Look Who's Rocking the Casbah

The revolutionary implications of Arab music videos.

Charles Paul Freund from the June 2003 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Can that be what is happening with Arabic videos? While they are entertaining and titillating viewers, they are also transmitting new ways of being to an apparently receptive audience, new and multiplying approaches to being an "Arab" that combine traditional forms of cultural self-presentation with forms borrowed from an array of other sources. The combinations that promise to emerge would not be mere copies of borrowed foreign models; they would be new and indigenous cultural creations, just as is the case in cultures around the world. This syncretism is already true of the music itself, which not only uses traditional Arabic instrumentation (nye, oud, qanoon, etc.) in new ways but also borrows instruments and rhythms from the Caribbean, Europe, India, rock, rap (including rap in Spanish), and numerous other sources.

What this low, "vulgar" genre is offering, in sum, is a glimpse of a latent Arab world that is both liberal and "modernized." Why? Because the foundation of cultural modernity is the freedom to achieve a self-fashioned and fluid identity, the freedom to imagine yourself on your own terms, and the videos offer a route to that process. By contrast, much of Arab culture remains a place of constricted, traditional, and narrowly defined identities, often subsumed in group identities that hinge on differences with, and antagonism toward, other groups.

For nearly a century, a series of utopian political systems has been advanced in the region to attempt to break this cycle of conflict and stagnation: Pan-Arabism, Ba'athism, Nasserism, Islamism, etc. These have all failed, sometimes disastrously. What may yet work in the region is what has worked elsewhere for centuries: commercialism that does not transmit a regime's utopian dreams but addresses the personal dreams of the audience.

If the audience for these videos uses them to foment a long-term cultural revolution, it would hardly be the first time that "vulgar" forms were at the center of significant social change. In fact, "low" culture has almost certainly done more to transform the modern world than has "high" culture. That is because, as communications professor Joli Jensen argues in the recent Is Art Good For Us?, it is the low, "expressive" forms of art that people use to engage with and understand the world around them, and not the high, "instrumental" cultural forms that are collected in museums because they are supposed to be good for a public in need of uplifting.

Cultural history is replete with examples of this process, despite critics' traditional focus on aesthetic achievement. The most influential Russian novel, for example, was written not by Tolstoy or Turgenev but by the forgotten journalist Nikolai Chernyshevsky. His wooden 19th-century tale, What Is to Be Done?, was one of a series of popular novels at the center of an intense late-czarist reading frenzy that accompanied liberalization, and the one that set the stage for the Leninist enterprise that was to follow. Tolstoy's own most influential work was not War and Peace but a populist spiritual tract entitled The Kingdom of God Is Within You. Its lesson of returning good for evil was to inspire Gandhi and, eventually, Martin Luther King.

The most effective literary expressions of 18th-century British feminism were not the period's eloquent tracts but the "cheap" Gothic novels that dramatized virtue in distress. The modern American character was shaped far less by celebrated transcendentalist and realist works than by such yarns as Owen Wister's The Virginian, which offered a powerful model of quiet masculine strength. And mid-century Eastern Europeans living under communism who sought cultural expressions of personal liberty found them in jazz, jeans, rock music, and Hollywood.

Can such a model be applied to the Arab world? If Arab pop culture does indeed reflect latent Arab liberalism, it would be historically fitting. After all, modern puritanical Islamism emerged, in part, from a reaction to the West's supposed cultural degeneracy. Secular Arabs using their own cultural artifacts to assert personal liberty would only be striking back on a familiar front.

Islamism has spread through the region via a series of classic and modern works, and by far the most important of the 20th-century writers has been an Egyptian named Sayyid Qutb, who was executed by Nasser in 1966. The most important of Qutb's works is a tract titled Signs Along the Path.

The book argues that the modern world is imbued with the same moral evil that existed at the time of the prophet Mohammed. What is required today is a purifying global jihad. Signs is this jihad's manifesto, and Qutb is in many ways its intellectual architect. The jihad he sought must take place in both senses of the term: as an outer struggle against the unbelieving and sinful enemy, and as an inner, spiritual struggle. In short, life must be lived within Islamic strictures. For many, that has meant women once again in hijab; for some it has even meant the prohibition of secular music.

Qutb concluded that a return to Islam was necessary because he equated liberalization with moral corruption. This is especially apparent in the observations he made during a sojourn in the United States between 1948 and 1950. Americans, he decided, were crass and ignorant because they led secular lives. Qutb wrote an often-quoted letter home from Washington, D.C., that described a tattooed man seated near him in a coffee shop; the gaudy colors of the man's tattoo disgusted him, and symbolized the lack of taste and spirituality that pervaded American culture.

Qutb's most notorious reaction to American life was occasioned by, of all things, a church social in Greeley, Colorado, a community originally organized along utopian lines and one that had maintained a tradition of temperance and moral rigor. Qutb found it a black hole of degeneracy. He had been invited to a dance in Greeley's church basement, where the pastor was playing dance records for the congregation. At one point, the pastor lowered the lights and cued a 78-rpm version of the flirtatious but otherwise innocent tune, "Baby, It's Cold Outside," then popular because it had been used in a 1949 Esther Williams movie. Qutb was scandalized. "The dancing intensified," he wrote. "The hall swarmed with legs....Arms circled arms, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of love."

It is as a result of such encounters that Qutb's Islamism was to intensify. Oddly, the whole of the Western, liberalized world sometimes seems to have presented a sexual threat to Qutb, a threat that began aboard the ship that brought him to the U.S. There, a "drunken, semi-naked" woman knocked at his cabin door; he believed the woman could only have been sent to corrupt him by the CIA. It would be interesting to know just why women and sex represented threat and corruption to Qutb; there may be clues in his 1947 novel, Thorns, an autobiographical tale of romance and heartbreak, but the work is untranslated. In any event, two years after he returned from the U.S., Qutb joined Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the fountainhead of modern Islamism, and became its leading theorist.

Whatever the source of Qutb's concerns, it isn't hard to imagine his reaction to the sight of Elissa's substantial cleavage looming out of her bustier, never mind the idea of importing Gothic vampires, drive-in theaters, and mustachioed alien children invaders into the Arab imagination. Yet Elissa in her hotel room and Samr anticipating her wedding night could hardly be more apt responses to the Islamist moral constrictions that have been advanced, in part, as a result of Qutb's work. The Arab world will eventually achieve its long-delayed goal of liberalized modernity; it might just as well dance itself there.