Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Islam and the porno devils
Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Islam and the porno devils
Review in the Guardian about Muhajababes: Islam and the porno devils
Can the clash between scantily clad secularism and conservative religious ideology produce a third way in the Arab world? Some wish according to Allegra Stratton’s fascinating exploration of this question, Muhajababes, writes Rachel Aspden.
As a guide to the preoccupations of young Arabs, the Middle-Eastern chaos currently splashed across the front pages is only part of the story. Vying with bearded Hizbollah commanders for the hearts and minds (or at least cash and attention) of Middle-Eastern youth is a well-funded and altogether better-looking army: a gang of half-naked girls. Stars of the omnipresent Arabic music videos (‘video-clips’), the girls – led by Maria, Elissa, Ruby, Nancy Ajram and Haifa Wehbe – are the region’s super-groomed, cosmetically enhanced sweethearts – or its ‘porno clip devils’, according to one Egyptian newspaper. Their grip on ‘the morals of Arab youth’ is so strong that in 2004 conservative Egyptian MPs called for a ban on the clips – supported by letters and petitions from young Egyptians.
But how do the region’s armies of under-30 video-lovers and haters square up? In early 2005 Allegra Stratton, a young BBC producer, set off on a tour of Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Dubai, Kuwait City and Damascus with the aim of finding out.
Stratton is in search of a cultural revolution – experts on the Middle East have told her that a massive rise in the number of educated young people coupled with a stunted job market have led to a situation that parallels the English Civil War, the French Revolution and 1968. So, at first, she goes looking for a Haight-Ashbury-type counterculture, hanging out with TV producers, struggling artists, MCs and curators.
Her findings are less romantic than she had hoped – there are no flower children in Damascus, and Amman’s only nude portraitist is, she disappointedly remarks, ‘crap’. The verdict is characteristic of Muhajababes, which is written in a jaunty conversational tone that allows Stratton to feel ‘rubbish’ about ‘shit’ things, such as the invasion of Iraq or badly produced Arabic music. The chirpiness can grate – ‘Here, everyone has a telly on their desk,’ she observes artlessly of BBC Westminster – but it has an upside. In comparison with many products of the Middle-Eastern comment and analysis industry, and despite its off-puttingly trend-spotting title, Muhajababes is direct, energetic and unpretentious. Stratton is out on the street accosting passers-by and counting the number of veiled women with a persistence that makes her a likeable and instructive guide to the lure of extremism for Palestinian refugees or why What Not to Wear will never air in Beirut.
And what she learns, Trinny and Susannah aside, is fascinating. The video-clip girls are indeed a serious cultural force – Nancy Ajram was recently voted ‘one of the region’s most influential Arabs’ by the Arabic version of Newsweek – but their eminence grise is the Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the eighth-richest man in the world and the owner of the Rotana satellite stations and record label that 80 per cent of Arab pop stars are signed to. Despite the acres of flesh on display at Rotana, the singers’ most fervent fans are the eponymous ‘muhajababes’: veiled girls (muhajaba is Arabic for ‘one who veils’) who nevertheless wear skin-tight jeans, stiletto heels and plenty of make-up. To describe them, Stratton learns a great new Arabic word, ‘rewish’, which means somewhere between ‘hip’ and ‘distracted’ – these are the Dazed & Confused-sters of the Middle East. Nominally strict Muslims, some sneak cigarettes, date boys and engage in other behaviour that is technically haram (forbidden).
Ranged against (or sometimes, confusingly, alongside) them are the conservative anti-clip brigade. But increasingly they, too, Stratton discovers, worship the TV screen. Their idol is a swoonsome young accountant-turned-preacher called Amr Khaled, who appears on religious shows with ‘young men and women, praying, crying and giving hearty, healthy belly laughs, as if they were in a vitamin-supplement advert’. Stratton is particularly scathing about Khaled, a well-fed BMW driver who announces, televangelist-style, that: ‘I want to have money and the best clothes to make people love God’s religion.’ But it’s only when she ditches her dream of finding the Arab Bob Dylan and focuses on Khaled’s ‘Life Makers’ initiative that Muhajababes gains in pace and authority.
Capable of mobilising hundreds of thousands of young Muslims worldwide for causes ranging from the benign (collecting clothes for charity) to the sinister (berating smokers and drinkers in public), Khaled is the well-groomed face of a new, media-friendly conservative Islam that reviles the ‘degrading display of women’s bodies’.
Between the muhajababes and the Life Makers, there is little room for the handful of arty oddballs (including the gay Kuwaiti who provides the book’s best line, ‘There’s no such thing as straight in Kuwait’) to whom Stratton, as a liberal Westerner, is instinctively drawn. But this is the point. Social change in the Middle East won’t be led, as Stratton – and many Western policy-makers – had hoped, by the secular trendies, but by those she dismissively describes as the ‘Life Making, green-fingered, litter-collecting, I’d-like-to-teach-the-world-to-sing Arabs’. Muhajababes discovers a world in which religion is packaged and sold as slickly as a video clip. And the people behind the scenes are the same, too: Prince Al-Waleed has already diversified into an immensely popular new Islamic channel, Al-Risala (‘The Message’). And it is not a conveniently distant world either: having been banned from preaching by the nervous Egyptian regime in 2002, Khaled now finds refuge in the UK and is soon, Stratton surmises, advising the British government on engaging with the Muslim world.
It is hard, as Muhajababes demonstrates, for secular observers to appreciate the genuine force of belief, however clumsily or confusedly it may be expressed. In the summer of 2004 when I was living in Cairo, I was surprised to meet engineering graduates who believed in djinn with green claws and veiled girls who swapped oral-sex tips. But with bombs falling in the Beirut streets that Stratton scoured fruitlessly for a trendier revolution, the region’s latest crisis is a reminder that it’s essential to try.
· To order Muhajababes for £7.99 with free UK p&p, go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885
