Nabil Ayouch’s Mektoub and the Reinvention of Moroccan Film Spectatorship Today in many ways the figurehead of Moroccan cinema, filmmaker Nabil Ayouch made a decisive imprint on the cinema of that country with his first feature film, Mektoub. A box office success, Mektoub was shown to audience acclaim at cinemas throughout Morocco and screened at a number of international film festivals abroad. Yet its influence on Moroccan cinema was soon eclipsed by Ayouch’s second feature, the engaging, internationally acclaimed and distributed Ali Zaoua. Yet despite his more visible, later films, Ayouch’s now neglected first film remains remarkable for the shift it effected in the aesthetics of Moroccan cinema. Alternately thriller, revenge drama, and road movie, Mektoub was the first Moroccan film that successfully took popular western genres and reinvented them as Moroccan, thereby reshaping Moroccan audiences’ expectations of what Moroccan cinema could and should be. This paper explores how Ayouch’s film politicizes the aesthetics of Moroccan cinema. This is not to say that Mektoub is necessarily political in nature. In fact, although it contains visual and narrative cues to very real political histories—the serial rapes leading to the last capital punishment case in Morocco in 1993, the years of lead marked by the imprisonment, torture, and/or disappearing of perceived dissidents, widespread corruption in the police force and government, the drug trade, the urban/rural divide that pitted some regions of the country against the monarchy, and so on—Ayouch’s film is first and foremost an entertainment film. It pits a spoiled, American-educated ophthalmologist against a corrupt police chief who has abducted and ritually raped his wife, as well as against the ring of law-enforcement and government officials who back the police chief and take part in the gang rapes he organizes. Although perhaps far-fetched for audiences abroad, Moroccan audiences were caught up in the action of the film, surmising that the film could not end well. And yet it did, though not in the manner it would have had it been an American film. More important than the plot, however, are Ayouch’s sweeping panoramas of Morocco and constant references to the act of looking and the uses of film. Mektoub, I argue, urges audiences not just to look at Morocco in a new light, but also to reconsider what Moroccan film should look like as well as the purposes it should serve.

The recent conflict in Gaza between Israel and the Hamas movement brought to the fore numerous innovations in the use of "new media". The Israeli military and state utilized various popular modes of online communications to proffer a very well-orchestrated and streamlined view of the conflict. This seems to mark the first instance of a state itself co-opting Internet venues such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and blogs as a component of a military conflict. The adoption of mass “new media”, which have a strong attraction for youth especially, allowed the Israeli state and military to conduct a coordinated campaign of media management of the conflict. This was aided by the prohibition on foreign journalists’ entering Gaza and the deterrence of regional news broadcasters such as al-Jazeera from working within Israel itself. Another interesting facet is the use of nascent communications technologies by both parties in the conflict for purposes of propaganda and strategy. Hamas and the Israeli military both utilized cellular phone mediums as well as their concomitant texting component to engender panic in the other, with varying levels of success. Additionally, as regards the follow-up of the conflict, the Israeli state has turned to online mediums again to address issues of Israel’s international image in the wake of heightened criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza, as well as to combat a perceived anti-Semitism. The significance of the usage of such mediums for the conducting of and conveyance of the information concerning this conflict cannot be overstated. For the first time, a military campaign was undertaken with a carefully constructed agenda of media co-optation, not merely through the manipulation of traditional media outlets. Instead, popular forms of online communication, and even entertainment, were exploited with great efficacy by the Israeli state and military in what can only be characterized as a new form of “nth generation warfare”. Warfare, that is, conducted in a virtual sphere and not merely concerned with the advancing of the desired information, but as equally concerned with its form.

Ode to the Fezzed Shaykh! : The role played by the Coptic press in mobilising communal opposition against the Muslim Brotherhood, 1945-49 Literature concerning the Copts has traditionally been very limited, focussing on a few genres or categories of analysis during certain historical contexts, and using extremely limited primary sources for analysis. Historiography has assessed the Coptic community as either an integral part of the national narrative and instrumental in providing an image of unity in the face of anti-colonial forces or, labelled as a beleaguered and persecuted minority. This paper seeks to challenge these fixed genres through the analysis of neglected sources, addressing inter-communal dynamics between the orthodox Coptic community and the Muslim Brotherhood during the mid-1940s. Coptic newspapers and magazines throughout the early twentieth century played a crucial role as an instrument for Coptic communal views, grievances and mobilisation. Despite this however, they have not been studied extensively as a legitimate expression of Coptic grassroots opinion. This paper will asses differing Coptic responses to individual cases of discrimination instigated by the Muslim Brotherhood in the mid-1940s, using articles written by Copts from varying religious and political backgrounds. Particular emphasis will be placed on a personal and vehement vendetta spearheaded by the religious demagogic Coptic reformer Qommus Sergius, against the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna, dubbed ‘the fezzed shaykh’. The aim is to contribute to the knowledge of Coptic social, political and religious communal mobilisation, bridging the established divide between minority studies and the traditional nationalist histories.