Caliphs and 'City' Girls: Split-Personality Muslim Television

Ramadan is the Islamic holy month of fasting and prayer, but it is also the Muslim world's television drama addiction month. At the end of a day’s deprivation, millions of Muslims from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf gather in front of their television sets to follow daily episodes of month-long miniseries especially created for the Ramadan sweeps month. Every year, one or two of the multiple offerings becomes the breakout success, and the year’s forerunners invariably reflect the zeitgeist of the Islamic world.

This year, the two stand-outs are a mind-boggling contrast: on the one hand, a scholarly, pious docudrama of the life of Omar, a Disciple of the Prophet and second Caliph; and on the other, a wild Egyptian version of Sex and the City. It is disconcerting enough that ‘The Girls’, as the latter is called, is allowed to air in newly Islamist-governed Egypt and conservative Gulf Emirates- more about that later- but even more controversial is the life story of the Caliph Omar. That strikes at the heart of a particular Sunni-Shiite split in Islamic doctrine.

In the eponymous docudrama, actors play the Caliph Omar and other close disciples of the Prophet, as well as members of his family, breaking a long-standing taboo in the film industry of the Muslim world. So far, Arabic screens have been spared Cecile B. De Mille style religious epics with Victor Mature and Charleston Heston in biblical garb. 

But the interdiction on portraying Muhammad and his disciples is a Sunni tradition, never observed in Shia Islam. In Iran, black-browed, black-bearded, turbaned depictions of Muhammad, the Caliph Ali and his martyred son Hussein, are ubiquitous. On the other hand, in strict Sunni Saudi Arabia, the prohibition against idol-worship is so sweeping that the very shrines and tombs of the Prophet’s family were destroyed by Wahabi zealots in the eighteenth century.

Even in moderately Sunni Egypt, imams of the Azhar University have been ambivalent about the Ramadan docudrama ‘Omar,’ although the tone of the Emirates-based MBC production is irreproachably respectful, and the lead role is played by a sympathetic, brawny, charismatic young actor. The Prophet Muhammad is never shown or heard directly, although his off-screen presence is intimated in many scenes. The dialogue is enlivened by a few wrestling scenes and a love story featuring a Spartacus-like Ethiopian slave.

On the other hand, the four girls of ‘Girls’ Stories’ are blatant mimics, if not parodies, of the Sex and the City Quartet, down to the Carrie character’s habit of concluding each episode by recording her thought of the day on her laptop. They live in an unrecognizable, aseptic Egypt of gated communities and traffic-less roads, and pepper their vocabulary with five Americanisms per sentence. Camellia, the crudest and wildest, is the ‘Samantha’ character, but all four of the ‘girls’ vamp around in six-inch heels, skintight spandex, décolletage and nip-tuck faces. They chase elusive boyfriends and equally elusive jobs with the talentless single-mindedness of rhinos. They abuse any male at hand, including lackluster suitors and doting daddies- not Sugar Daddies, but their actual progenitors; for these Egyptian ‘girls’ are spoilt brats who still live under the roof of improbably indulgent fathers whom they treat with such contempt that one boyfriend actually objects. The girls are so unsympathetically drawn that it is a mystery which demographic these charmless protagonists are intended to attract.  

Unless, of course, wittingly or unwittingly by their creators, they represent a cautionary tale, girls gone wild, ‘secular’ values taken to a cartoonish extreme. In that case, it is no wonder that Egypt’s newly-elected Islamist government turns a blind eye to their onscreen shenanigans during the holy month of Ramadan.

Suleiman: The Spymaster Who Came in from the Cold?

If ever a man knew too much, it was Omar Suleiman. The most powerful spymaster in the Middle East, Mubarak’s black box, the C.I.A.’s rendition agent in Egypt, Israel’s intermediary. The head of Egypt’s dread Mukhabarat, a spy chief so powerful that his very identity was unknown to the average Egyptian until he chose to go public a few years ago. The Intelligence Chief who, when asked by the C.I.A. to provide a DNA sample from the brother of Ayman Zawahiri, the Al Qaeda leader, offered instead to send them the man’s entire arm.

No wonder that the out-of-the-blue announcement of Suleiman’s sudden death, purportedly at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio when he was supposed to be in the Emirates, unleashed a flood of conspiracy theories worthy of a John Le Carré novel.

I sat a table away from Omar Suleiman at a wedding in February, by sheer chance. This was a year after Mubarak’s downfall, and a couple of months before Suleiman briefly and unsuccessfully ran for president of Egypt. It struck me then what a physically small man he was, in person, but how he commanded deference from his entourage. It was testament enough to his power that, in the year that elapsed since the January Revolution, in spite of Suleiman’s sulfurous reputation, in spite of his closeness to Mubarak, he was never at risk of being tried, let alone jailed, as so many ministers and other powerful regime figures were. The inescapable conclusion was that Suleiman knew so much about enough people to be untouchable. Even the news media seemed too cowed to touch him.

At the wedding we both attended, at tables nearby, there were a few sotto voce jokes about: “Where is the man behind Omar Suleiman?” A reference to the indelible, notorious television image of his pale and haunted face announcing Mubarak’s resignation on February 11^th 20111, while behind his chair a stone-faced, burly man in glasses stood guard. Some, at the time, wondered if Suleiman were being coerced into reading the resignation announcement, but if ever a man had a face designed by nature to deliver mournful news or be painted by El Greco, it was Omar Suleiman.

Pity he wasn’t available to announce his own demise. Although there are plenty of conspiracy theories to suggest that he may well have been. After all, the circumstances are ripe for intrigue. First Suleiman’s two daughters precede him out of Egypt, then he himself is reported to have left for the Emirates; then it is suddenly announced that he had been at the Cleveland Clinic all along and that, although he was well when he checked in, he died during treatment. That doesn’t say much for the Cleveland Clinic. On the other hand, if Suleiman, like his former boss Mubarak, was trying to stage a temporary death- who can forget Mubarak’s miraculous resurrection in June, when he rapidly progressed backward from ‘clinically dead’ to ‘comatose’ to ‘stable’ to ‘commenting on the elections’ in three short days?

If Suleiman were trying to engineer a convenient disappearance beyond the reach of Egypt’s current Islamist-led government that might conceivably hold him accountable for ordering the torture of extradited Islamist suspects on behalf of the C.I.A., he could well have orchestrated his own ‘death’, with the connivance of his friends in the U.S. intelligence community, witness-protection style. Or there is a more sinister scenario possible:  the man who knew too much may finally have known too much for his own good. Only John Le Carré could have dreamed this stuff up, but then truth can be stranger than fiction. 

When Did Egypt's Revolution Get Downgraded to a Revolt?

 On February 3^rd, 2011, the day after Mubarak ‘loyalist’ thugs rode into Tahrir Square on horses and camels and started bludgeoning the peaceful protesters camping there, I wrote:  ‘If (Mubarak) stays, the events of the past ten days will be referred to as "the uprising of January 2011"; if he goes, we will talk of a revolution. We owe it to these brave young protesters to make it the latter.’

Today, ominously, there are more and more references to Egypt’s ‘revolt’ in the media; just this morning, the New York Times referred to ‘Egypt’s postrevolt politics.’ Ironically, the context was an article about the reconvening of the first democratically-elected Egyptian parliament, after sixty years of what effectively amounted to one-party rule; at the behest of the first democratically-elected president in the first contested presidential election, after sixty years of yes/no referendums on the incumbent that invariably returned the sitting president with an incredible 90% plus approval.

True, there is controversy over the eligibility, under Mubarak-era rules, of Muslim Brotherhood candidates to run for one third of the seats they won. But even an observer like myself, dismayed by the sweep of the legislative and executive by Islamist candidates, must admit that vox populi had spoken.

True also that the election of the president turned out to be not the end but the beginning of an intensification of the tug of war between the civilian president and the military establishment. Those who object to the Constitutional Court ruling that invalidated one third of the seats point out that the Generals made a power grab by dissolving Parliament under the cover of a ruling by the Mubarak-appointee court. Others, like Mubarak-opposition leader Mohamed Baradei, uphold the authority of the Court on the principle of ‘a government of laws, not of men.’ This brings to my mind the parallel with the Bush/Gore impasse of 2008, when Vice President Gore bowed to the higher authority of the courts, regardless of the widespread criticism of their role at the time.

So democracy is messy, even in the country that prides itself on being the city on the hill. Democracy, as we understand the concept today, evolved over centuries in specific contexts that, until recently even in the West, did not include women, colored persons or the uneducated. In a country with Egypt’s rate of illiteracy, where a vast swath of the disaffected, disenfranchised masses turned to religion as ‘the solution’, is it any surprise that the outcome of the first free elections disappointed the ideals of the secular-minded young liberals who originally launched the January 25^th revolution?

But that does not negate the fact that it was a revolution, not a mere revolt. To suggest otherwise is to insult the memory of the young idealists who suffered, sacrificed, and died by the thousand to break the cycle of fear and autocracy, once and for all.