EGYPTIAN vocalist Amr Diab is talented, sexy ... read on ...

2005-06-04

EGYPTIAN vocalist Amr Diab is talented, sexy and the wealthiest Arab in show business. His music videos are hits from Abu Dhabi to Casablanca. He broke out of Arab pop's ghetto last month - big time - by recording a bilingual duet with Jennifer Lopez. There's even talk of a movie deal for Diab (hopefully a more promising vehicle than a sequel to Gigli).

But one thing the crooner from Cairo will not do, at least not yet, is run for parliament in his country's elections. All the widespread rumours to the contrary - including Arabic press reports that he recently went canvassing in his home town of Port Said - are apparently false. "I was shocked at what the newspapers printed," Diab told the Arabic language women's magazine Laha. "I am totally busy at this time preparing my new album." Diab's ambitions, the story added, do not include politics.

Why so much fuss over the political aspirations - or non-aspirations - of an Arab pop star? For anyone concerned about the impact of religion on Arab governments today, a secular sex symbol winning an election in Egypt would be good news indeed. But such a prospect has long been little more than an amusing pipe dream in the Middle East, unlike in other parts of the world where entertainers from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Eva Peron have long played key political roles, using their storytelling skills to mould popular opinion. In Arab countries, Islamist dogma and the excesses of nationalism have conspired to keep entertainers, and especially their wayward ideals, out of government.

Now there are signs that Middle Eastern entertainers are beginning to exercise political influence. While Western powers and media have been understandably fixated on Arabs with guns and ammo, a different cultural stream has grown strong in the region. Through sell-out concerts from North Africa to the Gulf and video clips on Arab satellite television, a new generation of entertainers is challenging the forces of cultural conservatism for Arab hearts and minds in a way that older crooners and actors failed to do.

Although Diab may be disinclined to seek office this election year, his influence - and the influence of his fellow entertainers - on Arab politics is undeniable. By entering public life, Diab could change Middle Eastern politics. Even if he won't, it seems only a matter of time before someone rises to the challenge.

In the developing world, show business has often played a central role in politics. Consider the Philippines, a country with a film industry dating back to the 1930s. Movie star Joseph Estrada rose to the nation's highest office in 1998 before being booted out over bribes.

Or take India, where politics was altered by the social impact of a TV show. Back in the late '80s, Indian national TV broadcast a 78-episode weekly soap opera based on the Hindu Ramayana epic. The show had an estimated 100 million viewers and is widely credited with uniting the country's disparate regions around a militant national myth. The right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP rose to power in the early '90s using the warrior king Rama, featured in the TV show, as its mascot.

Not coincidentally, scores of TV and film stars were ushered into regional and national politics. In last year's elections, nearly two dozen actors ran for parliament, many aligned with the BJP.

If Indian entertainers could demolish their country's left-wing status quo, it's tempting to ask whether Arab crooners could help do the same for their region's right-wing status quo. The question is: What big story could Arab stars of stage and screen come together to tell?

There would be obstacles to overcome: for starters, Arab storytelling, as an industry, hasn't been viable for decades. The region's capital of film-making used to be Egypt, which at one time boasted the third largest film output in the world after India and the US. The Egyptian film industry churned out 70 movies a year in the early '50s; today it produces so few films per year - probably fewer than 10 - that each one is a news event.

This flop reflects a victory of politics over business. Many musicals and slapstick comedies of the '30s and '40s were lucrative hits across the Arab world. Indeed, they elevated Egypt's music and culture to new heights vis-a-vis its Arab neighbours, and sometimes outsold films from the US that also played in local markets.

But politicians in Cairo came to view local cinema as too lewd and too similar to Hollywood imports, a bad rap for any business in the heady days of anti-colonialism. Boycotts of Egyptian movie houses in the '50s received support from the Muslim Brotherhood and nationalists, and films were compared with poison. By 1963, Egypt's entire film industry had been nationalised and turned over to the "National Guidance" ministry. The content changed starkly, funding plummeted and in 1970, the year Egypt's economy collapsed, production ground to a screeching halt. Critics, East and West, tend to praise nationalist-era films as serious cinema and pooh-pooh the bawdier black-and-white musicals. But when the market votes, the old stuff wins; the Egyptian movies that repeat most often on Arab satellite TV today are overwhelmingly those that pre-date nationalisation.

While film was assaulted and ultimately hijacked by the state, secular music in Arab capitals suffered the disdain of conservative society. All four schools of Sunni Islam, and some Shia clerics, severely discourage believers from listening to women's singing voices and melodic instruments. Though this ban is undoubtedly honoured more in the breach than the observance, it has been a rallying cry for Islamist movements.

It's not surprising, therefore, that the greatest figures of 20th-century Arabic music threw their weight behind secular Arab nationalism. Umm Kulthum, the diva of Egyptian song, was a kindred spirit of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser; her immensely popular songs often served to advance the political project of pan-Arabism. The great composer and performer Mohamed Abdel Wahab routinely sang the state's praises as well. As ornaments to the establishment, these storytellers reached great heights of acclaim. Had they chosen to be dissidents, they would have been on their own in a most unforgiving environment.

A similar dynamic played out even more starkly in Lebanon, another capital of Arab pop music, during that country's 15-year civil war. With a handful of notable exceptions - the beloved singer Fayrouz, for example, managed to survive the war as a unifying symbol of Lebanon - most vocalists faced enormous pressure to sing in praise of whichever ethnic faction they had been born into. Witness Majida al Rumi, early in her career a pan-Arab pop star. During the war she became associated with her extended family's Christian Phalangist politics, a stigma that took her years to shake off.

Between the pressure of the state, the intrusion of Islamism and the baggage of ethnicity, Arab pop culture as a locus of power took a serious beating during the past few decades. That is, until the dawn of the 21st century, when the region's pop stars found a way to hit back.

Most American reporting on Arab media spotlights the banter of politicians, clerics, protesters and military officials, as presented on the region's news channels. But if one really wanted to convey a cross-section of Middle Eastern TV today, most of the verbiage would have to be concerned with scantily clad women and buff men, singing suggestively to each other in Arabic - often while gyrating horizontally and vertically - in MTV-style video clips. I'd venture to say that for the region's 30-and-under set - the majority of Arab populations - these clips, together with soccer games, command at least three-quarters of viewers' attention.

One man who does not shrink from the challenge of parsing this phenomenon is Marc Lynch, by day a sober and prolific scholar of Arab politics at Williams College, Massachusetts. His blog includes translation and analysis of telling moments in Arab pop culture, as well as links to opinion columns on the subject by the region's leading intellectuals. He files these entries under the heading "Nancy Ajram Culture Wars". This reflects his view that a legion of mostly female pop stars, exemplified by the sultry belly dancer and vocalist Nancy Ajram, are fighting Muslim clerics for - and possibly winning - the soul of Arab youth via satellite TV.

An excerpt: "Whether it's Nancy Ajram performing to an alleged crowd of 100,000 in Morocco, or Haifa Wehbe 'dominating' male Arabic pop superstar Raghib Alama ... or the Saudi winner of Star Academy 2 being hauled in by the religious police for inflaming Saudi women to improper behaviour, no objective observer of the Arab media could possibly avoid writing about this stuff."

A rally against video clips by Islamist students in Alexandria; a public-decency lawsuit by a United Arab Emirates lawyer against a Lebanese satellite channel; a new "family values" association in Qatar that calls on the public to "stand up to the culture of the video clip": if a movement gets to be defined by its opponents, then "the culture of the video clip" is surely the name of a new movement.

Anti-video-clip rhetoric, which assails pop stars and their producers as purveyors of a foreign evil, sounds like '50s Cairo all over again. Egyptian critic Abdel Wahab el Messiri, for example, writes: "The video clip embodies a consumerism detached from all ethical, societal and national affiliations. The songs often have Indian, American or European settings; the girls are often blonde or dressed in foreign fashion." But what a difference 50 years makes. This time, Arab governments are either ill-equipped to suppress the medium or simply have too many other things to worry about.

The qualities that critics of the clips rail against are singled out for praise by the medium's admirers.

One of the first American writers to point out the political implications of clips as a cultural movement was Reason senior editor Charles Paul Freund. In 2003, he observed: "For nearly a century, a series of utopian political systems has been advanced in the region to attempt to break this cycle of conflict and stagnation: Pan-Arabism, Baathism, Nasserism, Islamism, etc. These have all failed, sometimes disastrously. What may yet work in the region is what has worked elsewhere for centuries: commercialism that does not transmit a regime's utopian dreams but addresses the personal dreams of the audience."

The big story Arab entertainers are telling involves a repudiation of collective labels and ideologies and a basic empowerment of the individual. If Lopez's duet partner Diab, or any other entertainer, takes that story to the voters, the Middle East may never be the same again.

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