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By Lindsay Wise,
TBS managing editor
Islamists have
been some of the most ardent foes of reality programs on Arab
television, forcing MBC’s Al Ra’is (Big Brother) off the
air and staging protests or boycotts against LBC’s Star
Academy and Al Wadi (The Farm). But now it seems at
least some Islamists have decided to adopt a different approach: If
you can’t beat them, join them.
As producers
prepare for the 2006 launch of a new Islamic channel, Al Risella
(The Message), they are scheduling several reality shows in prime
time. It is part of a heavy dose of "ethical" entertainment
programming, designed to compete both with religious channels like
Iqraa and Al Magd and with more liberal variety channels like
Saudi-owned MBC and Beirut-based LBC.
“What’s
presented now on TV is not reflecting the society,” says Ahmed Abu
Haiba, the manager of Risella in Cairo. “This is a new field and a
lot of people are searching for this—something you can watch and
enjoy but keep your values.” Iqraa and Al Magd are “too dull” and
general variety channels like MBC are “too liberated” for
conservative Arab society, Abu Haiba explains, drawing a line on a
piece of paper with Iqraa and Magd on one end, and MBC and LBC on
the other. “We’re here in the gray area,” he says, writing “Al
Risella” in the middle of the two polls.
“You have to
attract an audience,” Abu Haiba goes on. “The people who are working
in the Islamic media, they thought that by just putting a sheikh in
front of the camera, it’s enough. The people should listen to the
Quran, they should listen to what the prophet says.” But Abu Haiba
argues it is not enough, especially when Islamists are competing
with secular entertainment channels for viewers.
“I consider
myself a religious man,” he says. “But I don’t spend all my time in
front of sheikhs speaking about the Quran because I don’t like the
way they’re speaking. I’m bored! It’s natural. I do not consider
myself against Islam if I don’t want to watch a sheikh talking. If
you got the most religious man on earth and brought him to listen to
the Quran, I don’t think he could stand it for more than five or six
hours. And if he’s such a religious man, he would just listen to
Quran for spiritual reasons. But we are speaking about media now,
about television, and we are sitting in our living room with our
family, trying to see something nice. So I have to present to this
family something nice. That’s why now, on Risella, we are starting
to think more about entertainment.”
Accordingly,
Risella’s lineup will include comedy, late-night talk shows, game
shows, documentaries, soap operas, video clips and women’s programs
starring veiled pop stars and actresses, all of which must meet an
“ethical” standard that producers deem to be in accord with the
region’s religious and cultural values.
This goes for
reality TV as well, of course. Instead of sexy crooners cohabitating
in a mansion and competing for a record deal, Risella envisions a
Super Star for Islamic singers performing wholesome songs
about faith and family like those of hot young Muslim singing
sensation Sami Youssif. The audience will be asked to assess the
singers not only for their talent, but also their values. “We’re
looking for people who have ethics, not just religion,” says Abu
Haiba, adding, with a smile, that “belly dancing naked women will
not be accepted.”
Another
prime-time reality show slated to air on Risella is Tariq
al-Risella (The Path of the Message), a program in which a
group of young men will take a Road Rules-style trip across
the globe, following the historic path of Islam’s spread, from
Medina to Syria to Spain and elsewhere. Each talented in a different
field, such as poetry, music, or acting, the youths will travel with
a camera crew and undertake challenges in different villages and
cities where they stop to learn about Islamic history and teachings.
In the final stage, there’s a prize, yet-to-be announced.
A third show,
modeled loosely on Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, is slated
to star the popular Kuwaiti preacher Tarik Suwaidan, who will teach
a group of young people leadership skills, testing them through
practical exercises and allowing the audience to vote who among the
contestants is the best leader. Although details are still being
worked out, Abu Haiba says the plan is for the winners to be awarded
with chances to work at big companies or research institutes.
Other programs
on Risella may not be full-fledged reality shows, but many of them
have “reality” elements or other interactive features built into
them. As Joe Khalil notes elsewhere in this volume, “As a
programming genre, ‘reality’ has become such an infatuation that the
mere mentioning of the word triggers smiles throughout corporate
advertising meeting rooms.” The same concept works for Islamist
media projects and their creators, who are eager to attract all Arab
and Muslim audiences, especially those who might not otherwise be
interested in tuning in to a “religious” channel. In fact, Abu Haiba
would be happy if Risella could escape the religious label
completely and stand on its own as an attractive product in an
increasingly competitive market.
“An Islamic
program doesn’t have to speak about the Quran or the Prophet,” Abu
Haiba told TBS. “I consider that speaking about friendship is
Islamic, speaking about love is Islamic, about sex is Islamic. What
matters is what I’m going to do behind that. The values. I think
this is the real border to differentiate between Islamic material or
not, that I consider that Islamic material should have a value
behind it.”
Risella is
gambling that there’s a niche for such value-based entertainment
programming in the Arab satellite milieu and they’re not the only
channel that is ready to make that bet. In fact, one of the first
networks to get into the “ethical” reality TV trend was secular
Dubai TV with its 2005 program Green Light, a charity
reality show that followed a team of four young people every week as
they tackled a different philanthropic project, such as staging a
fund-raising concert to benefit Palestinian refugees, collecting
food for the poor, or sending school supplies to needy Iraqi
children—all without a budget. "The atmosphere on set was really
great, " said Feyrouz Seihal, one of the show's producers. "So much
positive energy." Although Green Light's ratings do not yet warrant
a second season, other secular channels are taking note of such
proactive reality shows and beginning to follow suit.
According to MBC
programming director Abdelfatah El-Masry, his network’s reality TV
offerings this year reflect a new trend of producing reality shows
perceived as being more sensitive to Arab religious and cultural
values. MBC’s last two major reality productions were The
Investor, based on The Apprentice, and Min
Jedid (Starting Over), a show about a group of women between
the ages of 19 and 50 who live in the same house and try to start
their lives over with the aid of life coaches, psychologists,
dieticians, educators and stylists. Starting Over was such
a success that MBC is planning a second season.
“Well, first of
all we’re a family network, so this is one thing,” El-Masry told
TBS. “Second, I think these shows are doing well and they’re
feel-good type of shows so they have a better impact among viewers
and on people. It’s a trend that now a lot of stations are moving
into it. It has to do with making people feel good and creating
something for themselves. Plus, you still have the reality
element.”
El-Masry denies
that MBC, whose first venture into reality TV ended with the forced
cancellation of Big Brother when images of unmarried men
and women sharing the same home in Bahrain proved too much for Arab
audiences, now has a specific set of ethical guidelines for its
reality programs. But he admits that there are ground rules.
Producers and executives try to choose projects that “fit our
society more.”
Shows “have to
be acceptable to the Islamic and the Arab world, and present
something with good taste, that is decent, not indecent,” he says.
“This basically means avoiding as much as you can issues or
appearances related to sexual situations or offending people on
religious grounds.”
To that end,
MBC’s next reality show, currently in production, is a version of
the American weight-loss competition program The Biggest
Loser, but MBC has renamed it The Biggest Winner. “We
wanted to keep it positive, not to add a negative twist,” explains
El-Masry. “In the Arab world they perceive these things somewhat
differently… I think the programs that we’ve been creating or that
we’re doing now, they’re more or less feel-good type of shows.” Such
programs are not just a good moral choice for the network, he says.
They also are good business. “I think people are adapting to this
and actually these programs are getting good ratings.”
The emergence of
an “ethical” reality TV trend reflects a larger political and
cultural negotiation taking place between socially conservative
Islamists and more liberal secular elements in the Arab world. Both
are struggling to define the norms people live by in society, or, to
put it more precisely in this case, to define whose version of
“reality” is more authentically “real.”
The
entertainment industry has long been a nexus of this debate. The
cases of Al Ra’is, Star Academy clearly
demonstrate the effect of the Islamist “backlash” against reality TV
production on secular entertainment networks. For such channels, a
compromise can be found in the rise of ‘ethical’ reality shows at
MBC, Dubai TV and other secular networks. But it is a game of
give-and-take, not a straightforward cultural tug-of-war with a
clear winner and loser. These networks’ successes in adapting the
genre of reality TV for Arab audiences have had their influence on
the Islamists as well. Several years ago, many Islamist leaders were
busy condemning actresses and pop singers and calling for them to
veil and retire from the “immoral” media. Now channels like Risella
are bringing many of these former stars out of retirement to host a
variety of entertainment and talk show programs. But the return of
retired actresses in the service of Islamic media, like the
appropriation the reality genre, is not simply a concession; it is a
solid marketing strategy.
“The Islamists
for a long, long time considered the media as something forbidden,
haram, so you didn’t have any Islamic productions in this
field,” Abu Haiba says. “And when we started to make Islamic media,
we depended for a very long time on a very traditional way, some
artificial way to present Islam, and it was far from exciting or
interesting. Just the sheikh is sitting on a chair and there is one
camera fixed on his head and he is just saying a lot of things.”
This led to Islamic media misrepresenting itself and its message, as
well as failing to attract a large audience share, he says. “So now
at Risella, it is our hope that we can make this transition, that we
can make Islamic media not just as good, but much, much more
interesting than the most interesting programs on other
channels.”
Lindsay
Wise is managing editor of TBS. She has a B.A.
in English and Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia and
an M.Phil. in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St. Antony's
College, University of Oxford, where she earned distinction for her
thesis on popular Egyptian da'iya Amr Khaled. Titled "Words from the
Heart: New Forms of Islamic Preaching in Egypt," the thesis explored
the recent rise of “tele-Islamists” through satellite television and
the Internet. In addition to her work with TBS, she also is a
freelance journalist in Cairo.
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