
Jordanian with experience in both printed and visual media. LBC
recruited him as managing editor for the newly-created "SuperNews
Center" whose objective is "to train print journalists in TV
journalism." (22) However, the Lebanese are not admitting that they
are serving as middlemen for the Americans. If you asked LBC's
chairman, Sheikh Pierre Daher, what was the objective of his merging
with Al Hayat and locating the "Super News Center" in London, he
would answer that he was recruiting journalists like Ghada Fakhri
solely to improve his channel's own political coverage and its news
product. But "according to analysts ...there is a
Saudi-Lebanese-American concentration" (23) which is trying to lobby
in the United States to profit from market openings in this new
communication war.
In any case,
what I want to stress here is that the rising demand for articulate
intellectuals who combine writing and television experience in the
new communication wars in the Arab world is giving women a golden
opportunity to enter the power game in the Middle East. Although in
a country like Egypt which has a powerful movie industry (ranking
third after the US and India) women have managed to compete for
higher positions, their influence has remained local. With the
satellite media industry, Arab women are competing for pan-Arab
influence and, beyond it, for global sway. But to understand better
the empowerment dynamics of satellite broadcasting, one has to keep
in mind the intense competition not only among channels but also
among satellite operators which is forcing everyone to switch as
fast as possible from manufacturing propaganda to responding
attentively to the citizens' needs.
9. The
Explosion of Satellites Has Turned Arab Citizens-Women Included-into
Profitable Audiences.
The explosion
of satellite broadcasting has transformed the passive Umma everyone
was abusing into a precious audience for advertisers-an audience
including 36% illiterates, of which 64% are women. (24) The
proliferation of satellites launched in the Mediterranean region, by
both Arab and non-Arabs, has heightened the competition for
audiences among all sectors, public and private, legitimate and
terrorist: "Between 1998 and 2000, several satellites equipped for
digital compression were launched to serve areas that included Arab
states. Besides Egypt's Nilesat 101 and 102 and the new generation
of Arabsat craft, starting with Arabsat 3A, the HotBird satellites
of Europe's operator, Eutelsat, also transmit to viewers in the
Mediterranean Basin and parts of the Gulf." (25) This proliferation
of satellites has made it possible for smaller operators to compete
with the propaganda-manufacturing oil lobbies and it has reduced the
latter's revenues by fragmenting the audiences. Because of the oil
reserves, all major players-be they private investors, like Saudi
princes, heads of state, or ayatollahs-have to listen carefully to
what the viewers want, both to gain political power by influencing
public opinion and to attract advertising. "With a population of
over 300 million people, all speaking the same language in a highly
strategic region of the world," remarks Sheikh Pierre Daher, LBC's
chairman, "we have all the potential we need to compete with the
rest of the world, and attract billions of dollars in advertising
budgets. If we don't do it, someone else will." (26)
Women are
among the winners in this power shift because "the new information
technologies are basically anti-hierarchical and detrimental to
power concentration," explains Nabil Ali, an Arab linguistics and
digital technology expert. "Destroying space and time frontiers ...
these technologies blur the familiar distinctions our civilization
has operated on up to now, such as the separation between student
and teacher, learning and teaching, production and consumption...."
(27) It is precisely the collapse of this latter distinction which
is radically transforming the Arab World.
The irony is
that the camp of pluralism and democracy is rapidly winning in the
Arab World since September 11, not because the left has won the
battle, but because the conservative heads of state and oil princes
who have invested their assets in extremist propaganda, are now
shifting to courting audiences in general and promoting women in
particular. In her assessment of the "New Order of Information in
the Arab Broadcasting System," Tourya Guaaybess makes the ironic
comment that we are witnessing an unexpected "growing market of
political liberalism." (28) In any case, it is startling to realize
that the much longed-for democratic revolution is happening in the
Arab world not because the left has subverted the system but because
authoritarian regimes and oil-lobbies are rapidly realizing that in
a cyber-Islam galaxy, you can only remain in power if you share it
with citizens of both sexes.
10. MBC'S
Money-losing Singing Girls versus Al Jazeera's Female
Stars
According to
the latest news, MBC 's emergency move from London to Dubai was " to
get closer to its viewers so as to arrest its financial decline due
to a catastrophic shrinking of audiences." We want to be closer to
our audience," (29) said Ali Al-Hedeithy, MBC Director General, when
asked to justify his hurried move to Dubai and his decision to
launch a new MBC all-news channel like Al Jazeera. One of MBC's
problems is that Arab female audiences seem to stick with al-
Jazeera because of its rebellious images of femininity.
MBC was
extremely popular when it started in 1991. It used Arabsat to target
the Middle East and North Africa, Eutelsat to reach Europe's 20
millions viewers and ANA (The Arab Network Agency) to recruit an
American audience. MBC was then the only satellite channel, but soon
its "12.5% religious programs, 75.5% entertainment, and only 9.5%
information" (30) got on the Arab viewers' nerves. Consequently,
they deserted it in 1996 when Al Jazeera gave them the opportunity
to see uncensored news twenty-four hours a day. But the other reason
was that MBC's systematic censorship was projected through the
superficiality of its entertainment programs, alienating viewers,
especially women. "These channels' activities were reduced to a
frantic parade of male and female singers" explained Walid Najm, one
of the experts invited to diagnose the viewers' desertion. "One
could say that such channels programmed citizens to hope to achieve
one single objective: to become male or female singers." (31) Other
stations like it, who also violated citizens' right to information
and reduced talk shows with intellectuals to pitiful masquerades,
were deserted as soon as Al Jazeera offered a different image of
both informer and informed.
"MBC set out
originally to be the CNN of the Arab world," explains Ian Ritchie,
its former CEO. Once the channel started losing money, "my mandate
was to change it into a more commercial channel and therefore the
news played less importantly perhaps than entertainment and sport,
because that was what advertisers want to see. That's why I did the
deal to bring the US Champion League to MBC and a deal for "Who
Wants to be a Millionaire?" (32) Entertainment meant promoting
singing and dancing men and women and it proved to be fatal
business-wise, because Middle Eastern women were interested in al
Jazeera's more energetic femininity: "One of Al Jazeera's programs,
"Sports News" (Akhbar Riyadiyyah), has devoted several
episodes to the role of Arab women in sports and has highlighted the
championships that have been won by various female sports figures."
(33) Besides sports, it is the forceful female news anchors who
fascinate both men and women. A news channel such as Al Jazeera,
funded by the Emir of Qatar with the objective of strengthening
civil society and free speech, offered the possibility of becoming
stars to intelligent, articulate speakers and program hosts of both
sexes. Therefore, it is no wonder that MBC shifted assets from its
money-losing entertainment channel to launching a new channel
devoted to information only. To catch up with Al Jazeera, MBC
started looking for smart professional men and women rather than its
usual singers, but it has to compete for such talent with Iran and
the U.S.
11. The
Fascination of Arab Audiences with Strong Female Hosts and War
Correspondents
Promoting
strong female stars has proven to be a fantastic asset for the
Saudis' most threatening TV rival. Al Jazeera is winning crowds
every night through the eloquence of its news anchors Jumana Nammour
and Khaduja Bin Guna, and economics expert Farah al-Baraqawi. While
state-owned televisions and oil-funded channels traditionally
censored their staff and denied them the right to decide freely
about their programs' content and their guests, Al Jazeera's success
is due precisely to the freedom its programmers and speakers enjoy,
which allow them to become credible communicators. "Channels that
want to be viable are required to rely much more heavily on
high-impact 'brands' and product lines. Al Jazeera demonstrated the
value of such assets when it developed a range of programs whose
titles and presenters have become household names inside and outside
the Arab world," explains Naomi Sakr, the author of "Satellite
Realism: Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle
East." (34) The most famous reporters in the Middle East today are
probably the Palestine-based Al Jazeera reporters Shirin Abu 'Aqla
and Jivara al-Badri, who are admired for their courage and
professionalism. "History will remember that day when there was no
one to speak up in the entire Arab nation, from the Atlantic to the
Persian Gulf, but women such as Shirin Abu 'Aqla and Jivara al Badri
and Leila Aouda," comments Ali Aziz, the columnist of the Egyptian
magazine Al-Nuqqad ("The Critics"), "while male leaders and
gallon-hat wearing generals have disappeared from our sight and
hearing." (35)
How to explain
this sudden passion of the supposedly macho Arabs for Al Jazeera's
powerful women. While Amin Hussein, a mass communication expert,
gives a technological answer to the question (the satellites'
empowerment of women), the artist Hisham Ghanem offers a more
sophisticated psychoanalytical explanation-the Arab male's
identification with the woman as the victim who is taking revenge on
her aggressors. For Amin Hussein, "Arab satellite services have
responded to the demand of Arab women to portray their true image
and role in society to balance the common stereotype in the West of
the downtrodden Arab woman without rights and without a role to play
other than daughter, wife and mother." According to his analysis,
"Talk shows, news, and programs feature interviews with female
leaders in business, government, politics, and diplomacy ... rather
than covering only their role in the household of food preparation
and as sex symbols in television commercials and video-clips." (36)
But for Ahmed Ghanem, an artist who is more interested in esthetics
and hidden emotions, technology does not explain it all. Ahmed
Ghanem was one among the dozen intellectuals whom the Kuwaiti
magazine Al Funun ("The Arts") invited to contribute to their
summer 2002 issue on decoding the mystery of the Fada'iyyat. Unlike
our much more publicized extremists, Ghanem feels empowered by a
woman's strength. As both an artist and a designer, he goes into
detail in his study on "The Esthetics of the Private Satellite
Channels." He argues: "If we consider the laws and psychological
mechanisms which in each satellite channel define for the female
speaker the code for dressing and expressing oneself, as well as the
way she uses the screen's space to unfold her personality, then we
cannot escape noticing that the aggressive (hujumi) style of the Al
Jazeera female speakers is a very distinctive kind of beauty which
is very specific to them and makes them stand out when compared to
other channels, especially if we remember that Al Jazeera is a news
(as opposed to entertainment) channel, and that these women's job is
to inform the viewer. The fact that the majority of this channel's
female speakers are far from being young and insecure and display on
the contrary maturity in both age and emotional equilibrium gives
them a cerebral charisma and audacity which exercises a particular
enchantment on the viewer. The Al Jazeera female speakers exude a
spell-binding fascination which transcends physical attraction."
(37)
Could it be
that Al Jazeera's powerful women have such an attraction for Arab
men because they trigger childhood fantasies when they enjoyed their
mothers' story-telling and improvisations on the "1001 Nights"?
Could it be that the satellite is reviving Arab men's childhood
universe where Scheherazade, the powerful female inventor of
adventures, empowered them as children? What is certain, according
to Ghanem, is that by contrast to Al Jazeera where women's strength
reflects the freedom of speech they enjoy as journalists on that
channel, the superficial beauty of the fragile female speakers in
entertainment channels reflects a passivity which does not excite
him as a man, if only because, as he says, passivity "mirrors the
rules of the game on those televisions. Rules which reveal that only
the masters are players." (38) What is extraordinary about Ahmed
Ghanem's analysis of digital Islam's new game, is that, as a male,
he does not identify with the masters, the princes or ayatollahs who
can afford to buy satellites, but on the contrary, he feels his own
fate to be linked to that of the women. In my view, it is this
rejection of the archaic role of the dominant male, whose
masculinity increases with women's passivity, which is the news in
digital Islam.
Conclusion
The novelty in
this digital Islam galaxy is that many Arab men craving their own
emancipation from authoritarian censorship have become alert enough
to disconnect power from sex. Many of the male viewers of satellite
broadcasting do not seem to think that their masculinity is
threatened if women show their power. The problem now is how to
interpret this new phenomenon.
Is this only a
transient phase or are we witnessing a civilizational shift in the
perception of the difference? Are the satellite-connected Muslims
growing to perceive the sexual difference as enriching? Are they
even preparing themselves to embark on a less threatening global
universality? Is the satellite reviving the cosmic vision of the
Sufis, the mystics of Islam who perceive the difference as
enriching?
For the Sufi,
the stranger (the different other), be it the woman or the
foreigner, is not a threatening enemy. On the contrary, Sufis
celebrate diversity as an enchanting display of human complexity in
their concept of the cosmic mirror. "The mirror is like a single
eye, while the forms (it reveals) are various in the eye of the
observer" is how Ibn 'Arabi, born in Murcia (Spain) in 560 of the
Hijra (1165 of the Christian calendar), encouraged his
contemporaries to enjoy foreigners as fabulous reflections of the
same divine being. "The essence of primordial substance is single,
but it is multiple in respect to the outer forms it bears with its
essence." (39) It is not only femininity alone which emerged in
satellite broadcasting as a challenge, it is also the question of
minorities, be they religious, or ethnic, such as the Kurds and the
Berbers, which are claimed as positive enrichment. Morocco has
declared Berber to be a national language and established an
institute to enhance it as a vital dimension of a dynamic society.
(40) The satellite has changed the frame in which the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict is addressed in such a way that
exclusion of either party is ruled out: "Palestine-Israel: Peace or
a Racist System?" (41) This how the influential Palestinian
journalist Marwan Bishara frames the question, ruling out any
extremist alternative which is a negation of peace. It is no more
"does the state of Israel have the right to exist or not" which is
at stake, but how can harmony be engineered from the difference that
is the challenge everyone is facing.
As for the
Sufis and women, it is no wonder that male Sufis celebrate
femininity as energy, an opportunity for men to blossom and thrive.
For Ibn 'Arabi, the female lover is "tayyar" or, literally, endowed
with wings, an idea that the Muslim miniature painters often tried
to capture. Sufi men seem to explore the subconscious of the Muslim
psyche where myths and legends, sacred and profane, endow women with
extraordinary powers. From the dazzling Queen of Sheba to the
irresistible Zuleikha in the sacred Koran, to horse-riding Shirin in
the Persian legends and the subversive Scheherazade in Arabic tales,
to modern women artists today, the feminine stands as a challenge in
Islamic art. This brings us to understand better why intellectually
dazzling female Al Jazeera hosts enchant male viewers.
But there is
one final emotional nuance I would like to add which seems to me
pertinent if we are to grasp the nascent trends of the digital Islam
galaxy: Sufis were very popular in a medieval Islam which had to
face the constant attacks of Christian crusaders because they
addressed the question of fear. Sufis helped people in medieval
Islam to face fear of the unknown by diving into knowledge." The
human being can master his anxieties by channeling his energies into
learning ... The issue is confusion. Confusion creates anxiety
(hayra), and anxiety creates movement and movement is life." (42)
Fear is OK,
says the Sufis, because it triggers in you the desire to know what
frightens you. In so doing, it produces a positive movement within.
The worst is to be petrified by one's fears to the point of being
paralyzed and forced to shrink inward. And anxiety is indeed the
daily share of many of us, Muslims or not, who witness the
apocalyptic vanishing of our familiar frontiers. TBS.
This
abridged version of THE SATELLITE, THE PRINCE AND SCHEHERAZADE: The
Rise of Women in Digital Islam by Fatema Mernissi, Copyright (C)
2003 by Fatema Mernissi, is reprinted by permission of the Edite
Kroll Literary Agency Inc. All rights reserved.
Endnotes
1.
Mohammad Mahmud "Darura am ighra? Dirama Ramadan" ("Necessity or
Seduction? Ramadan Films") in the TV Programs insert of Al-Ahram
Al-'Arabi, Issue 299, December 2002, p. 18. Al-Ahram Al-'Arabi
is a Cairo-based avant-garde magazine. Website:
www.ahram.org.eg/arabi.
2. Zaynab
Muntashir "Qasim Amin wa-Faris Bila Jawad: bayna harim as-sultan
wal-sultan nafsih" ("Qasim Amin and Rider Without a Horse: Between
the Sultan's Harem and the Sultan Himself") in the Television column
of the magazine Rose El Youssef, Issue 3885, November 23-29,
2002.
3. Husam 'Abd
al-Hadi "The Empire of Women: of 80,000 Employed in Radio and
Television, 50,000 are Women," a survey published in the Ramadan
issue of the Egyptian magazine Rose El Youssef, Issue 3886,
November 30-December 6, 2002, pp. 43-45.
4.Tariq Ali in
his Suhun Fada'iyya ("Satellite Dishes") column in Al-Nuqqad,
June 17, 2002. Al-Nuqqad is a Pan-Arab political and cultural weekly
magazine with offices in London and Lebanon. Website:
www.annouqad.com
5. Jamal
al-Kashki "The Halal-Haram Fatwas" (Fatawi al-Halal wal-Haram) in
the special Ramadan Issue of Al-Ahram Al-Arabi, Issue 295,
November 16, 2002, p. 73.
6. "Aftahu
fi-l amri, abana lahu .... and the verse of the Quran yastaftunaka
qul Allahu yuftikum [Sura 4 Al-Nisa' ("Women"), Verse 176] ay
yas'alunaka su'ala ta'allumin ...." Ibn Manzur Lisan
al-'Arab, Dar al Maarif, Cairo 1979 edition, volume 5, page
3348. Ibn Manzur was born in Cairo in 1232 and died in
1311.
7. Jadal, the art of interactive debate central to the
spread of Islam as an oral communication strategy (before the
introduction of paper by the Persian Wazir Ja'far al-Barmaki
strengthened the despotic bureaucracy of the Abbasid dynasty). It
was the object of a whole school of dialogue training manuals such
as the 13th-century Ibn 'Uqayl's The Book of Jadal According to
the Way of the Theologians (Kitab al-jadal 'ala tariqat
al-fuqaha). Maktabat al-Thaqafa al-Diniyya, Port Said, Egypt, n.d.
The author died in 510 A.H. (13th century). Today, we witness a
renaissance of jadal, and books teaching dialogues are becoming
best-sellers again. Such is the case with my Moroccan contemporary
Taha Abderrahman's book On the Tradition of Dialogue (Fi usul
al-hiwar), Al Markaz al-Thaqafi al-'Arabi, Casablanca, second
edition, 2002), which has been reprinted in response to the great
demand..
8. Jamal
al-Kashki, idem.
9. Peter Mandaville "Digital Islam: Changing
the Boundaries of Religious Knowledge" in the International
Institute of the Study of Islam in the Modern World Newsletter,
March 1999, pp. 1 and 23. This newsletter is a tri-annual
publication of Leiden University, Netherlands.
Website:http://isim.leidenuniv.nl
10.
"maqsiduhum maqsidun wahid" Lisan al-'Arab, Volume 1, p.
134.
11. Peter
Mandaville "Digital Islam" op.cit. To get a quick glimpse of the
speedy digital Arab galaxy build-up, the following two books are
quite useful: René Naba: Guerre des Ondes…Guerre des Religions: La
Bataille Hertzienne dans le Ciel Méditerrannéan, L'Harmatan, Paris
1998 and Mohamed El-Nawawy and Adel Iskandar Al Jazeera: How the
Free Arab News Network Scooped the World and Changed The Middle
East. Westview, Perseus Books Group, Massachusetts,
2002.
12. Naomi Sakr
"Arab Satellite Channels Between State and Private Ownership:
Current and Future Implications" in Transnational Broadcasting
Studies Issue 9 (TBS 9), Winter-Fall 2002, p 3. Website:
www.tbsjournal.com.
13. Naomi
Sakr, op.cit.
14. Hussein
Amin "Arab Women and Satellite Broadcasting" in Transnational
Broadcasting Studies Issue 6 (TBS 6), Spring/Summer 2001.
Website: www.tbsjournal.com. Amin Hussein is chairman of the
Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the American
University in Cairo and has produced impressive work on the topic of
new technologies.
15. Driss
Bennani: "L'Iran Drague Nos Journalistes" in the Moroccan
weekly Tel Quel, Issue 46, October 5-11, 2002.
16. "Who
Controls LBC?" According to Mohamed El-Nawawy and Adel Iskandar, LBC
will be controlled by a board nominated by ministers and officials
close to the Syrian government and not by Rafik Al Hariri, as many
think. According to them, Rafik Al Hariri partially owns another
Lebanese TV channel, Future TV (op. cit.).
17. Assya Y.
Ahmed "The Closing of Murr TV: Challenge or Corrective for Satellite
Broadcasting in Lebanon" in Transnational Broadcasting Studies
9 (TBS 9), Winter-Fall 2002. Website:
www.tbsjournal.com.
18. Mohammed El-Nawawy and Adel Iskandar,
op.cit., p. 39.
19. "Akbar
safaqa Sa'udiyya-Lubnaniyya li-damj at-tilifizyun bis-suhuf"
("The Biggest Deal between Saudi Arabia and Lebanon to Merge
Audiovisual with Printed Media") in Al-Nuqqad, March 2002, p.
16 (cover story).
20. Duncan
Campbell "US Plans TV Station to Rival Al Jazeera" in The Guardian,
Friday November 23, 2001.
21. David
Chambers "Will Hollywood Go to War?" in Transnational
Broadcasting Studies 8 (TBS 8), Spring-Summer 2002. Website:
www.tbsjournal.com
22. Abdallah
Schleifer "Super News Center Setting Up in London for Al-Hayat and
LBC: An Interview with Jihad Khazen and Salah Nemett" in
Transnational Broadcasting Studies 9 (TBS 9), Winter-Fall
2002. Website: www.tbsjournal.com.
23.
Al-Nuqqad, op.cit.
24. The source
for the statistics on illiteracy rates is the UNESCO Statistical
Yearbook for 1999, Table II.5.1.: "Estimated number of adult
illiterates and distribution by gender and by region.1980, 1999 and
2000."
25. Naomi Sakr
"Arab Satellite Channels between State and Private Ownership"
op.cit.
26. Chris
Forrester "Middle East TV Continues to Baffle and Bewilder" in
Transnational Broadcasting Studies 9 (TBS 9), Fall-Winter
2002. Website: www.tbsjournal.com. Chris Forrester is a broadcast
journalist and the author of Digital Television Broadcasting
published in June 1998 by Philips Business
Information.
27. Nabil Ali "Thuna'iyyat al-asr: al-sifr
wal-wahid" ("The Century's Duality: the Zero and the One") in
Wijhaat Nazar ("Points of View, an Egyptian monthly review),
Volume 4, Number 44, September 2002, pp. 34-40. Website:
www.wighaatnazar.com.
28. Tourya
Guaaybess "A New Order of Information in The Arab Broadcasting
System" inTransnational Broadcasting Studies 9 (TBS 9),
Fall-Winter 2002. Website: www.tbsjournal.com.
29. Abdallah
Schleifer "An Interview with Ali Al-Hedeithy, the Director General
of MBC" inTransnational Broadcasting Studies 9 (TBS 9),
Fall-Winter 2002. Website: www.tbsjournal.com.
30."12, 5% de
son programme à des émissions religieuses, contre 75, 5 pour les
variétés et 9, 5 pour cent pour l'information …." René Naba op. cit.
p. 85.
31.Walid Najm
"Cultural Programs: The frequency is ridiculously low and the
content is totally divorced from reality" in Al-Funun (a
Kuwaiti magazine), Issue 6, June 2001. p.39. The issue is devoted to
a survey of Arab satellite channels.
32. Abdallah
Schleifer "Interview with Ian Ritchie, Former CEO of MBC" in
Transnational Broadcasting Studies 7 (TBS 7), Fall-Winter
2001. Website: www.tbsjournal.com.
33. Mohamed
El-Nawawy and Adel Iskandar op cit., p. 59
34. Naomi
Sakr, op.cit.
35. Tariq Ali,
op.cit..
36. Hussein
Amin, op. cit.
37. Ahmed
Ghanem Shakl al Fada'iyyat al Khassa Yataqqadam ("The
Aesthetics of Private Satellite Channels Are Improving") in
Al-Funun 6, June 2001, p. 38. Website:
www.kuwaitculture.org
38. Ahmed
Ghanem, op. cit.
39. Ibn 'Arabi
Fusus al-Hikam ("The Bezels of Wisdom"). The English
translation used here is that of R. W. Austin: "The Bezels of
Wisdom," Paulist Press, New Jersey, USA, 1980. The quote is on page
233. The original text of the first quote reads fal-mir'atu
'aynun wahidatun, was-suwaru kathiratun fi 'ayn al-ra'i. Dar
al-Kitab al-'Arabi, Beirut, Lebanon, date not indicated, p. 184.
40. Since
Berber was declared a national language, you notice regularly in the
news stands magazines with its unfamiliar alphabet challenging you
to learn its mysterious code, such as Le Monde Amazight and Tasafut
("Candlelight").
41. Marwan
Bishara Falastin-Isra'il: salam am nizam 'unsuri?
("Palestine-Israel: Peace or Racist Regime?"). Cairo, Markaz
al-Qahira li-Dirasat Huquq al-Insan, 2001.
42. My
translation of the following quote: Fal-Huda huwa an yahtadi al
insan ila l-hayrati fa ya'lam. Inna l-amra hayratun wal-hayratu
qalaq wa harakah, wal-harakatu hayat. Fala sukuna fala mawt, wa
wujud, fala 'adam in Fusus al-Hikam (p. 200). TBS |