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