This paper explores how various rhetorical tropes about the female body are elaborated, contested and reformulated in pan-Arab and Islamist public discourse, in the context of controversies about Arabic music video “clips.” These polemics are contextualized historically in the historical Arab-Islamic debate on specifying terms of engagement with Western modernity, a debate intensified in by the growth of Arab satellite television during the last two decades. Music videos cost relatively little, are replayed endlessly, and present vast advertising opportunities. As a result they now are a staple of the vibrant pan-Arab media industries, whose practices, formats and styles are increasingly integrated in the global media market. Arabic language music videos range from soft-porn sensationalistic videos featuring barely known fannanat (artists), to “Islamic videos” that draw on traditional anashid. While the former represent an unabashedly consumerist and –some argue—ostensibly Western form of expression, the latter reflect a complex blend of local and global, a cultural hybridization symptomatic of globalization and expressive of a desire to re-enchant modernity. In pan-Arab public discourse, music videos have been highly contentious because they depict the female body and gender dynamics suggestively. In this context, tropes of veiling and unveiling, ikhtilat (gender mixing), tabarruj (immodest demeanor) and fitna (political and sexual chaos), have emerged as important lynchpins of various visibilities and counter-visibilities. Framed by scholarly literatures on (1) media and cultural globalization and (2) gender and Islam, and based on textual analysis of video clips, fatwas, Arabic newspaper op-eds, and interviews with media workers, I argue that the transnational polemics over women’s representations in music videos spawn new visibilities and counter-visibilities in the Arab-Islamic world. I analyze the ways in which video as a modern form has been appropriated by an Islamic resurgence that is carving a substantive niche in the pan-Arab media industry. Rival visibilities of femininity (and by extrapolation, of masculinity) enabled by music videos and the polemics surrounding them, I argue, are best understood not as assertions of traditional norms and knowledge claims against a putative single global modernity, but as a search to define an Islamic modernity that is embedded in, rather than antagonistic to, global culture.