Finding a Place for Islam: Egyptian Television Serials and the National Interest

Finding a Place for Islam: Egyptian Television Serials and the National Interest

Lila Abu-Lughod

fter something of a hiatus, anthropologists have returned to questions about A the making of national culture. Inspired in part by debates generated by Benedict Anderson’s (1983) notion of nations as “imagined communities,” they are interrogating the processes by which national ideologies are constructed, internalized, and contested (e.g., Ferguson and Gupta 1992; Foster 1991; Fox 1990). In the postcolonial world, mass media have played crucial roles in these processes, with governments making control over media a priority and betraying their anxieties in the continuing controversies at UNESCO over the free flow of information and in such practices as positioning tanks and armed guards outside places like the Television and Radio Building in Cairo.’ That so many successful revolutions or coups d‘etat have been marked by the seizure of air waves suggests that governments’ fears are justified. Yet anthropologists are only beginning to examine the rich cultural forms of television, radio, and video, not to mention the print media that Anderson considered so pivotal in the development of national sentiments.

Fieldwork in Egypt in 1989-90 was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship from the American Research Center in Egypt and a grant for advanced research from the American Council of Learned Scholars/Social Science Research Council Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East. I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Kamal Abdel Malik and Maha Mahfouz Abdel-Rahman in researching the Egyptian press. Also helpful were critical readings by Tim Mitchell, Unni Wikan, and anonymous reviewers for Public Culture of earlier versions.

1. For discussions of the UNESCO controversies see Mattelart, Delcourt, and Mattelart (1988) and Michaels (1983).

Public Culture 1993, 5: 493-513 01993 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0899-2363/93/0503~1$01 .OO

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I want to explore here the”re1ationship of Egyptian television serials to national political contests as a way of engaging the methodological and theoretical chal- lenges that studies of the politics of media pose. The crucial importance of television serials is obvious to anyone who has been to Egypt. Walk down the streets of Cairo or the lanes of any village during the early evening hours and you will see the flicker of television screens and hear the dialogue and music (usually melodramatic) of the current serial. Read the newspapers and you will find articles and cartoons that can only be understood if you were following these serials known as the musulsulur. Easily the most popular of television genres, these Egyptian serials, usually lasting fifteen days, seem to set the very rhythms of national life. Given the extensiveness of access to television combined with the limits of broadcasting to only half a day and on only two full-fledged channels, one could argue that the audience might include a majority of Egypt’s people; the highest-quality serials are aired during the holy month of Ramadan (when people have the most leisure).

If the serials produce a national community and television in Egypt, as in most countries, is state-controlled, one needs to ask how the entertainment provided to these large audiences that cross boundaries of class, gender, and region articulates with national politics, policies, and cultural identities. In studies of media in the non-Western world alarms are often sounded about cultural imperialism in the domination of national culture and production by international imports (usually from the U.S. and Britain). But Egypt, much like India, Brazil, and Mexico, produces and even exports a healthy amount of film and television programming of its own. Within Egypt, the local productions are more popular and widely viewed than imported films and television serials (which are subtitled and there- fore largely inaccessible to the nonliterate). The kinds of questions that must be addressed are: What are the internal politics of these national productions? Meant to entertain, are the serials free of political messages? Who controls these messages and who is excluded? Concerns about global inequalities and domination should not lead us to forget the existence of domestic forms of inequality and political control.

On the basis of an analysis of several key serials of the late 198Os, I will argue that although the writers and producers of the most sophisticated Egyptian television serials have a certain independence from the govemment that is reflected in the social criticism characteristic of their productions, they nevertheless participate in a shared discourse about nationhood and citizenship that manifests itself most directly these days in their treatment of religion. Their television dramas thus play an important part in the most pressing political contest in Egypt (and other predominantly Muslim countries): the contest over the place of Islam in social and political life.

I also want to argue, however, that this vividly drawn contest over the proper

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place of Islam in national life may not be pekeived as such by many of the 495 Finding a Place for

Islam communities that constitute the audiences for these serials. Nearly all mass-media cultural production takes place in Cairo, the capital and major city of Egypt.Z Moreover, those professionals responsible for producing the entertainment are urban and educated, part of the national cultural and intellectual elite, and civil servants. Although they self-consciously direct their products to their imagined audience - the Egyptian people- their perspectives as urban professionals living in the political center of the country can be quite different from those of their viewers, whether in the regional or class “peripheries.” In at least two rural regions, for example-the Bedouin area in the northwest of Egypt and the agricul- tural area in the south-as a consequence of their particular relationship to the dominant culture of Cairo and Alexandria and to the educational and urban circumstances of both the secular television professionals and their Islamist opponents, people view the two positions that are so at odds in the capital as merely the twin faces of modernity. This raises the question of the effectiveness of the government-sanctioned political messages of these serials against the actualities of people’s particular situations within the nation-state.

The View from the Center

Questions about the place of Islam are at the center of public life in Egypt. Among the more educated and the professionals, especially in Egypt’s cities, with occasional assassinations (including that of former President Sadat) making news, periodic government crackdowns on Islamic groups alternating with at- tempts at co-optation and accommodation, and signs of a self-consciously Islamic cultural identity growing, the contest is sharply drawn. The contest is reflected and managed in the mass media, especially television, in subtle ways. Mamduh al-Laythy , director of the sector of the Union of Television and Radio responsible for the production of films and serials, confirms that it is one of the concerns of television producers. When asked about differences between the content of the serials of the 1960s and those of the 1990s, he noted that the subject matter had to change with viewers’ concerns. Among the problems that people in the 1990s faced, he listed the housing shortage, family planning, drug addiction, and religious e~tremism.~

One of the best ways to explore how this opposition between the secular television producers and the forces of “religious extremism” plays itself out is

2. Alexandria is involved with some theater and film, and many television serials are now filmed

3. Interview by the author, April 29, 1990. abroad in the superior studios of Jordan and the Gulf states.

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to examine several popular‘ierials. Analysis of a few successful serials of the last few years provides a sense of the way television is working in contemporary Egypt to assert a particular place for Islam. With one important exception (a controversial serial called “Hilmiyya Nights”), these television serials maintain a noticeable silence on the Islamic movements and deliberately ignore the alternative vision these movements offer of Islam’s place in Egypt’s future-that is, as the solution to many of its problems -for specific political reasons.

The two works I consider first are directed by Muhammad Fadil, arguably Egypt’s foremost television director, and scripted by Usama Anwar ‘Ukasha, a thoughtful writer with a mission to provide high-quality fare for television. Their collaboration has resulted in the most noteworthy serials of the past few years- programs of immense popularity that have also generated intense debate in the press and at public meetings around the country. Both works can be seen as critical commentaries (skillfully embedded in an entertaining mix of melodrama and comedy) on Egypt in the post-Nasser period - the period beginning in the mid-1970s known as that of the injituh or “opening” to the West and to capitalist development. The first serial, “The White Flag,” was aired finally in 1989 after several years of trouble with the censors; the second, titled “The Journey of Mr. Abu al-‘Ela al-Bishry” and subtitled “A Comedy about People and the Morals of These Times” was broadcast several years earlier.

The protagonists of both serials are dignified, cultured, and highly moral men in their late fifties or early sixties who have spent their lives in public service, one as an ambassador in Europe and the other as an irrigation inspector in provincial Egypt. The ambassador returns to Alexandria after a long stint abroad; the engineer returns to the Cairo he has not visited for years. Both find a changed Egypt and are forced to confront the contemporary forces of corruption threatening Egyptian society. In “The White Flag” the educated man of taste with an appreciation for his national heritage, art, books, and Tchaikovsky is pulled into a war with a crass (if ultimately irresistible) and very determined nouveau riche real estate developer who, aided by her unscrupulous lawyer, some misguided thugs, and a host of bribed public officials and newspaper editors, tries to force him to sell her his historic seafront villa in Alexandria so she can put up some apartment buildings. In “The Journey of Mr. Abu al-‘Ela” the earnest man who goes to Cairo to try to help out his relatives, all embroiled in family and financial difficulties, suddenly comes into some wealth and is then ruined by the schemes of everyone around him scrambling to get his money. He too encounters corrupt officials, dishonest lawyers, greedy businessmen, people who have bought their way into professions through bribes and cheating or now use their skills for selfish ends. As one character puts it, “They are all running, running after money. No one stops to catch his breath or ask himself where he is going or what he is doing.”

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In addition, “The Journey of Mr. Abu al-‘E@ treats the problem of the corro- 497 Finding a Place for

Islam sion of family values. Older brothers abdicate family responsibilities, mothers fail to discipline their children, wives argue with their husbands, children don’t respect their parents. “Where is the family spirit that binds you together?” the protagonist complains to his relatives. ”Where is the respect of young to old and the compassion of the older for the younger? Where is the mother’s concern for her children? Where is the children’s fear of their mother? Where is it all?”

These serials deplore the moral state of the nation in modem times; they ask whether the harsh but all-too-familiar circumstances of inadequate housing, low wages, and rising prices must lead people to abandon their principles. Especially in “The Journey” we hear a good deal about manners, principles, morality, and values. The father of the only honest and principled young man complains, “I raised my son well. That’s why his path to advancement is blocked. He can’t marry [because he cannot save enough money for an apartment and one cannot marry unless one has an apartment]. I gave him a conscience. That’s why he can’t survive. He doesn’t know how to steal.” When his son despairs, he tells him, “We’re in an age when manhood is an ordeal, morality a heavy burden, and honor a path of thorns.”

The serials directed by Fadil and written by ‘Ukasha are more clever, subtle, and complex than the works produced by most other television professionals. But they differ little in the catalog of social ills they associate with the times. Other recent serials show individuals and families struggling against bureaucratic red tape, the near impossibility of getting anything done without connections and/or bribes, the corruption of government officials, the fallout of the housing crisis, and high prices. The tough circumstances of today’s expensive world are always depicted as tempting the younger generation to compromise their values and disrespect their parents. They seek degrading, unrespectable, or even illegal work (such as waiting on tables, acting, or drug dealing) or try to marry for money. The serials, in other words, are often about the struggles of good, decent people and families to remain so in these trying times4

What may be unique about these two popular serials is that they personify morality and immorality not by the contrast between tradition and modernity or the local versus the Western but by two social classes. One class consists of those

4. A study conducted in 1981-82 that included a content analysis of all television dramas, inter- views about current social problems with members of the Writers’ Union, and a survey of problems reported in major newspapers suggested that most television drama was based on stories about Egyptian problems. The major foci were quite similar to those I noted in 1989-90: class conflict and the gap between rich and poor; economic problems such as housing, price inflation, poverty, and byzantine bureaucracies; family problems; the persistence of traditional attitudes and rejection of modem practices. Confirming one of the points of this article, the study noted that 87.7% of the works were concerned with urban, as opposed to rural, problems. See hi (1984).

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who took advantage of the eGonomic liberalization and “opening” that President Sadat initiated in the 1970s and President Mubarak has continued: people portrayed in the serials as fat cats who drive around in late-model Mercedes while others cannot afford to marry, wear fancy suits and sit in glass-and-steel office buildings, deal in construction, take and offer bribes, and embezzle while others are unemployed. The younger generation is represented as spoiled and self- centered, dazzled by the allure of money and glamour and trying to become movie stars, pop singers, and boutique owners.’

The other class consists of educated professionals-not just irrigation engineers and diplomats but lawyers, architects, doctors, medical students, university students, philosophy teachers, school principals, responsible journalists, serious artists, and translators. Some have risen from the bottom of society through their education; others have been comfortable all their lives. The quality they share is that they are honest and care about others and their society.6

No opposition is set up between Westernization and an authentic indigenous identity, however defined. Both classes are presented as having appropriated much that could be considered modem and Western; the difference lies in what they have incorporated into their lives. The nouveau riche villains have borrowed foreign cars, pop music, English words they do not know how to use, gaudy telephones, and garish wallpaper. The protagonists have taken literacy and an appreciation for art and heritage, portrayed as universal rather than simply West- em values added to Egyptian values. Mr. Abu al-‘Ela’s library contains books by European and Arab writers: Aristotle, Taha Hussein, and Voltaire. The villa in “The White Flag” is full of art treasures like Chinese vases, yet it was also the site of meetings of the early Egyptian nationalists.

What is startling in these works, in the context of the current situation in Egypt, is the absence of religion as a source of morality and the avoidance of overt signs of Muslim piety and identity in the protagonists. The silence on the Islamic movement as a modem alternative is broken only to mock. The villain in “The White Flag” wears clothes that are a travesty of the new Islamic modest dress that has become a fashionable sign of piety in the cities and towns of Egypt. Her head is wrapped “modestly” in a turban and she carries the title (hagga) of someone who has been on the pilgrimage to Mecca. But her turbans are made

5. Significantly, the critique of this class of nouveau riche entrepreneurs and the linking of the deterioration of family ties with the business opportunities of the “opening up” are themes common to what Malkmus (1988) has labeled the %ewn Egyptiancinema, a more realistic and socially conscious cinema that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s.

6. For a more detailed treatment of T h e White Flag” that differs in some respects from mine, see the dissertation in progress on Egyptian popular culture by Walter Armbrust, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan.

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of gold lam6 and sometimes further graced brightly colored pompons. Her 499 Finding a Place for

Islam speech is crude, the religious calligraphy that decorates her office is overshadowed by a huge television set and a photograph of her smoking a water pipe, and her main interests are money and movie stars. Nothing in her behavior suggests genuine piety.

While the everyday forms of piety that are so much a part of life in Egypt are occasionally reflected in the popular serials-older characters or simple peas- ants are sometimes shown praying or using religious phrases - the new forms of piety are never portrayed. One never sees the young in the cities asserting an Islamic identity in the serials. The obscuring of this crucial group can be tracked through dress. There is a stark contrast between what the fashionably outfitted bareheaded actresses wear in the serials and what real urban women depicted in television documentaries wear. These educated and semieducated women on the streets, in schools, in health clinics, and in offices (including those of the Union of Television and Radio itself) are more often than not wearing the headcovering known as the higab and the full-length clothing of new Islamic modest dress.'

This is not to say that religious programming on television does not exist; there is an increasing amount of i ts8 Recitations of the Koran open and close the television day; the call to prayer interrupts programming; there are numerous religious discussions and programs; the Friday mosque prayers are televised; there are even religious television serials, didactic and stilted historical costume dramas about the early days of Islam, that is, the past not the present, always in the classical Arabic that so few people really understand and still fewer speak. But such religious programming is generally kept segregated from the more popular shows, especially the serials.

Exclusions

Why these exclusions and segregations? A look at who is involved in television gives some indication. Television was introduced to Egypt in 1960 under President Nasser and used, along with radio, as an instrument of national development

7. The only exception of which I am aware to this exclusion of the Islamists from serials is the highly critical portrayal of "religious extremists" in the fourth installment of 'Hilmiyya Nights," the controversial serial written by 'Ukasha and discussed briefly below. The serial is so unusual that it merits a separate study, which is forthcoming. For the first full-length study of the new veiling among lower-middle-class women in Cairo, see MacLeod (1990). See also Abaza (1987), El Guindi (1981), Hoffman-Ladd (1987), and Stowasser (19876) for excellent discussions of the ideology of the new veiling and its relation to larger political trends in Egypt.

8. Abaza (1987:20-23) sees the increase in religious programming as a strategy for assertions by the state of its religiosity to counter the religious opposition groups so popular in the early 1980s.

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and political m~bilization.~ 'his ideology of mass communication in the service of national development, common enough in the Third world, persists for some like the director whose serials I have been describing. He diagnoses the problem of citizens of this "developing nation" as "cultural illiteracy" and sees television drama as the best instrument for eliminating such illiteracy.1° The discouse of other influential figures in television is a somewhat patronizing one of the guidance and education of the Egyptian masses." Mamduh al-Laythy, the director of the film and serial production unit and a police officer turned screenwriter, explained:

Egypt is one of the developing nations and we as a country are very concerned with the cultural education of our people. . . . Our most important goal in relation to the citizens is to help individuals become cultured. We must educate them, teach them the basics of morality and religious duty. The individual needs direction. He needs information and we need to inculcate the spirit of patriotism, morality, religion, cour- age, and enterprise. We have found that the best means to reach the individual is through drama. It works like magic.12

Many urban intellectuals within the television industry, people like Fadil and 'Ukasha who came of age during the Nasser period, see their vision of modernity and progress under threat today from both the newly wealthy and the religious groups. Their serials uphold the secular national institutions of the postcolonial state, promote the ideals of informed citizenship, and deplore what they view as abuses of basically good institutions like the law, government, education, and the family.13 Although somewhat controversial, the social criticism they offer remains within the bounds of the familiar paradigms of the official political parties.

Such is not the case for the self-proclaimed radical Islamic reformists who are ignored in the serials. They speak directly to the same corruption and consum- erism the serials deplore. In their meetings, pamphlets, magazines, and Friday sermons in the thousands of private mosques for which the Ministry of Religious Endowments cannot provide preachers, they offer an alternative path to modernity-a path that rejects the West and the secular nationalist vision that derived from it, as well as those Egyptians who have associated themselves with the

9. For an outline of the history of television and radio in Egypt, see CEDEJ (1987). Karthigesu

10. Interview with Muhammad Fadil by the author, April 15, 1990. 1 1 . This is consistent with Rugh's observations in the late 1970s (1984:250). 12. Interview with Mamduh al-laythy by the author, April 29, 1990. 13. A telling scene is one in "The Journey" in which a young woman is reassured by a lawyer

that justice will be done. He tells her, "The law isn't just texts and we aren't just machines for putting them into effect. The law is based on values and morality."

(1988) explores the common development aims of television in the postcolonial world.

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West.I4 This alternative vision of a self-consciously Islamic path has a widespread appeal because it seems to offer people a moral way to deal with the times.

What Fadil and ‘Ukasha, as well as other television professionals seem to be contesting, in excluding this vision for the future from the serials, is not the value of religious faith and piety but the place where Muslim discouse is relevant. The segregation of religious and popular programming produces a sense of the separation of spheres, declaring the irrelevance of religion, except as a moral guide, to the public domain of political development, economic progress, and social responsibility. The same television professionals who refuse or are unable to portray the appeal of the Islamist vision or to criticize it openly may be personally pious.I5 But they carefully set up boundaries that are rejected by the Muslim activist groups who assert that Islam, referring to sources like the Koran and the model of the Prophet and his first community, can and should provide a blueprint for society and government and should inform every aspect of life; there is no distinction made between “public” and “private.”

If the short pieces published on the back page of Al-Zksam, the magazine of the Muslim Brotherhood, are any indication, these groups resent this exclusion and are quick to condemn television.I6 In issues published in 1989, for example, pieces criticized female television announcers for the impious display of their beauty, the falsification of modern history in televison programs that erased the role of the Islamic forces in Palestine and glorified Nasser and his notorious Intelligence Service, and the scandalous behavior of a number of major actors and actresses recently arrested for drug-trafficking. In that last article, the mass media in contemporary Egypt are described hyperbolically as “a humiliated slave- girl in the palace of the Sultan who needs a protracted war of liberation in order to become her own mistress.” Television is commended for airing one program that will be counted as a “good deed”- a religious program on the beautiful names of God-but the programmers are criticized for scheduling it so late at night that “only those suffering from insomnia watch it.”

The magazine is even critical of the voice of official Islam in Egypt, Shaykh Jad al-Haq, rector of Al-Azhar University. One article, by a junior faculty member at a provincial university, takes the religious leader to task for remaining silent about Egypt’s participation in the Miss Universe Pageant. He notes sarcastically

14. The literature on the Islamic movements around the Arab world is vast. Some important studies are Dessouki (1982), Ibrahim (1980), Kepel (1985), Kramer (1987-88), and Stowasser (1987~) .

15. When I interviewed them during the month of Ramadan they were observing the religious fast-just as Egyptian presidents like Sadat and Mubarak are televised praying at the mosques on religious holidays .

16. A book critical of the negative effects of television on Muslim family life even draws on research by Western social scientists to bolster its claims. See Kashak (1986).

50 I Finding a Place for

Islam

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that, even after shamelessly exposing her body in a bikini in front of the world media, the Egyptian beauty did not win.

Shaykh Jad al-Haq does indeed take a more moderate stance on television entertainment. In afarwa, or legal opinion, on the arts, written on July 5, 1988, and published by Al-Azhar Magazine he states that “Islam does not forbid entertainment or enjoyment.” Including under his rubric music, singing, and acting, he notes, however, that their religious status can be confusing. To be permitted, they must conform to certain general principles: the themes should follow the principles of Islam and its instructions; styles of performance should not stimulate any lustful desires; performances should not be located in venues where instinctual desires will be stimulated or that are associated with alcohol or drugs. In film and theater he judges as unlawful such subject matter as crimes, sex, or any other wrongful beliefs and corrupt ideas. The Shaykh recognizes the importance of ends. Unlike those in Al-Z‘fisam who attack actors and actresses, he notes that “acting can be used as a tool to educate society through discussing issues that are threatening to the harmony of a successful society-issues such as family ties and how they have weakened, or how selfishness, betrayal and dishonesty are widespread in modern societies” (Jad Al-Haq 1988-89: 10-23).

This latter judgment would condone the work of the socially conscious television drama producers I have been describing whose central themes were exactly those the religious leader valued. Here, as in many other arenas, the position of the highest official in the religious establishment in Egypt does not challenge the government, insofar as television represents the position of the government that controls it.

But the relationship between government and television production is complex. Since some of the best directors can and do fund most of their productions through independent financing, the state television bureaucracy has at its disposal only the power of censorship together with the preemptive self-censorship that accom- panies this in the case of culture producers like Fadil and ‘Ukasha.” Unlike many other serials, their works are often controversial because they are so critical of social conditions in Egypt and, by implication, government policy. Fadil has always been known and respected for this political criticism. His first serial, aired in the days after the 1967 defeat and called “Cairo and People,” focused on cases of corruption and the abandoning of national ideals in the Nasser period. Written by two judges in the Department of Justice, some of the stories were inspired by court cases. As Nur Al-Sharif, the famous Egyptian film actor who got his start on this show, explained, “The serial harshly criticized the defects

17. In recent years, an even more powerful force for self-censorship has been the economic necessity of selling programs to the morally conservative wealthy Arab nations of the Gulf.

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and mistakes that led to the defeat and what followed.” When I asked him whether Fadil, the director, was supporting or attacking the government policy in that series, he replied, “ ‘Cairo and the People’ was not opposed to the political theory of the time; it was against the weaknesses and errors in the way the theory was being applied.”’*

With the significant shifts in government policy pursued by Nasser’s succes- sors, Sadat and Mubarak, this socially concerned director and the writer with whom he often collaborates seem to have become even more critical. In their productions they now nostalgically invoke, through charged symbols of the Nasser era like the great singer U r n Kulthum or the Aswan High Dam, the period of socialist ideals and nationalist vision. In fact, an upsurge of interest in the Nasser period is noticeable in a number of the popular serials aired during the last few years. One spectacularly popular serial called “Hilmiyya Nights,” written by ‘Ukasha and shown in four annual installments (of thirty to forty episodes each), is an epic of modem Egyptian history that follows the rich and poor families in a popular quarter, Hilmiyya, in Cairo from the days of King Farouk to the present. Its positive depiction of Nasser and the period before Sadat was controversial. In 1990, for example, every major periodical carried stories and editorials con- demning or defending the serial. Headlines to articles in the newspaper of the center-right Wafd party demanded, “Does the Author of ‘Hilmiyya Nights’ Have the Right to Write History from a Nasserist Viewpoint?“ while an article in Roz ul-Yusuj, a more left-of-center magazine, defended the serial as the most brilliantly artistic one ever, blessed with superb acting and music, made riveting by the complexity of the characters, and to be commended for a plot that did justice to Nasser and was rightly critical of the new parasitical commercial class that Sadat’s open-door policy created. l 9

Even more relevant to this revival of interest in Nasser’s days, which cannot be unrelated to the growing disaffection with the social and economic changes brought on by the “opening” (infirah) and what may be a popular rethinking of the peace treaty with Israel that accompanied this policy, was an extraordinarily popular serial called “Ra’fat al-Haggan,” whose first two installments were shown during the months of Ramadan in 1989 and 1990. Based on a book by Salih Mursy, it claimed to tell the true story of an Egyptian spy successfully planted in Israel for twenty years beginning in the 1950~.~O The hero is a handsome James Bond character (except that he is a chain smoker and works at a low-tech level- placing pieces of string over his door to detect break-ins and writing in invisible ink) backed by a team of dedicated and patriotic Egyptian intelligence officers.

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18. Interview by the author, July 22, 1990. 19. Respectively, A[-Wufd, June 10, 1990, p. 10, and Hanafy (1990). 20. For a review of the press concerning this serial, see the dossier in CEDEJ (1988).

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Unlike most Egyptian television serials this was a political rather than a family drama. It offered, however, only the simple message of identity politics, which guaranteed its appeal to a wide constituency.

The opening scene sets the terms. Shown writhing in pain, the protagonist is dying of cancer in his home in Germany. He confesses to his German wife: “I’m not an Israeli, I’m an Egyptian. I’m not a Jew, I’m a Muslim.” His widow then goes to Egypt in search of the truth about her husband. The rest of the serial unfolds the story of his life, through flashbacks accompanying the narrative his handler recounts to her. What matters in this opening scene and another in the same episode is that our hero, Ra’fat al-Haggan, although initially a small-time crook, is a patriotic Egyptian who has sacrificed himself for his country. His cleverness in outwitting the Israelis, his irresistible attractiveness to a bevy of beautiful Israeli women (played by some glamorous Egyptian actresses), and the triumph of the Egyptian Intelligence Service are meant to inspire national pride. Other kinds of politics besides this general love of country are noticeably absent. There is nothing to indicate what Egypt’s internal politics were at the time although one hears some of Nasser’s emotional radio broadcasts about the 1956 war. More intriguing, neither the politics nor history of the Palestine conflict is presented even though our hero is living in Israel.21

The serial, perhaps inadvertently, conveyed a double message. Although its primary purpose was to promote national pride and identity, an effect produced by reviving memories of the Nasser period during which Israel was unequivocally the adversary on which heroic Egyptians should spy, ironically it also seemed to normalize the traffic with Israel that Sadat initiated. Israelis were portrayed as sometimes corrupt (the men) and immoral (the women all fall in love with Ra’fat, even when they are already married) but generally normal and, in the case of women, quite attractive people.22 The roles were played by familiar and well-liked Egyptian actors. Our hero regularly greeted his new friends with “shalom” and “maze1 tov”; his use of these terms taught them to children and adults all over Egypt. As one cartoon in the magazine Roz al-Yusufsuggested, the serial also filled people’s heads with a host of previously unfamiliar names like Charlie, David, Yacov, Keohane, Levy, and so forth. Significantly, the censors found little to criticize in the script and only minor changes were required as decided by the Egyptian Intelligence Service.

In the context of Islam and national television, however, the most fascinating

21. For a discussion of the way the Egyptian serials, even when presenting social criticism, are depliticized, see Abu-Lughod (1991).

22. Latifa al-Zayat (1992) has argued that the fourth installment differs radically from the first three in its idealized (and skewed) portrayal of Israeli society. I am grateful to Joel Beinin for bringing this article to my attention.

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aspect of the serial is the way it asserts that Islam is an essential part of our hero’s Egyptian identity even though he is not living a religious life. In Israel he is regularly shown drinking wine over meals and gambling (to obtain secrets); moreover, since he is passing himself off in Israel as an Egyptian Jew, he even attends temple. Yet two moving scenes claim for him his Muslim identity. The first occurs in the first episode, right after Ra’fat’s death. His body has been prepared for burial and lies in a casket. The Egyptian Intelligence Officer who has taken special charge of him cannot bear the thought that he will have a Jewish burial and that no Egyptians will attend to honor him. So he flies to Europe and, disguised as a rabbi, manages to get into the house while everyone is away. As he stands before the casket he slips off his shoes, as one would do to pray in a mosque, and pulls out from his breast pocket a copy of the Koran. With tears in his eyes, he recites over the corpse of the hero the proper verses for praying over the dead.

We see this officer cry in another episode as well, the one in which, late one night, he first discovers the file of Agent 313 and thus the existence of Ra’fat in Israel. Although others in the Intelligence Service have lost faith in Ra’fat because he is not sending worthwhile information, this young officer in training is moved by what he finds when he looks through the file; he decides to take responsibility for the young spy. When he opens the folder, he finds an envelope marked, “To be opened after my death.” It begins (and we hear Ra’fat’s voice repeating after him), “In the Name of God the Merciful the Compassionate. Truly we are God‘s and to Him we return.” This is our hero’s will, to be executed, he says, if he does not return alive to the land of his beloved Egypt. In a broken voice, with mournful music playing in the background, Ra’fat goes through, one by one, the sums to be given to each of the members of his family, even those brothers who mistreated him after the death of his father. He ends, by now practically sobbing, with the Muslim profession of faith: “Thus I will have cleared myself of all guilt in front of God, after I sacrificed everything in the service of the cherished homeland. God is Great, and for the glory of Egypt, I testify that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is his prophet.”

The protagonist has, in this document, neatly linked Egyptian patriotism with Islamic identity. The serial can be interpreted as asserting that those in the more militant Islamic movements today - and by implication perhaps their brethren jailed during the Nasser era-have no grounds for accusing their secular government of being less than fully identified with Islam. This program can thus be seen as part of a struggle to reappropriate Islamic identity for secular nationalists, a struggle in which the state-controlled mass media, as in much else, are instru- mental.


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506 Peripheral Visions: Regionalism Public Culture In the cities of Egypt the secular visions purveyed by television dramas and the

Islamists’ assertions of Islam’s relevance to national political and social life are clearly opposed. But is this opposition viewed in the same way in rural areas? To suggest how differently the contest might be viewed, I want to sketch in the surprising interplay between the forces of mass-media entertainment and Islamic activism in two communities outside Cairo with which I am familiar. I had initially become interested in television and radio dramatic serials while working with the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin of the Western Desert because these figured in generational conflicts. Resistance to the authority of elders was beginning, in the mid-l980s, to take the form of a slight shift on the part of the younger generation toward identification with a national Egyptian culture based in the Nile Valley. The irony was that while the radio soap operas and Egyptian popular music inspired in some young people a tentative desire to emulate certain aspects of middle-class urban Egyptian life-styles - romantic love, companionate marriage, and education and careers for women-the same avid consumers were those whose involvement in national schooling was putting them in contact with the growing urban trend toward public religiosity.

The attitudes of one young Bedouin woman I call Kamla, the only girl in the community in which I lived to have graduated from high school, illustrate this seemingly strange confluence. Over the ten years I knew her, Kamla had come more and more to chafe against the restrictions facing Bedouin girls and women. She often critized her mother for her chaotic life-style and swore she would not marry a Bedouin unless he were “Egyptianized” and educated. She read Egyptian magazines and newspapers whenever she could and was scolded by her mother for listening to Cairo radio while she did her household chores. Yet Kamla also confided to me that she would have liked to replace her headscarf with the new headcovering associated with modest Islamic dress, but she was afraid her family would object. She also said she would adopt this kind of veil “if God opens the way for me and I many someone educated.”

Her attitudes toward the new Islamic activists were more positive than the older generation’s. Because most of the older people in the Bedouin community are secure in their identities as Muslims, they have mixed reactions to the sancti- monious Egyptians they are beginning to encounter and the assertions of some moderately educated Awlad ‘Ali from the towns and cities who are becoming, as they called them, “followers of the traditions” (meaning the model of the Prophet). The older women are not cowed. They argue that they had always worn modest clothing and covered their hair with a head cloth-unlike urban Egyptians who had until recently preferred Western clothes. They resent being told that some of the ways they have been devout Muslims are wrong.

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Kamla was less certain. Sometimes she defended these Muslim sisters and brothers, as they called them, and sometimes she went along with the old Bedouin women as they made fun of them. For example, one evening, having recited some poetry and told some traditional tales for my benefit, Kamla’s aunt turned to her and asked, “Hey Kamla, have you given Lila any songs?”

Kamla had laughed and said, “I’m not a song person. I’m just a simple person minding my own business. . . . I’m pious and know God.”

Her sister hooted, since Kamla’s love of the Egyptian radio soap operas, cloying Egyptian love songs, and the scandalous Egyptian movie magazines was well known. But Kamla went on, only half-jokingly, “Auntie, I’ve become pious. I don’t have anything to do with songs.”

Her aunt mocked her, “God‘s blessings! God‘s blessings! So, you’re joining the Beard family?”

There was a commotion, everyone talking at once about the Muslim brothers. Kamla defended them. “They say ‘we are religious people, . . . following God‘s path, the path to heaven.”’

Her aunt was hardly convinced. “I swear to God they’ve never seen heaven. God is the only judge.”

Some old women were even more irreverent, and this angered Kamla. Once when a woman from a nearby town came to visit, the evening conversation turned to the topic of these new religious types. The visitor complained that they had said celebrations of saints’ festivals - an extremely important part of popular religion in the Western Desert as in most of Egypt-were sinful or forbidden. “They have forbidden everything,” the toothless old woman said in exasperation. “The next thing you know they’ll forbid the clothes we wear and make us go around naked.”

She then described to the group of women and girls gathered around her how these people dressed. She told them about the wife of a Muslim Brother who had moved to her town. The woman, she explained, wore a veil that covered her head and her face, “except for her eyes.” She wore gloves, a dress down to the ground, and shoes. “She looks like a ghost.”

Kamla had interjected, showing off the knowledge of religion she had picked up from school. “It is wrong for a woman to veil her face. What is required is that your head be covered; it is fine to expose your hands, your feet, and your face.”

The old woman had then commented on the men. “They all run around with those beards. Why, so-and-so,” mentioning one man by name, “his sticks out like this!” Everyone laughed hysterically when she added, “It looks like pubic hair!”

Kamla definded them, raising her voice to be heard. “But Auntie, the beard is a tradition of the Prophet!”

In these exchanges Kamla defended the new Islamists, as she would defend


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ordinary Egyptians when her sisters criticized them for their stinginess or their immorality compared to Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin. Her involvement in school had developed in her a patriotism that her parents did not share, a national identification that extended from the love stories of the nonBedouin soap operas to the piety of the urban is la mist^.^^

In brief research visits in 1990 to a village at the opposite end of Egypt I saw further evidence of this association between mass-media values and the new Islamic identity as twin aspects of a national urban identity, an identity distinct from the local regional identity of villagers. Although their assertions of separate identity are less pronounced than the Awlad ‘Ali’s, people in Upper Egypt (in the south) do claim they are different from northern Egyptians, drawing, like the Awlad ‘Ali, on a distinctive origin. Many groups in this particular village near Luxor said they were descendants of Arabs, by which they meant tribal pastoral nomads.24 And like the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin of northwest Egypt, Upper Egyptians are viewed with some contempt by urban Egyptians. While Bedouin are stereotyped as backward or bandits, Upper Egyptians are the butt of endless jokes about dim-witted country bumpkins.

Television was more widely available in this village than among the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin, many of whom still had no electricity. Most households owned a television set, and there were said to be five color-television sets in the village. Children and young people watched nearly every evening and during the day when they were not in school. The names of the actresses and actors were well known to them as were numerous details about their public and private lives. As in Cairo, the most popular programs were films and the dramatic serials. Some adults were as enthusiastic about television as their children; others were less interested in television and worried that it was interfering with their children’s schoolwork. The influence of the Cairo-based national mass media, however, was present in such phenomena as the distinction between the dialect of the younger people and the older and the fact that, at the celebrations for brides, the young women tended to sing songs learned from movies and the radio rather than the traditional songs of the region.25

As with the Awlad ‘Ali, however, those going to school were also adopting some of the accouterments of the new Islamic piety. All the girls past puberty who went to school were required to wear the new veil. At home they went back to their ordinary headscarves. Their female schoolteachers, all from Luxor, the

23. For more discussion of Kamla and the issues of generational conflict see Abu-Lughod (1989,

24. For more on this village see Critchfield (1978), as well as Mitchell’s critique (1990, 1991). 25. Slyomovics (1987) has studied the traditional epic poetry performed by male poets in this

1990, 1993).

region, but I am not aware of studies of women’s traditional song in the region.

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town across the river, also wore the higab, except the Coptic (Christian) assistant. The young male teachers, by and large a dogmatic group with strong sympathies with the new Islamic movements, were strict with the girls and sometimes quite insulting. According to one young woman, these teachers made them sit quietly in a classroom during gym period while the boys were allowed to do exercises and play sports; occasionally the male teachers berated the girls for being in school at all. New linguistic practices were also imposed on the local children. They were forbidden to use, in school or on the schoolgrounds, many of the ordinary words of greeting from the local dialect. Instead they were told they had to use the more conventional Islamic Arabic greetings.26

The two experiences of urban or educated sophistication these young villagers encountered were contrary in their messages and intents, as we saw above. Yet like the Awlad ‘Ali, these villagers on the margins of the dominant national culture did not perceive the contradictions between the new Islamic pious activism and the dramas of secular television because the people involved were equally associated with the nonlocal-with the major cities of Cairo and Alexandria or even the provincial cities and towns closer to home.

509

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Television as a National Medium

In many parts of the world, television is the most popular and ubiquitous public medium, offering diverse fare and available to a wider range of people than print media. Because programs are fleeting, repeated only occasionally in reruns, and part of a daily “flow,” as Raymond Williams has noted, their impact is hard to assess. Yet if we can determine which programs do seem to capture the imagina- tions of audiences we can begin to ask why and to what effect. Insofar as popular programs deal with national social and political issues, as I have argued about Egyptian serials, they cannot be analyzed at the general level of cultural difference but must be treated as historically specific. For the anthropologist this means not just describing and analyzing the texts of the programs or the responses of the audience but also relating these to the complex dynamics of political life in the country concerned. For example, to grasp the role of television entertainment in Egypt in the late 1980s and to be able to understand the relation between the media professionals and the state that controls the medium through which they work, I had to take stock of the shifting politics associated with Egypt’s three presidents since the 1950s.

Television can be a powerful national cultural force, as it is in Egypt, but it

26. For example, a schoolteacher told me that they did not allow children to use the local word for goodbye- hdiilu-but instead had to use m‘as-sulum.

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never simply reflects or produces the interests of the nation-state. Even if the medium is state-controlled, the producers are not necessarily puppets. In Egypt they have some freedom of expression and respond creatively to many of the restrictions in place. And though the political and moral issues that the most sophisticated of these producers engage may seem clear to them-living in the capital where the political debates about Egypt’s future are part of daily conversation and take a certain familiar form due to the structure of a press organized along political party lines-their programs can be received quite differently in outlying areas. The case I discussed here concerned the hostile relation between the popular television soap operas and the ideologies of the Islamic groups: for the people I knew in the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin community, as for those in the Upper Egyptian village who may have found it difficult to see themselves in either the secular and sophisticated vision of the television serials or the Islamist vision of a rigid, textually based Islamic identity that seeks to transform society, both visions were compelling because associated with superior education and cosmopolitansim.

The case of Egyptian television reminds us of the continuing importance of regional identities within nation-states. As we become increasingly sophisticated in attending to global or transnational cultural processes (Appadurai 1990; Han- nerz 1989) we must not lose sight of the internal dynamics of the nation-states that participate in these flows. When we speak of center and periphery, we need to recall that it is not just Western capitalism and Third World peripheries in question but, equally important, centers and peripheries within countries. This is especially true in countries with cities that tend to dominate other regions- politically, economically, and culturally. Where groups in outlying regions have distinct identities and are not well integrated into the center or are integrated at the bottom of the hierarchy, any consideration of national cultural productions must explore differential reception of mass-media products. This project-of examining regional variation and asking how, in particular places, the people who form the imagined audience of the culture producers respond to and appro- priate what is broadcast to them-must be part of any study of television as a national medium.

Lila Abu-Lughod teaches anthropology at New York University. She wrote two books on the Egyptian Bedouin, Veiled Sentiments and Writing Women’s Worlds (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986 and 1993, respectively), before turning her attention to Egyptian television serials.

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Documents

Finding a Place for Islam: Egyptian Television Serials and the National Interest