Public Culture

Finding a Place for Islam:

Egyptian Television Serials and
the National Interest
Lila Abu-Lughod

fter something of a hiatus, anthropologists have returned to questions about

the making of national culture. Inspired in part by debates generated by
Benedict Andersons (1983) notion of nations as imagined communities, they
are interrogating the processes by which national ideologies are constructed,
internalized, and contested (e.g., Ferguson and Gupta 1992; Foster 1991; Fox
1990). In the postcolonial world, mass media have played crucial roles in these
processes, with governments making control over media a priority and betraying
their anxieties in the continuing controversies at UNESCO over the free flow of
information and in such practices as positioning tanks and armed guards outside
places like the Television and Radio Building in Cairo. That so many successful
revolutions o r coups detat have been marked by the seizure of air waves suggests
that governments fears are justified. Yet anthropologists are only beginning to
examine the rich cultural forms of television, radio, and video, not to mention
the print media that Anderson considered so pivotal in the development of national
sentiments.

Fieldwork in Egypt in 1989-90 was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities
fellowship from the American Research Center in Egypt and a grant for advanced research from
the American Council of Learned Scholars/Social Science Research Council Joint Committee on the
Near and Middle East. I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Kamal Abdel Malik and Maha
Mahfouz Abdel-Rahman in researching the Egyptian press. Also helpful were critical readings by
Tim Mitchell, Unni Wikan, and anonymous reviewers for Public Culture of earlier versions.
1. For discussions of the UNESCO controversies see Mattelart, Delcourt, and Mattelart (1988)
and Michaels (1983).
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01993 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

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I want to explore here there1ationshipof Egyptian television serials to national

political contests as a way of engaging the methodological and theoretical challenges that studies of the politics of media pose. The crucial importance of television serials is obvious to anyone who has been to Egypt. Walk down the streets
of Cairo or the lanes of any village during the early evening hours and you will
see the flicker of television screens and hear the dialogue and music (usually
melodramatic) of the current serial. Read the newspapers and you will find articles
and cartoons that can only be understood if you were following these serials
known as the musulsulur. Easily the most popular of television genres, these
Egyptian serials, usually lasting fifteen days, seem to set the very rhythms of
national life. Given the extensiveness of access to television combined with the
limits of broadcasting to only half a day and on only two full-fledged channels,
one could argue that the audience might include a majority of Egypts people;
the highest-quality serials are aired during the holy month of Ramadan (when
people have the most leisure).
If the serials produce a national community and television in Egypt, as in most
countries, is state-controlled, one needs to ask how the entertainment provided to
these large audiences that cross boundaries of class, gender, and region articulates
with national politics, policies, and cultural identities. In studies of media in the
non-Western world alarms are often sounded about cultural imperialism in the
domination of national culture and production by international imports (usually
from the U.S. and Britain). But Egypt, much like India, Brazil, and Mexico,
produces and even exports a healthy amount of film and television programming
of its own. Within Egypt, the local productions are more popular and widely
viewed than imported films and television serials (which are subtitled and therefore largely inaccessible to the nonliterate). The kinds of questions that must be
addressed are: What are the internal politics of these national productions? Meant
to entertain, are the serials free of political messages? Who controls these messages and who is excluded? Concerns about global inequalities and domination
should not lead us to forget the existence of domestic forms of inequality and
political control.
On the basis of an analysis of several key serials of the late 198Os, I will
argue that although the writers and producers of the most sophisticated Egyptian
television serials have a certain independence from the govemment that is reflected
in the social criticism characteristic of their productions, they nevertheless participate in a shared discourse about nationhood and citizenship that manifests itself
most directly these days in their treatment of religion. Their television dramas
thus play an important part in the most pressing political contest in Egypt (and
other predominantly Muslim countries): the contest over the place of Islam in
social and political life.
I also want to argue, however, that this vividly drawn contest over the proper

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place of Islam in national life may not be pekeived as such by many of the
communities that constitute the audiences for these serials. Nearly all mass-media
cultural production takes place in Cairo, the capital and major city of Egypt.Z
Moreover, those professionals responsible for producing the entertainment are
urban and educated, part of the national cultural and intellectual elite, and civil
servants. Although they self-consciously direct their products to their imagined
audience - the Egyptian people- their perspectives as urban professionals living
in the political center of the country can be quite different from those of their
viewers, whether in the regional or class peripheries. In at least two rural
regions, for example-the Bedouin area in the northwest of Egypt and the agricultural area in the south-as a consequence of their particular relationship to the
dominant culture of Cairo and Alexandria and to the educational and urban circumstances of both the secular television professionals and their Islamist opponents,
people view the two positions that are so at odds in the capital as merely the
twin faces of modernity. This raises the question of the effectiveness of the
government-sanctioned political messages of these serials against the actualities
of peoples particular situations within the nation-state.

The View from the Center

Questions about the place of Islam are at the center of public life in Egypt.
Among the more educated and the professionals, especially in Egypts cities,
with occasional assassinations (including that of former President Sadat) making
news, periodic government crackdowns on Islamic groups alternating with attempts at co-optation and accommodation, and signs of a self-consciously Islamic
cultural identity growing, the contest is sharply drawn. The contest is reflected
and managed in the mass media, especially television, in subtle ways. Mamduh
al-Laythy , director of the sector of the Union of Television and Radio responsible
for the production of films and serials, confirms that it is one of the concerns
of television producers. When asked about differences between the content of
the serials of the 1960s and those of the 1990s, he noted that the subject matter
had to change with viewers concerns. Among the problems that people in the
1990s faced, he listed the housing shortage, family planning, drug addiction,
and religious e~tremism.~
One of the best ways to explore how this opposition between the secular
television producers and the forces of religious extremism plays itself out is
2. Alexandria is involved with some theater and film, and many television serials are now filmed
abroad in the superior studios of Jordan and the Gulf states.
3. Interview by the author, April 29, 1990.

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to examine several popularierials. Analysis of a few successful serials of the

last few years provides a sense of the way television is working in contemporary
Egypt to assert a particular place for Islam. With one important exception (a
controversial serial called Hilmiyya Nights), these television serials maintain
a noticeable silence on the Islamic movements and deliberately ignore the alternative vision these movements offer of Islams place in Egypts future-that is, as
the solution to many of its problems -for specific political reasons.
The two works I consider first are directed by Muhammad Fadil, arguably
Egypts foremost television director, and scripted by Usama Anwar Ukasha, a
thoughtful writer with a mission to provide high-quality fare for television. Their
collaboration has resulted in the most noteworthy serials of the past few yearsprograms of immense popularity that have also generated intense debate in the
press and at public meetings around the country. Both works can be seen as
critical commentaries (skillfully embedded in an entertaining mix of melodrama
and comedy) on Egypt in the post-Nasser period -the period beginning in the
mid-1970s known as that of the injituh or opening to the West and to capitalist
development. The first serial, The White Flag, was aired finally in 1989 after
several years of trouble with the censors; the second, titled The Journey of Mr.
Abu al-Ela al-Bishry and subtitled A Comedy about People and the Morals
of These Times was broadcast several years earlier.
The protagonists of both serials are dignified, cultured, and highly moral men
in their late fifties or early sixties who have spent their lives in public service,
one as an ambassador in Europe and the other as an irrigation inspector in provincial Egypt. The ambassador returns to Alexandria after a long stint abroad; the
engineer returns to the Cairo he has not visited for years. Both find a changed
Egypt and are forced to confront the contemporary forces of corruption threatening Egyptian society. In The White Flag the educated man of taste with an
appreciation for his national heritage, art, books, and Tchaikovsky is pulled into
a war with a crass (if ultimately irresistible) and very determined nouveau riche
real estate developer who, aided by her unscrupulous lawyer, some misguided
thugs, and a host of bribed public officials and newspaper editors, tries to force
him to sell her his historic seafront villa in Alexandria so she can put up some
apartment buildings. In The Journey of Mr. Abu al-Ela the earnest man who
goes to Cairo to try to help out his relatives, all embroiled in family and financial
difficulties, suddenly comes into some wealth and is then ruined by the schemes
of everyone around him scrambling to get his money. He too encounters corrupt
officials, dishonest lawyers, greedy businessmen, people who have bought their
way into professions through bribes and cheating or now use their skills for selfish
ends. As one character puts it, They are all running, running after money. No
one stops to catch his breath or ask himself where he is going or what he is
doing.

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In addition, The Journey of Mr. Abu al-E@ treats the problem of the corrosion of family values. Older brothers abdicate family responsibilities, mothers
fail to discipline their children, wives argue with their husbands, children dont
respect their parents. Where is the family spirit that binds you together? the
protagonist complains to his relatives. Where is the respect of young to old and
the compassion of the older for the younger? Where is the mothers concern for
her children? Where is the childrens fear of their mother? Where is it all?
These serials deplore the moral state of the nation in modem times; they ask
whether the harsh but all-too-familiar circumstances of inadequate housing, low
wages, and rising prices must lead people to abandon their principles. Especially
in The Journey we hear a good deal about manners, principles, morality, and
values. The father of the only honest and principled young man complains, I
raised my son well. Thats why his path to advancement is blocked. He cant
marry [because he cannot save enough money for an apartment and one cannot
marry unless one has an apartment]. I gave him a conscience. Thats why he
cant survive. He doesnt know how to steal. When his son despairs, he tells
him, Were in an age when manhood is an ordeal, morality a heavy burden,
and honor a path of thorns.
The serials directed by Fadil and written by Ukasha are more clever, subtle,
and complex than the works produced by most other television professionals.
But they differ little in the catalog of social ills they associate with the times.
Other recent serials show individuals and families struggling against bureaucratic
red tape, the near impossibility of getting anything done without connections
and/or bribes, the corruption of government officials, the fallout of the housing
crisis, and high prices. The tough circumstances of todays expensive world are
always depicted as tempting the younger generation to compromise their values
and disrespect their parents. They seek degrading, unrespectable, or even illegal
work (such as waiting on tables, acting, or drug dealing) or try to marry for
money. The serials, in other words, are often about the struggles of good, decent
people and families to remain so in these trying times4
What may be unique about these two popular serials is that they personify
morality and immorality not by the contrast between tradition and modernity or
the local versus the Western but by two social classes. One class consists of those
4. A study conducted in 1981-82 that included a content analysis of all television dramas, interviews about current social problems with members of the Writers Union, and a survey of problems
reported in major newspapers suggested that most television drama was based on stories about
Egyptian problems. The major foci were quite similar to those I noted in 1989-90: class conflict
and the gap between rich and poor; economic problems such as housing, price inflation, poverty,
and byzantine bureaucracies; family problems; the persistence of traditional attitudes and rejection
of modem practices. Confirming one of the points of this article, the study noted that 87.7%of the
works were concerned with urban, as opposed to rural, problems. See hi (1984).

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who took advantage of the eGonomic liberalization and opening that President
Sadat initiated in the 1970s and President Mubarak has continued: people portrayed in the serials as fat cats who drive around in late-model Mercedes while
others cannot afford to marry, wear fancy suits and sit in glass-and-steel office
buildings, deal in construction, take and offer bribes, and embezzle while others
are unemployed. The younger generation is represented as spoiled and selfcentered, dazzled by the allure of money and glamour and trying to become
movie stars, pop singers, and boutique owners.
The other class consists of educated professionals-not just irrigation engineers
and diplomats but lawyers, architects, doctors, medical students, university students, philosophy teachers, school principals, responsible journalists, serious
artists, and translators. Some have risen from the bottom of society through their
education; others have been comfortable all their lives. The quality they share
is that they are honest and care about others and their society.6
No opposition is set up between Westernization and an authentic indigenous
identity, however defined. Both classes are presented as having appropriated
much that could be considered modem and Western; the difference lies in what
they have incorporated into their lives. The nouveau riche villains have borrowed
foreign cars, pop music, English words they do not know how to use, gaudy
telephones, and garish wallpaper. The protagonists have taken literacy and an
appreciation for art and heritage, portrayed as universal rather than simply Westem values added to Egyptian values. Mr. Abu al-Elas library contains books
by European and Arab writers: Aristotle, Taha Hussein, and Voltaire. The villa
in The White Flag is full of art treasures like Chinese vases, yet it was also
the site of meetings of the early Egyptian nationalists.
What is startling in these works, in the context of the current situation in
Egypt, is the absence of religion as a source of morality and the avoidance of
overt signs of Muslim piety and identity in the protagonists. The silence on the
Islamic movement as a modem alternative is broken only to mock. The villain
in The White Flag wears clothes that are a travesty of the new Islamic modest
dress that has become a fashionable sign of piety in the cities and towns of Egypt.
Her head is wrapped modestly in a turban and she carries the title (hagga) of
someone who has been on the pilgrimage to Mecca. But her turbans are made
5. Significantly, the critique of this class of nouveau riche entrepreneurs and the linking of the
deterioration of family ties with the business opportunities of the opening up are themes common
to what Malkmus (1988) has labeled the %ewnEgyptiancinema, a more realistic and socially conscious
cinema that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s.
6. For a more detailed treatment of T h e White Flag that differs in some respects from mine,
see the dissertation in progress on Egyptian popular culture by Walter Armbrust, Department of
Anthropology, University of Michigan.

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brightly colored pompons. Her

of gold lam6 and sometimes further graced
speech is crude, the religious calligraphy that decorates her office is overshadowed
by a huge television set and a photograph of her smoking a water pipe, and her
main interests are money and movie stars. Nothing in her behavior suggests
genuine piety.
While the everyday forms of piety that are so much a part of life in Egypt
are occasionally reflected in the popular serials-older characters or simple peasants are sometimes shown praying or using religious phrases - the new forms of
piety are never portrayed. One never sees the young in the cities asserting an
Islamic identity in the serials. The obscuring of this crucial group can be tracked
through dress. There is a stark contrast between what the fashionably outfitted
bareheaded actresses wear in the serials and what real urban women depicted in
television documentaries wear. These educated and semieducated women on the
streets, in schools, in health clinics, and in offices (including those of the Union
of Television and Radio itself) are more often than not wearing the headcovering
known as the higab and the full-length clothing of new Islamic modest dress.'
This is not to say that religious programming on television does not exist;
there is an increasing amount of its8Recitations of the Koran open and close the
television day; the call to prayer interrupts programming; there are numerous
religious discussions and programs; the Friday mosque prayers are televised;
there are even religious television serials, didactic and stilted historical costume
dramas about the early days of Islam, that is, the past not the present, always
in the classical Arabic that so few people really understand and still fewer speak.
But such religious programming is generally kept segregated from the more
popular shows, especially the serials.

Exclusions

Why these exclusions and segregations? A look at who is involved in television

gives some indication. Television was introduced to Egypt in 1960under President
Nasser and used, along with radio, as an instrument of national development
7. The only exception of which I am aware to this exclusion of the Islamists from serials is the
highly critical portrayal of "religious extremists" in the fourth installment of 'Hilmiyya Nights," the
controversial serial written by 'Ukasha and discussed briefly below. The serial is so unusual that it
merits a separate study, which is forthcoming. For the first full-length study of the new veiling among
lower-middle-class women in Cairo, see MacLeod (1990). See also Abaza (1987), El Guindi (1981),
Hoffman-Ladd (1987), and Stowasser (19876) for excellent discussions of the ideology of the new
veiling and its relation to larger political trends in Egypt.
8. Abaza (1987:20-23) sees the increase in religious programming as a strategy for assertions
by the state of its religiosity to counter the religious opposition groups so popular in the early 1980s.

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and political m~bilization.~

'his ideology of mass communication in the service
of national development, common enough in the Third world, persists for some
like the director whose serials I have been describing. He diagnoses the problem
of citizens of this "developing nation" as "cultural illiteracy" and sees television
drama as the best instrument for eliminating such illiteracy.1 The discouse of
other influential figures in television is a somewhat patronizing one of the guidance
and education of the Egyptian masses." Mamduh al-Laythy, the director of the
film and serial production unit and a police officer turned screenwriter, explained:
Egypt is one of the developing nations and we as a country are very
concerned with the cultural education of our people. . . . Our most important goal in relation to the citizens is to help individuals become cultured. We must educate them, teach them the basics of morality and religious duty. The individual needs direction. He needs information and
we need to inculcate the spirit of patriotism, morality, religion, courage, and enterprise. We have found that the best means to reach the individual is through drama. It works like magic.12
Many urban intellectuals within the television industry, people like Fadil and
'Ukasha who came of age during the Nasser period, see their vision of modernity
and progress under threat today from both the newly wealthy and the religious
groups. Their serials uphold the secular national institutions of the postcolonial
state, promote the ideals of informed citizenship, and deplore what they view
as abuses of basically good institutions like the law, government, education, and
the family.13 Although somewhat controversial, the social criticism they offer
remains within the bounds of the familiar paradigms of the official political parties.
Such is not the case for the self-proclaimed radical Islamic reformists who
are ignored in the serials. They speak directly to the same corruption and consumerism the serials deplore. In their meetings, pamphlets, magazines, and Friday
sermons in the thousands of private mosques for which the Ministry of Religious
Endowments cannot provide preachers, they offer an alternative path to modernity-a path that rejects the West and the secular nationalist vision that derived
from it, as well as those Egyptians who have associated themselves with the
9. For an outline of the history of television and radio in Egypt, see CEDEJ (1987). Karthigesu
(1988) explores the common development aims of television in the postcolonial world.
10. Interview with Muhammad Fadil by the author, April 15, 1990.
1 1 . This is consistent with Rugh's observations in the late 1970s (1984:250).
12. Interview with Mamduh al-laythy by the author, April 29, 1990.
13. A telling scene is one in "The Journey" in which a young woman is reassured by a lawyer
that justice will be done. He tells her, "The law isn't just texts and we aren't just machines for putting
them into effect. The law is based on values and morality."

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West.I4This alternative vision of a self-consciously Islamic path has a widespread

appeal because it seems to offer people a moral way to deal with the times.
What Fadil and Ukasha, as well as other television professionals seem to be
contesting, in excluding this vision for the future from the serials, is not the
value of religious faith and piety but the place where Muslim discouse is relevant.
The segregation of religious and popular programming produces a sense of the
separation of spheres, declaring the irrelevance of religion, except as a moral
guide, to the public domain of political development, economic progress, and
social responsibility. The same television professionals who refuse or are unable to
portray the appeal of the Islamist vision or to criticize it openly may be personally
pious.I5 But they carefully set up boundaries that are rejected by the Muslim
activist groups who assert that Islam, referring to sources like the Koran and the
model of the Prophet and his first community, can and should provide a blueprint
for society and government and should inform every aspect of life; there is no
distinction made between public and private.
If the short pieces published on the back page of Al-Zksam, the magazine of
the Muslim Brotherhood, are any indication, these groups resent this exclusion
and are quick to condemn television.I6 In issues published in 1989, for example,
pieces criticized female television announcers for the impious display of their
beauty, the falsification of modern history in televison programs that erased the
role of the Islamic forces in Palestine and glorified Nasser and his notorious
Intelligence Service, and the scandalous behavior of a number of major actors
and actresses recently arrested for drug-trafficking. In that last article, the mass
media in contemporary Egypt are described hyperbolically as a humiliated slavegirl in the palace of the Sultan who needs a protracted war of liberation in order
to become her own mistress. Television is commended for airing one program
that will be counted as a good deed- a religious program on the beautiful names
of God-but the programmers are criticized for scheduling it so late at night that
only those suffering from insomnia watch it.
The magazine is even critical of the voice of official Islam in Egypt, Shaykh
Jad al-Haq, rector of Al-Azhar University. One article, by a junior faculty member
at a provincial university, takes the religious leader to task for remaining silent
about Egypts participation in the Miss Universe Pageant. He notes sarcastically
14. The literature on the Islamic movements around the Arab world is vast. Some important studies
are Dessouki (1982), Ibrahim (1980), Kepel (1985), Kramer (1987-88), and Stowasser (1987~).
15. When I interviewed them during the month of Ramadan they were observing the religious
fast-just as Egyptian presidents like Sadat and Mubarak are televised praying at the mosques on
religious holidays.
16. A book critical of the negative effects of television on Muslim family life even draws on
research by Western social scientists to bolster its claims. See Kashak (1986).

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that, even after shamelessly exposing her body in a bikini in front of the world
media, the Egyptian beauty did not win.
Shaykh Jad al-Haq does indeed take a more moderate stance on television
entertainment. In afarwa, or legal opinion, on the arts, written on July 5, 1988,
and published by Al-Azhar Magazinehe states that Islam does not forbid entertainment or enjoyment. Including under his rubric music, singing, and acting, he
notes, however, that their religious status can be confusing. To be permitted,
they must conform to certain general principles: the themes should follow the
principles of Islam and its instructions; styles of performance should not stimulate
any lustful desires; performances should not be located in venues where instinctual
desires will be stimulated or that are associated with alcohol or drugs. In film
and theater he judges as unlawful such subject matter as crimes, sex, or any
other wrongful beliefs and corrupt ideas. The Shaykh recognizes the importance
of ends. Unlike those in Al-Zfisam who attack actors and actresses, he notes that
acting can be used as a tool to educate society through discussing issues that
are threatening to the harmony of a successful society-issues such as family
ties and how they have weakened, or how selfishness, betrayal and dishonesty
are widespread in modern societies (Jad Al-Haq 1988-89: 10-23).
This latter judgment would condone the work of the socially conscious television drama producers I have been describing whose central themes were exactly
those the religious leader valued. Here, as in many other arenas, the position of
the highest official in the religious establishment in Egypt does not challenge the
government, insofar as television represents the position of the government that
controls it.
But the relationship between government and television production is complex.
Since some of the best directors can and do fund most of their productions through
independent financing, the state television bureaucracy has at its disposal only
the power of censorship together with the preemptive self-censorship that accompanies this in the case of culture producers like Fadil and Ukasha. Unlike many
other serials, their works are often controversial because they are so critical of
social conditions in Egypt and, by implication, government policy. Fadil has
always been known and respected for this political criticism. His first serial,
aired in the days after the 1967 defeat and called Cairo and People, focused
on cases of corruption and the abandoning of national ideals in the Nasser period.
Written by two judges in the Department of Justice, some of the stories were
inspired by court cases. As Nur Al-Sharif, the famous Egyptian film actor who
got his start on this show, explained, The serial harshly criticized the defects
17. In recent years, an even more powerful force for self-censorship has been the economic
necessity of selling programs to the morally conservative wealthy Arab nations of the Gulf.

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and mistakes that led to the defeat and what followed. When I asked him whether
Fadil, the director, was supporting or attacking the government policy in that
series, he replied, Cairo and the People was not opposed to the political theory
of the time; it was against the weaknesses and errors in the way the theory was
being applied.*
With the significant shifts in government policy pursued by Nassers successors, Sadat and Mubarak, this socially concerned director and the writer with
whom he often collaborates seem to have become even more critical. In their
productions they now nostalgically invoke, through charged symbols of the Nasser
era like the great singer U r n Kulthum or the Aswan High Dam, the period of
socialist ideals and nationalist vision. In fact, an upsurge of interest in the Nasser
period is noticeable in a number of the popular serials aired during the last few
years. One spectacularly popular serial called Hilmiyya Nights, written by
Ukasha and shown in four annual installments (of thirty to forty episodes each),
is an epic of modem Egyptian history that follows the rich and poor families in
a popular quarter, Hilmiyya, in Cairo from the days of King Farouk to the present.
Its positive depiction of Nasser and the period before Sadat was controversial.
In 1990, for example, every major periodical carried stories and editorials condemning or defending the serial. Headlines to articles in the newspaper of the
center-right Wafd party demanded, Does the Author of Hilmiyya Nights Have
the Right to Write History from a Nasserist Viewpoint? while an article in Roz
ul-Yusuj, a more left-of-center magazine, defended the serial as the most brilliantly
artistic one ever, blessed with superb acting and music, made riveting by the
complexity of the characters, and to be commended for a plot that did justice to
Nasser and was rightly critical of the new parasitical commercial class that Sadats
open-door policy created. l9
Even more relevant to this revival of interest in Nassers days, which cannot
be unrelated to the growing disaffection with the social and economic changes
brought on by the opening (infirah) and what may be a popular rethinking of
the peace treaty with Israel that accompanied this policy, was an extraordinarily
popular serial called Rafat al-Haggan, whose first two installments were shown
during the months of Ramadan in 1989 and 1990. Based on a book by Salih
Mursy, it claimed to tell the true story of an Egyptian spy successfully planted
in Israel for twenty years beginning in the 1950~.~O
The hero is a handsome James
Bond character (except that he is a chain smoker and works at a low-tech levelplacing pieces of string over his door to detect break-ins and writing in invisible
ink) backed by a team of dedicated and patriotic Egyptian intelligence officers.
18. Interview by the author, July 22, 1990.
19. Respectively, A[-Wufd, June 10, 1990, p. 10, and Hanafy (1990).
20. For a review of the press concerning this serial, see the dossier in CEDEJ (1988).

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Unlike most Egyptian television serials this was a political rather than a family
drama. It offered, however, only the simple message of identity politics, which
guaranteed its appeal to a wide constituency.
The opening scene sets the terms. Shown writhing in pain, the protagonist is
dying of cancer in his home in Germany. He confesses to his German wife: Im
not an Israeli, Im an Egyptian. Im not a Jew, Im a Muslim. His widow then
goes to Egypt in search of the truth about her husband. The rest of the serial
unfolds the story of his life, through flashbacks accompanying the narrative his
handler recounts to her. What matters in this opening scene and another in the
same episode is that our hero, Rafat al-Haggan, although initially a small-time
crook, is a patriotic Egyptian who has sacrificed himself for his country. His
cleverness in outwitting the Israelis, his irresistible attractiveness to a bevy of
beautiful Israeli women (played by some glamorous Egyptian actresses), and the
triumph of the Egyptian Intelligence Service are meant to inspire national pride.
Other kinds of politics besides this general love of country are noticeably absent.
There is nothing to indicate what Egypts internal politics were at the time although
one hears some of Nassers emotional radio broadcasts about the 1956 war. More
intriguing, neither the politics nor history of the Palestine conflict is presented
even though our hero is living in Israel.21
The serial, perhaps inadvertently, conveyed a double message. Although its
primary purpose was to promote national pride and identity, an effect produced
by reviving memories of the Nasser period during which Israel was unequivocally
the adversary on which heroic Egyptians should spy, ironically it also seemed
to normalize the traffic with Israel that Sadat initiated. Israelis were portrayed
as sometimes corrupt (the men) and immoral (the women all fall in love with
Rafat, even when they are already married) but generally normal and, in the
case of women, quite attractive people.22 The roles were played by familiar
and well-liked Egyptian actors. Our hero regularly greeted his new friends with
shalom and maze1 tov; his use of these terms taught them to children and
adults all over Egypt. As one cartoon in the magazine Roz al-Yusufsuggested,
the serial also filled peoples heads with a host of previously unfamiliar names
like Charlie, David, Yacov, Keohane, Levy, and so forth. Significantly, the
censors found little to criticize in the script and only minor changes were required
as decided by the Egyptian Intelligence Service.
In the context of Islam and national television, however, the most fascinating
21. For a discussion of the way the Egyptian serials, even when presenting social criticism, are
depliticized, see Abu-Lughod (1991).
22. Latifa al-Zayat (1992) has argued that the fourth installment differs radically from the first
three in its idealized (and skewed) portrayal of Israeli society. I am grateful to Joel Beinin for bringing
this article to my attention.

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aspect of the serial is the way it asserts that Islam is an essential part of our
heros Egyptian identity even though he is not living a religious life. In Israel
he is regularly shown drinking wine over meals and gambling (to obtain secrets);
moreover, since he is passing himself off in Israel as an Egyptian Jew, he even
attends temple. Yet two moving scenes claim for him his Muslim identity. The
first occurs in the first episode, right after Rafats death. His body has been
prepared for burial and lies in a casket. The Egyptian Intelligence Officer who
has taken special charge of him cannot bear the thought that he will have a Jewish
burial and that no Egyptians will attend to honor him. So he flies to Europe and,
disguised as a rabbi, manages to get into the house while everyone is away. As
he stands before the casket he slips off his shoes, as one would do to pray in a
mosque, and pulls out from his breast pocket a copy of the Koran. With tears
in his eyes, he recites over the corpse of the hero the proper verses for praying
over the dead.
We see this officer cry in another episode as well, the one in which, late one
night, he first discovers the file of Agent 313 and thus the existence of Rafat in
Israel. Although others in the Intelligence Service have lost faith in Rafat because
he is not sending worthwhile information, this young officer in training is moved
by what he finds when he looks through the file; he decides to take responsibility
for the young spy. When he opens the folder, he finds an envelope marked, To
be opened after my death. It begins (and we hear Rafats voice repeating after
him), In the Name of God the Merciful the Compassionate. Truly we are Gods
and to Him we return. This is our heros will, to be executed, he says, if he
does not return alive to the land of his beloved Egypt. In a broken voice, with
mournful music playing in the background, Rafat goes through, one by one,
the sums to be given to each of the members of his family, even those brothers
who mistreated him after the death of his father. He ends, by now practically
sobbing, with the Muslim profession of faith: Thus I will have cleared myself
of all guilt in front of God, after I sacrificed everything in the service of the
cherished homeland. God is Great, and for the glory of Egypt, I testify that there
is no god but God and that Muhammad is his prophet.
The protagonist has, in this document, neatly linked Egyptian patriotism with
Islamic identity. The serial can be interpreted as asserting that those in the more
militant Islamic movements today - and by implication perhaps their brethren
jailed during the Nasser era-have no grounds for accusing their secular government of being less than fully identified with Islam. This program can thus be
seen as part of a struggle to reappropriate Islamic identity for secular nationalists,
a struggle in which the state-controlled mass media, as in much else, are instrumental.

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Peripheral Visions: Regionalism

In the cities of Egypt the secular visions purveyed by television dramas and the
Islamists assertions of Islams relevance to national political and social life are
clearly opposed. But is this opposition viewed in the same way in rural areas?
To suggest how differently the contest might be viewed, I want to sketch in the
surprising interplay between the forces of mass-media entertainment and Islamic
activism in two communities outside Cairo with which I am familiar. I had initially
become interested in television and radio dramatic serials while working with the
Awlad Ali Bedouin of the Western Desert because these figured in generational
conflicts. Resistance to the authority of elders was beginning, in the mid-l980s,
to take the form of a slight shift on the part of the younger generation toward
identification with a national Egyptian culture based in the Nile Valley. The irony
was that while the radio soap operas and Egyptian popular music inspired in
some young people a tentative desire to emulate certain aspects of middle-class
urban Egyptian life-styles- romantic love, companionate marriage, and education
and careers for women-the same avid consumers were those whose involvement
in national schooling was putting them in contact with the growing urban trend
toward public religiosity.
The attitudes of one young Bedouin woman I call Kamla, the only girl in the
community in which I lived to have graduated from high school, illustrate this
seemingly strange confluence. Over the ten years I knew her, Kamla had come
more and more to chafe against the restrictions facing Bedouin girls and women.
She often critized her mother for her chaotic life-style and swore she would not
marry a Bedouin unless he were Egyptianized and educated. She read Egyptian
magazines and newspapers whenever she could and was scolded by her mother
for listening to Cairo radio while she did her household chores. Yet Kamla also
confided to me that she would have liked to replace her headscarf with the new
headcovering associated with modest Islamic dress, but she was afraid her family
would object. She also said she would adopt this kind of veil if God opens the
way for me and I many someone educated.
Her attitudes toward the new Islamic activists were more positive than the
older generations. Because most of the older people in the Bedouin community
are secure in their identities as Muslims, they have mixed reactions to the sanctimonious Egyptians they are beginning to encounter and the assertions of some
moderately educated Awlad Ali from the towns and cities who are becoming,
as they called them, followers of the traditions (meaning the model of the
Prophet). The older women are not cowed. They argue that they had always
worn modest clothing and covered their hair with a head cloth-unlike urban
Egyptians who had until recently preferred Western clothes. They resent being
told that some of the ways they have been devout Muslims are wrong.

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Kamla was less certain. Sometimes she defended these Muslim sisters and
brothers, as they called them, and sometimes she went along with the old Bedouin
women as they made fun of them. For example, one evening, having recited
some poetry and told some traditional tales for my benefit, Kamlas aunt turned
to her and asked, Hey Kamla, have you given Lila any songs?
Kamla had laughed and said, Im not a song person. Im just a simple person
minding my own business. . . . Im pious and know God.
Her sister hooted, since Kamlas love of the Egyptian radio soap operas, cloying
Egyptian love songs, and the scandalous Egyptian movie magazines was well
known. But Kamla went on, only half-jokingly, Auntie, Ive become pious. I
dont have anything to do with songs.
Her aunt mocked her, Gods blessings! Gods blessings! So, youre joining
the Beard family?
There was a commotion, everyone talking at once about the Muslim brothers.
Kamla defended them. They say we are religious people, . . . following Gods
path, the path to heaven.
Her aunt was hardly convinced. I swear to God theyve never seen heaven.
God is the only judge.
Some old women were even more irreverent, and this angered Kamla. Once
when a woman from a nearby town came to visit, the evening conversation turned
to the topic of these new religious types. The visitor complained that they had said
celebrations of saintsfestivals - an extremely important part of popular religion in
the Western Desert as in most of Egypt-were sinful or forbidden. They have
forbidden everything, the toothless old woman said in exasperation. The next
thing you know theyll forbid the clothes we wear and make us go around naked.
She then described to the group of women and girls gathered around her how
these people dressed. She told them about the wife of a Muslim Brother who
had moved to her town. The woman, she explained, wore a veil that covered
her head and her face, except for her eyes. She wore gloves, a dress down to
the ground, and shoes. She looks like a ghost.
Kamla had interjected, showing off the knowledge of religion she had picked
up from school. It is wrong for a woman to veil her face. What is required is
that your head be covered; it is fine to expose your hands, your feet, and your
face.
The old woman had then commented on the men. They all run around with
those beards. Why, so-and-so, mentioning one man by name, his sticks out
like this! Everyone laughed hysterically when she added, It looks like pubic
hair!
Kamla definded them, raising her voice to be heard. But Auntie, the beard
is a tradition of the Prophet!
In these exchanges Kamla defended the new Islamists, as she would defend

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ordinary Egyptians when her sisters criticized them for their stinginess or their
immorality compared to Awlad Ali Bedouin. Her involvement in school had
developed in her a patriotism that her parents did not share, a national identification
that extended from the love stories of the nonBedouin soap operas to the piety
of the urban is la mist^.^^
In brief research visits in 1990 to a village at the opposite end of Egypt I saw
further evidence of this association between mass-media values and the new
Islamic identity as twin aspects of a national urban identity, an identity distinct
from the local regional identity of villagers. Although their assertions of separate
identity are less pronounced than the Awlad Alis, people in Upper Egypt (in
the south) do claim they are different from northern Egyptians, drawing, like
the Awlad Ali, on a distinctive origin. Many groups in this particular village
near Luxor said they were descendants of Arabs, by which they meant tribal
pastoral nomads.24And like the Awlad Ali Bedouin of northwest Egypt, Upper
Egyptians are viewed with some contempt by urban Egyptians. While Bedouin
are stereotyped as backward or bandits, Upper Egyptians are the butt of endless
jokes about dim-witted country bumpkins.
Television was more widely available in this village than among the Awlad
Ali Bedouin, many of whom still had no electricity. Most households owned a
television set, and there were said to be five color-television sets in the village.
Children and young people watched nearly every evening and during the day
when they were not in school. The names of the actresses and actors were well
known to them as were numerous details about their public and private lives.
As in Cairo, the most popular programs were films and the dramatic serials.
Some adults were as enthusiastic about television as their children; others were
less interested in television and worried that it was interfering with their childrens
schoolwork. The influence of the Cairo-based national mass media, however,
was present in such phenomena as the distinction between the dialect of the
younger people and the older and the fact that, at the celebrations for brides,
the young women tended to sing songs learned from movies and the radio rather
than the traditional songs of the region.25
As with the Awlad Ali, however, those going to school were also adopting
some of the accouterments of the new Islamic piety. All the girls past puberty
who went to school were required to wear the new veil. At home they went back
to their ordinary headscarves. Their female schoolteachers, all from Luxor, the
23. For more discussion of Kamla and the issues of generational conflict see Abu-Lughod (1989,
1990, 1993).
24. For more on this village see Critchfield (1978), as well as Mitchells critique (1990, 1991).
25. Slyomovics (1987) has studied the traditional epic poetry performed by male poets in this
region, but I am not aware of studies of womens traditional song in the region.

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town across the river, also wore the higab, except the Coptic (Christian) assistant.
The young male teachers, by and large a dogmatic group with strong sympathies
with the new Islamic movements, were strict with the girls and sometimes quite
insulting. According to one young woman, these teachers made them sit quietly
in a classroom during gym period while the boys were allowed to do exercises
and play sports; occasionally the male teachers berated the girls for being in
school at all. New linguistic practices were also imposed on the local children.
They were forbidden to use, in school or on the schoolgrounds, many of the
ordinary words of greeting from the local dialect. Instead they were told they
had to use the more conventional Islamic Arabic greetings.26
The two experiences of urban or educated sophistication these young villagers
encountered were contrary in their messages and intents, as we saw above. Yet
like the Awlad Ali, these villagers on the margins of the dominant national
culture did not perceive the contradictions between the new Islamic pious activism
and the dramas of secular television because the people involved were equally
associated with the nonlocal-with the major cities of Cairo and Alexandria or
even the provincial cities and towns closer to home.

Television as a National Medium

In many parts of the world, television is the most popular and ubiquitous public
medium, offering diverse fare and available to a wider range of people than print
media. Because programs are fleeting, repeated only occasionally in reruns, and
part of a daily flow, as Raymond Williams has noted, their impact is hard to
assess. Yet if we can determine which programs do seem to capture the imaginations of audiences we can begin to ask why and to what effect. Insofar as popular
programs deal with national social and political issues, as I have argued about
Egyptian serials, they cannot be analyzed at the general level of cultural difference
but must be treated as historically specific. For the anthropologist this means not
just describing and analyzing the texts of the programs or the responses of the
audience but also relating these to the complex dynamics of political life in the
country concerned. For example, to grasp the role of television entertainment
in Egypt in the late 1980s and to be able to understand the relation between the
media professionals and the state that controls the medium through which they
work, I had to take stock of the shifting politics associated with Egypts three
presidents since the 1950s.
Television can be a powerful national cultural force, as it is in Egypt, but it
26. For example, a schoolteacher told me that they did not allow children to use the local word
for goodbye- hdiilu-but instead had to use m a s - s u l u m .

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never simply reflects or produces the interests of the nation-state. Even if the
medium is state-controlled, the producers are not necessarily puppets. In Egypt
they have some freedom of expression and respond creatively to many of the
restrictions in place. And though the political and moral issues that the most
sophisticated of these producers engage may seem clear to them-living in the
capital where the political debates about Egypts future are part of daily conversation and take a certain familiar form due to the structure of a press organized
along political party lines-their programs can be received quite differently in
outlying areas. The case I discussed here concerned the hostile relation between
the popular television soap operas and the ideologies of the Islamic groups: for
the people I knew in the Awlad Ali Bedouin community, as for those in the
Upper Egyptian village who may have found it difficult to see themselves in
either the secular and sophisticated vision of the television serials or the Islamist
vision of a rigid, textually based Islamic identity that seeks to transform society,
both visions were compelling because associated with superior education and
cosmopolitansim.
The case of Egyptian television reminds us of the continuing importance of
regional identities within nation-states. As we become increasingly sophisticated
in attending to global or transnational cultural processes (Appadurai 1990; Hannerz 1989) we must not lose sight of the internal dynamics of the nation-states
that participate in these flows. When we speak of center and periphery, we need
to recall that it is not just Western capitalism and Third World peripheries in
question but, equally important, centers and peripheries within countries. This
is especially true in countries with cities that tend to dominate other regionspolitically, economically, and culturally. Where groups in outlying regions have
distinct identities and are not well integrated into the center or are integrated at
the bottom of the hierarchy, any consideration of national cultural productions
must explore differential reception of mass-media products. This project-of
examining regional variation and asking how, in particular places, the people
who form the imagined audience of the culture producers respond to and appropriate what is broadcast to them-must be part of any study of television as a
national medium.

Lila Abu-Lughod teaches anthropology at New York University. She wrote two
books on the Egyptian Bedouin, Veiled Sentiments and Writing Womens Worlds
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986 and 1993,
respectively), before turning her attention to Egyptian television serials.

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