SIX MONTHS AGO, in the Kingdom of Bahrain, an interesting television experiment, broadcast throughout the Middle East, came and went without much fanfare. Reality TV, in the form of Big Brother Middle East, made its debut, was embraced by viewers, then in just over a week was shown the door by a radical Islamist minority. Over the last few years, there have been all kinds of promises, or Panglossian utterances if you’re skeptically inclined, about what we occidentals will bring to the region. Democracy’s missionaries, forever in search of receptive agents of change in the Middle East, are in the habit of directing their message to people’s better angels, with whom only a small minority are acquainted. They might, however, do better to contemplate people’s baser natures, with which most of us tend to be on a first-name basis. The “pursuit of happiness” or the “blessings of liberty” might seem like enigmatic abstractions. But everyone can get their head around the unalienable right to watch bad TV. Or almost everyone. Which is what brings us to Bahrain.
A former British protectorate, Bahrain is generally considered a liberalized Arab nation. This, of course, is like being called the prettiest girl on the Bulgarian shot put team. The king appoints all the ministers and judges. The parliament is there to balance his power, or would be, if he didn’t appoint half of them too. While the Khalifa ruling family has made some head-fakes toward enlightenment, such as letting women run for office and recently emptying the jails of political prisoners after torturing them for a few decades, it’s difficult to practice democratic politics in Bahrain, since political parties are banned, and criticizing Islam or the king can earn you a fine or a prison sentence.
Still, Bahrain is “liberalized” by the Arab world’s low standards, since it’s a place where the unelected regime provides the right to quality shopping, to getting a drink, or to securing the services of a prostitute (technically illegal, but readily available down on aptly named “Exhibition Road,” in case you’re making travel plans). It’s good enough for the U.S. Navy to make Bahrain home to the Fifth Fleet. And it’s why, on weekends, the 16-mile-long King Fahd Causeway sees Saudis on holiday beating it over the bridge to escape their own homeland’s fanatical religious strictures. With Bahrain prohibiting picture-taking in their bars and hotels, as even uptight Wahhabists need to let down their kaffiyehs now and then, tourists would do well to remember a simple maxim: Bahrain–it’s not a good place to practice democracy, it is a good place to practice hypocrisy.
This being the climate, Bahrain seemed the ideal setting for the enterprising Big Brother producers. It’s all slightly redolent of Christopher Buckley’s new comic novel Florence of Arabia, in which State Department do-goodnik Florence Farfaletti sets about emancipating Arab women by launching a satellite channel in the fictional emirate of Matar (“pronounced, for reasons unclear, ‘Mutter'”), where burkha-clad talk-show denizens make subversive happy talk:
“My next guest–not that I can see her–are you there Farah?”
“Over here, Azad!”
“God be praised. Now, Farah, I understand you have actually driven a car? . . . Did you hit anything?”
“Just some mukfelleen religious police who were chasing me. So I backed up and ran them over again.”
The real-life difference is that Big Brother Middle East was in no way overtly political, nor did Americans have a thing to do with it. The venture was a coproduction of Endemol, the Dutch company that has brought its Big Brother franchise to 26 countries throughout the world, and the Middle Eastern Broadcasting Centre (MBC). Headquartered in Dubai, MBC is the region’s leading pan-Arab news channel. MBC 2, which aired Big Brother, is MBC’s satellite entertainment channel, offering 150 million viewers in the Middle East such Islamic staples as Oprah, the Bernie Mac Show, and America’s Funniest Home Videos. While MBC had had ratings success with its repurposed American shows, the Big Brother project represented a bolder probing of what the market could withstand.
Anuska Ban, the Endemol executive director of Big Brother, or as she’s affectionately known around their Netherlands offices “The Big Brother Mother,” says Bahrain seemed a natural fit. It didn’t hurt, she says, that their contact person in Bahrain, the information minister, “was a big fan of Big Brother–[he] knew all the British versions.” Likewise, she says, it was natural that MBC approached Endemol, since their owner “was also addicted to Big Brother.” MBC’s owner is Sheikh Walid al-Ibrahim, who in an odd twist is the brother-in-law of Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd, overseer of one of the region’s most censorious regimes.
Reached in Croatia, Anuska is setting up her 27th incarnation of Big Brother (nothing says “natural dramatic tension” to a television producer like recently concluded ethnic cleansing). While it is her job to birth the show in every country where it runs, she says that Bahrain presented a steeper challenge than any other location. After MBC approached Endemol nearly three years ago, it took two and a half years to bring the show to the screen, as opposed to the three to six months it usually takes. In most countries, Big Brother takes place in a house that effectively serves as a prison with spare Scandinavian décor. Followed by voyeuristic cameras, twelve men and women live there with all outside influences removed, and nobody allowed out. They are filmed 24 hours a day (with the footage then edited down into 30- or 60-minute shows) living, laughing, crying, complaining, occasionally having sex, and plotting each other’s demise, as each week a person is voted out of the house, until only one remains and claims a cash prize.
The prospect of unmarried men and women together under one roof was enough all by itself to send Middle Eastern bluenoses into spasms of panic, so every accommodation was made. While most Big Brother houses are completely gender-integrated right down to the bathrooms, the Bahrain house permitted contestants to mix it up only in the kitchen, living room, and garden. There were separate bathrooms, bedrooms, sitting areas, and prayer rooms (a prayer room, gender-segregated or otherwise, is not a regular reality-television feature).
Since the deal producers cut with the government mandated that 40 percent of the crew be Bahraini, Anuska says in her thick Dutch accent, “We had there a lot of completely inexperienced girls and boys.” The guy who laid stones for the patio, started from the outside and worked his way in, running out of stones before he finished so that the patio looked like a donut. Many of the camera crew didn’t know the basics, such as how to turn on the camera. “The week before,” says Anuska, “They were still truck drivers or working in the bakery of their parents.”
In addition to frequent sandstorms and holes in the security fence, Anuska faced political difficulties during her lengthy stay in the desert (Endemol was asked to serve as coproducer, while usually it just provides initial consulting for local partners and then leaves). While castmates were drafted from all over the Middle East, they decided not to “bring in Jewish people” since “it could be a big political issue.” Anuska says that if they had brought one in, the Big Brother challenges would’ve had to look different, such as “who could make in the most fast way a suicide belt. No, no, I’m only joking, I’m only joking,” she diplomatically adds (Endemol still hopes to relaunch Big Brother Middle East from another locale).
Reality TV is all about exhibitionism. In the American version of Big Brother, there seems to be a law against female contestants covering their midriffs, and the males preen like depilated apes–even the fat guys are unable to keep their shirts on for entire episodes. But while the Bahraini house came with a standard-issue pool, “nobody was in it,” says Anuska. The men brought bathing suits they didn’t wear, the women didn’t even bother. Likewise, Anuska says, they weren’t able to film in the bathrooms, and “we could only show them in the bedrooms when they were completely dressed, or if they were under the blankets.” That sort of takes the fun out of it, I suggest to her. “I know it. I know it,” she says, resignedly.
An upcoming documentary for VPRO (the Dutch equivalent of the BBC) captures the cultural disconnect. Filmmaker Sarah Vos, who traded the working title “Big Brother vs. Allah” for the less incendiary “Big Brother in the Middle East,” shows the casting process, which looks very standard. Most aspiring contestants already appear fairly westernized. Some, just off the plane from very conservative countries, flock to casting calls in Lebanon, where they change into hipper duds to impress producers.
Aspiring contestants say tin-eared things like, “I’m here to paint the town red. . . . I’m going to use the ladies of the street as my eyeliner, I don’t get them in Doha.” And they are eager to please. One Jordanian woman, her father a PLO member who was assassinated, is asked if she would talk about it in the house. “Definitely,” she says, “if you needed some drama, I would.” When another woman is told the house will be fairly strict, she says, “I’ve survived Yemen, so I can survive the house.” Still, as much as they yearn for the opportunity, they are unable to betray their upbringings. When Anuska grills one contestant with typical deep-think screening questions, such as what animal does he most resemble, he squirms while his translator relays, “He finds relating himself to an animal difficult because he’s a human being.” Anuska adds that the young contestants asked questions, too, the kind any young person would ask at a repressive summer camp. “We told them for instance that for the men, it was forbidden to enter the women’s part. The guys said, ‘What is that ridiculous rule?’ Also, the girls said that suppose we fall in love, ‘Is it possible that we can kiss?’ We said, ‘Yes, but we will not show it.'”
Despite anticipating cultural speedbumps–their production was saddled with a religious “specialist,” a sort of Koran-toting standards and practices watchdog–some hazards were unforeseen. In order to give the housemates something to do, producers made them take care of chickens, kept in a coop in the garden. When Abdul Hakim, an ebullient Saudi, first entered the house, he went straight for the coop, and began talking to the chickens while making clucking noises. A Saudi staffer from MBC took offense. “Afterwards,” says Anuska, “the channel said ‘How could you show it?’ We said, ‘Sorry, what was wrong?’ He said, ‘It is really very bad if a man from Saudi Arabia talks with chickens.’ We said sorry…we did everything that they asked us.”
Then, of course, there was The Kiss, also known as the beginning of the end. While clerics were already complaining about the show before it aired, on account of its being an Infidel-influenced abomination in which men and women cohabited, Abdul Hakim didn’t help matters. Right after he talked to the chicken, he welcomed a comely Tunisian housemate by asking for a kiss of greeting. She obliged with an air-smack in the vicinity of each cheek–lips never touched skin. But from the clerical reaction, you’d have thought someone took a squirt on Mohammed’s Tomb.
That first episode was generally well received. Anuska says that when contestants returned to their home countries, they were mildly and briefly famous. Ratings don’t, for the most part, exist in the Middle East, but she adds that the viewer call-in response was more robust than in countries where versions of the program became bona fide hits. Likewise, the business community applauded the show (especially after it brought 20 million dinars of much-needed investment). Some editorialists, like one in the Bahrain Tribune, were evenhanded, discouraging a culture of mistrust in favor of “a climate of openness,” one in which programs like this promote “human beings . . . moving freely and smoothly without shyness, timidity, fear or any complexes.”
But over the week Bahrain’s Big Brother Middle East aired, religious indictments came constant and loud. In a country known for only the rare public demonstration, such as turning out to stone the American embassy, over 1,000 protesters tried to storm Amwaj Island, where the show was being filmed. Seven MPs signed a demand to question the information minister, while numerous Islamic women’s societies insisted he resign. Among the more timorous complainants, critics called the show “Sin Brother” and said, “This program is a threat to Islam. This is entertainment for animals,” in keeping with the anti-poultry theme. One columnist called for the “Arab Cultural Marines” to act as an “intellectual, cultural and political line of defense” against the “new ideas” and “mutual understanding and tolerance” brandished by the Americans in the cultural cold war being waged through satellite channels (never mind that the satellite channel is Saudi-owned, the show was Arab-produced, and the mother ship was a Dutch company).
Sheikh Adel al-Mawda, the Bahrain parliament’s second deputy speaker and a leader of Bahrain’s Salafi movement (commonly called Wahhabi–“salaf” means “pious ancestors” in Arabic), spearheaded protests. “This program showed an abnormal way of living, which is totally opposed to our thoughts, culture, everything,” al-Mawda told the New York Times. “It is not reality TV at all, especially in our part of the world.” And al-Mawda was right–it largely isn’t reality in the Arab world, thanks to authoritarians like him. His recent legislative adventures include fighting to require that women who drive do so completely veiled (this in a country that already boasts one of the region’s highest auto-accident rates). Likewise, he wants to reward anyone who imports, acquires, sells, or produces alcohol with a prison term and a fine.
Such high-profile blowback is usually mother’s milk to a publicity-hungry show trying to get noticed. But MBC, citing external pressure from clerics, and internal pressure from the government’s information ministry, which had formerly welcomed it, quickly folded. After a little over a week on the air, after two-and-a-half years of setup and $7 million invested, and before the show had even had a chance to eject it’s first housemate, MBC pulled the plug. In a statement, they cited their “desire to preserve [Bahrain’s] social unity, and out of concern lest MBC constitute a reason for disagreement.” Likewise, they did “not want to risk…being accused of harming Arab traditions and values, because it considers the channel one for the Arab family.”
SINCE ENDEMOL first launched the franchise in 1999, Big Brother has become something of an international sensation. While the American casts, battling an already celebrity-saturated culture, have never enjoyed more fame than rent-a-star status at supermarket openings, elsewhere cast members tend to have greater impact. In Germany, last year’s top 1,000 singles included 12 songs from ex-castmates. In Poland, where castmates engaged in games like eating bottles of ketchup and shaving their heads, one was elected Labour Union deputy to the Polish parliament. After Big Brother Africa wrapped, Nelson Mandela demanded to meet the Zambian winner, offering to set her up with one of his grandsons.
As a shameless viewer of all five seasons of the American version, I can confess, with some confidence, that the show has almost no redeeming social value. Aside from the chess-master analysis that is required for weighing game strategies, it is a mindless exercise in voyeurism that mostly reveals the worst, and very rarely the best, of human nature. It’s an environment in which spiky-haired steakheads, tight-bloused bimbos, and the token gay guy plot each other’s ejection from the house while floating decadently in the hot tub, often inebriated. That said, the American version is tame by international standards, no sexual congress having been reported until Season 4. And even then, all we home viewers saw was the night-vision infrared of a tastefully-stretched duvet that gave the appearance of two badgers trying to escape suffocation in a gunnysack.
Outside the United States, things can get a bit randier. In other countries, contestants have made love nests under the kitchen table and engaged in nude lawn mowing. There has been sex of all varieties, including one contestant who, as a British tab memorably put it, “slipped to the loo for nookie . . . with himself.” In Great Britain’s “Big Brother Gets Evil” season, conceived to bolster sagging ratings, contestants appeared to have escaped from carnival exhibits. There was a gay man who only bedded straight guys, and a former garbage collector who boasted of sleeping with over 250 women, and who’d won “Mr. Best Buttocks of South Lanarkshire” (his nickname was “Shagger from the Shire”). Another, named Kitten, had been a child prostitute. And the show was won by a sex-starved, chain-smoking Portuguese trannie named Nadia.
Even the losers tend to be winners in the Weirdness Olympics. A girl who wasn’t picked for one of the British shows said that if she was selected, she’d have to bring along her best fried “Ernie,” the nickname for the glass eye she frequently popped out of its socket. While the show is by no means stocked solely with dimwits, they do seem to enjoy a commanding plurality. Political statements are mercifully rare, and tend not to be successful. One Australian contestant took it upon himself to cast a light on the mandatory detainment of immigrant refugees by taping his mouth shut, and carrying a sign that demanded someone Free The Refugees. Not only, however, did he misspell “the,” but a puzzled immigration minister informed the press that there were no refugees in Australian detention centers.
All of this is to say that one doesn’t have to be an Islamic fundamentalist to find Big Brother a deeply objectionable moral cesspool. So in the interest of fairness, I arranged for Endemol to send me all the tapes of Big Brother Middle East, which I then had translated by a Bahraini, just to see what got everyone’s dishdashas in a bunch. What I saw was not a Middle Eastern bacchanal, an orgy of air-kissing and chicken-talking, but television so excruciatingly tame and dull that it made watching sand-dune erosion look like a pulse-quickening alternative.
THE ATTRACTIVE HOSTESS of Big Brother Middle East begins almost apologetically: “We are going to watch the participants 24/7,” she intones, “of course, respecting their privacy.” As the contestants arrive one by one, disembarking from a camel then walking through a cloud of ’80s style dry-ice smoke that suggests they are getting locked into a Styx concert instead of their new home, we are shown their introduction videos. Wearing traditional Arab dress, Abdul Hakim, the first arrival and soon-to-be-infamous Kissing Bandit, says he likes to “be a part of any adventure” and likes “to jump from high places” (bungee jump). Before he disgraces his countrymen by talking to chickens, it should be noted, he proudly carries the Saudi flag, and congratulates “King Fahd, crown prince, and the government,” later telling housemates that the flag, which reads “There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His messenger,” is “the best flag in the whole world.”
His kissing co-conspirator, Kawthar from Tunisia, seems somewhat subversive, since she has a dangerous dream: “to have a comedy program produced by me.” She assures Hakim that “we are all brothers and sisters” and that she is a “very social person.” Mazim from Iraq says he always does his best to “make the people around me happy,” while Shatha from Bahrain says that she loves to act, read, sing, and do “anything that is crazy and different.” “Shatha is crazy,” seconds a friend in her video. “I am crazy a little bit,” thirds Shatha, who adds, “A woman from a Persian Gulf country in this program is something nice and is not expected.” Bashara from Lebanon favors the color schemes of an abstract painting. He owns a boutique, and is gay, but doesn’t dare mention it. He does, however, let fly that “I am funny and fun to be around. I am crazy also.” (There are a lot of self-described “crazy” people in the house, which is perhaps why a psychiatrist is kept on call.)
Ala’a, a portly lass from Oman, is one of the few women who dress in the traditional hijab and abaya. She does not claim to be crazy, but obviously is. A friend tattles that one thing she hates about Ala’a is “that she makes a whole pot of macaroni, and then she eats all of it by herself.” As the new castmates check out their digs, things quickly degenerate into, well, craziness. Stone-cold wild man Hakim boasts of entering the forbidden female section of the house. Najwa, a Syrian Joan Jett with heavy eye makeup, warns him, “You know you are not supposed to do so.” “But no one was there,” protests Hakim. “We have to watch every word we say here,” says Ala’a, perhaps accustomed to the real-life Big Brothers back home. “We have cameras everywhere.”
From there, it is off to the races. We watch them sleep in, snore, play slapjack, discuss Islamic activism, pray five times daily, plot passage to more liberal London, do calisthenics, and watch Hakim, the Saudi, gently berate the women: “How come you girls don’t know how to make tea?…Today Abdulla and Bashara were cooking, and the rest of the girls were sitting. What is going on here?”
The women, in segregated quarters, periodically discuss their wish for divorce from abusive spouses, or tell tales of getting smacked around by boyfriends. This should hardly be considered taboo in the Arab world. MBC recently broadcast a report on a Saudi TV talk-show host who was beaten so badly by her husband that she ended up unconscious in the hospital. He defended it, saying Islam forbids beating women on the face, but permits it as a means of punishment. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Arab TV stations “frequently air rulings by Muslim clerics who explain how and when a husband is allowed to beat his wife.”
As elimination-show Machiavels, the housemates are hopeless. While such shows are usually populated by saber-toothed backbiters, here is a verbatim series of responses when each Bahrain housemate is asked about the competition: “I can’t express how happy I am to be here. . . . I am not upset by anyone. . . . I liked all of them. . . . Every one of them has something nice about them. . . . All of them cooperate. . . . Every day is better than the previous day.” About the meanest thing anyone says comes when Michael, a Jordanian jeweler who loves salsa dancing, says that Shatha is constantly trying to show off her singing ability: “You can easily tell when someone has a beautiful voice, and Shatha is not that person.”
Most of the cast attempts to pass as westernized, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have uniquely Middle Eastern back-stories. Mazim, the habitually smiling Iraqi contestant who plays the oud, an Arabic lute, is shown in the behind-the-scenes documentary, “Big Brother in the Middle East,” sitting in a hotel room with his father. During the show, he claims that he’ll someday return to Iraq after the Americans stop “drinking our gas,” but now he lives in London. In the documentary, the interviewer asks his father if he will miss his son when he goes on the show. He responds that he has already missed his son for a long time. Mazim tells the tale of how they were separated for 19 years. “When I saw him for the first time, I didn’t recognize him,” says the father. “They put him in prison,” Mazim says of his father. “He was losing weight because they were torturing him.” When they let him go, “he fled to Turkey, and he didn’t have time to think about us.” As he says this, his father looks out the window while trying to nonchalantly smoke a cigarette, but his eyes well with tears.
There are few such dramatic moments in the actual series. After the third or fourth mind-numbing hour, there is a wacky charm to the whole enterprise. Sure, it’s awful television: static, drama-free, without narrative payoffs. But there is, even in its dullness, a frivolous excitability–the kind one sees when small children are allowed to stay up past their bedtimes. Rather than plot how to cut each other’s throats, the housemates seem to relish each other’s company. There is no sex or even skin (the most I saw was a little calf when a woman indiscreetly stretched in her Capri pants). Instead, they seem to be enjoying innocent flirtation, saying their piece (however obliquely), and taking refuge in a gender-integrated oasis without getting whacked on the knuckles by some overbearing mullah.
When the group’s staunchest traditionalist, Ala’a, goes into the “confessional”–a one-on-one private interview with producers–she admits, “I am depressed because I know one day I have to choose two people to leave this house and I don’t find any reason to do so.” Ala’a needn’t have worried. The show was canceled before she ever got the chance.
WHEN MY BAHRAINI TRANSLATOR, Husain Abdulla, returned the Big Brother tapes, I asked him what he thought of the show. Husain is a secularist who fled his country, afraid for his safety after becoming a political dissident, and after a friend of his was killed in jail for becoming the same. He now lives in the United States, and agitates on behalf of the Bahrain Freedom Movement, which advocates true democracy.
Husain doesn’t care much for reality TV. He’s a political junkie who in his homeland wasn’t permitted to practice politics. So these days he sticks to C-SPAN and Hannity & Colmes. (“Why don’t they put on a stronger liberal than this guy Colmes?” he asks.) Of the Big Brother hullabaloo, he says, “I might have marched with the clerics too. Not because the show was an offense against Islam. But because it was so boring.” What really drives him crazy is that the impression was given that extremists drove it off the air, when he says the ruling family had a vested interest in watching that happen.
Bahrain, he says, is a place where, “in the morning, . . . people . . . have a big disagreement. But when it comes night, they sleep in the same bed.” It’s a typical Arab pincer move, he says. An oppressive government that wants to look reform-minded to the West allows extremists to flourish as an object lesson in what could happen if they ever truly opened up the country. The whole thing has the fixed-match quality of professional wrestling. “The point of [canceling] Big Brother,” says Husain, “was to show the people of Bahrain are barbaric, they’re fanatic, and they’re not worthy of democracy.”
Husain says that when he arrived in this country, “I was a crazy man. I couldn’t believe all the freedoms–that you could fall asleep in your apartment, and not have to worry about police breaking in in the middle of the night to arrest you for something you said earlier that day. I love America. My dream is to have a small America in Bahrain.”
IN A STRANGE WAY, for Husain and his fellow dreamers, the best hope of little Americas developing in the Middle East could be Arab-produced reality TV. For it provides many of the benefits of Americanization (demonstrations of openness, individuality, freedom of expression) without the sticky business of its being foisted on them by Americans.
The genre has burgeoned over the last year, with varying results. The first Arab reality show, Al Hawa Sawa (or “On Air Together”), debuted last year on MBC. The show, which allowed Arab suitors to size up their prospective women, then propose marriage, ended disastrously when Islamists ran it off the air (but not before the winning bride locked herself in the bathroom, refusing to get married).
Iraq has also recently entered the reality-TV sweepstakes, with shows evincing Iraq’s own rather bleak reality. Carried on the independent satellite channel Al Sharqiya, reports the Washington Post, are sunny pick-me-ups with titles like Ration Card and Iraq’s Most Melancholy Home Videos. Then there’s Labor Plus Materials, a knockoff of Ty Pennington’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, except instead of selecting families with ugly couch patterns or Formica countertops, hard-hatted saviors rebuild war-damaged homes.
The Gulf News reports that advertising rates on Arab satellite during reality programming can actually reach up to 130 percent of regular primetime rates, demonstrating a tremendous appetite for the shows. In fact, some actually speculated that the Arab League Summit was postponed this year for fear of being overshadowed by an American Idol knockoff called Star Academy, broadcast by the Lebanese Broadcasting Company (LBC). The show, which features 16 men and women living together in a Beirut villa, then singing their little hearts out while Arabic viewers phone in votes to see who advances, has caused outpourings of bile from the cleric class.
The imam of Mecca’s Grand Mosque urged TV execs to cease “the vice and debauchery,” calling the shows “weapons of mass destruction that kill values and virtue.” The Council of Senior Ulema, Saudi Arabia’s top religious authority, went as far as issuing a fatwa telling the program’s funders not to “use their money to destroy the youth of the [Islamic] nation.” (One of the funders, circuitously, is Saudi Prince Al-Walid bin Talal–King Fahd’s nephew–who owns 49 percent of LBC.) It’s pretty heavy artillery to aim at singing and dancing kids. But fans don’t seem to be deterred. As one told Jordan-based Al-Bawaba, “This program for the first time has given Arab youth the chance to vote for other people than the dinosaurs who govern them.”
Echoing the democracy-in-action sentiment was Ihab Hamoud, one of the organizers of another Lebanon-based smash-hit, Superstar, also an American Idol-style vote-off show: “It’s probably the only democratic election in the Arab world,” he told the Financial Times. So threatening is the format to some, that even the terrorists at Hamas weighed in with a denunciation: “Our people are in need of heroes, resistance fighters and contributors to build the country, and are not in need of singers, corruption mongers and advocates of immorality.” But the Pan-Arabic singing contest claims some unusual fans. Yasser Arafat became so addicted that he offered weekly phone support to the Palestinian finalist, calling him “a Palestinian struggler of a different kind.” Reality TV junkie Muammar Qaddafi went even further, flying both the Palestinian and Libyan finalists to his tent for a confab. (Palestinians have hinted darkly that Qaddafi, in typical Middle Eastern fashion, rigged the vote to make the Libyan win by providing free phone lines to Libyans, while forbidding them to vote for the Palestinian.)
Many Westerners, of course, will remain suspicious of any format that, in its more debased versions, has contributed to the cultural rot of their own society (Endemol is currently developing a show called Sperm Race, in which men compete for the crown of “most virile man” and to “win a sexy sports car”). But not all the Middle Eastern critics focus on decadence. Political analyst Khaldun Sulh told Al-Bawaba that programs such as these “are not so innocent. They are meant to keep Arab youth away from national causes at a time that Iraq is occupied by imperialism.” (Let’s hope.)
Western Cassandras also frown on the prospects of instilling true democracy in the Middle East not via the spread of ideas but by depending instead on the spread of synthetic-cultural artifacts like reality TV. But even these people, such as Jihad vs. McWorld author Benjamin Barber, admit that the latter insures an unfair fight: “If the choice is ultimately to be (as the French writer Debray has argued) ‘between the local ayatollah and Coca-cola’–if ‘the satellite [TV dish] is exactly against the honorable Prophet, exactly against the Koran’–the mullahs will lose, because against satellite television and videocassettes they have no long-term defense.”
Nimrod Raphaeli, an Iraqi who now works for MEMRI’s Washington, D.C., office, further elucidates: “No Arab regime, not even Saudi Arabia, can keep up with the flow of information coming in from across the border. Don’t look at the veiled woman, look behind the veil. Saudi television can be as religious as they want it to be. But they don’t watch it. They watch Lebanese television with beautiful women dancing. They should continue to do that. You’ll have a whole new generation coming up in the Middle East that is absorbing enormous amounts of Western culture, which competes against a school system in which teachers teach them martyrdom and jihad. Don’t try to tell them all the time to be liberal and democratic. Continue to get these programs to them. It’s more effective than speeches by the State Department and the president, saying ‘democracy will come.’ It is the most effective weapon.”
In fact, while there’s plenty of precedent, both ancient and recent, to suggest true reform may never take hold in the Middle East, there is some reason to think that if a road to democracy does exist in the Arab world, it could run right past the Big Brother hot tub. As one source in the Arabic entertainment industry tells me, at once secretive and defiant, “We will continue to put these shows on the air. And the Islamists will continue to take them off. Let them. The old men are turning the young people against them. Their time is passing. Eventually, they will lose.”
Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
