Scholars have shed no shortage of ink on social media and its significance in the aftermath of the uprisings that shook the Middle East a few years ago. Indeed, a quick survey of recent scholarship reveals that Facebook, Twitter, and other online communities have supplanted al-Jazeera as the subject of choice for many studies on the region’s media. Although offering important insights into the intersections of activism, authoritarianism, and contemporary politics, these works collectively lend the impression that only the most recent media matter in Middle East studies. The speakers on this panel strive to enrich this body of literature and to reorient discussions of media in the Middle East by expanding the conventional parameters of its study. Specifically, we will look beyond the Internet to earlier technologies whose impact remains largely unknown. In so doing, we will consider what a historically rigorous discussion of print, audio, and visual technologies may contribute to our understanding of the Middle East. To accomplish this aim, this panel will revolve around four case studies spanning the 20th century.
The first paper, “Between Reality and Fiction,” focuses on the accurate interpretation and practical uses of mass-produced images from the early Turkish Republican popular press. The second paper, “The Reel 1940s,” attends to Iran’s cinema politics during and after World War II to investigate the role of international films in the formation of public opinions, the bolstering of war propaganda, and the shaping of sentiments for a sovereign country and national cinema. The third paper, “Vulgarizing Sounds,” explores how the widely-ranging material circulating on audiotapes in Egypt led many local commentators to argue that “crass” cassettes were poisoning public taste in an effort to dictate who created “culture” and what constituted “art” during a time of tremendous change. Lastly, the fourth paper, “Touch Your Screen and be Healed!,” charts the development of Christian television in the Middle East and engages a program led by a Pentecostal Lebanese-American minister as a starting point for reconsidering Arab televangelism.
Several questions guide these presentations. Why, for instance, is the history of everyday technologies important? What fresh insights may the historical study of mass media contribute to Middle East scholarship? And how may historians challenge the tendency of their peers to treat media technologies as objects without histories? By addressing these inquiries, speakers will contribute to larger debates on popular culture, nation-building, and subject formation in Middle East studies.
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Dr. Yasemin Gencer
After the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 the popular press was mobilized toward supporting and promoting the new state and its comprehensive reform agenda. The political elite and the intelligentsia alike were keen on transforming the formerly “Ottoman” society and state from a caliphate-sultanate to a modern, secular, nation-state. Consequently, print media was the main vehicle for developing and proliferating text- and image-based propaganda to assist in this transformation. A careful survey of the popular periodicals issued during the first five years of the Republic (1923-1928) reveals how images such as cartoons, illustrations, photographs, and advertisements approached the task of modifying and uniting the budding nation’s profile through various representations of the state and its people. If read with caution and care, these visual sources retain the potential to provide a wealth of information pertaining to this period in Turkey’s history. Concurrently, the same visual sources, if taken at face value or misinterpreted, could lead to erroneous information and conclusions.
This presentation will explore the benefits and difficulties of using mass produced images as sources of information in modern societies. Drawing from the rich examples provided by the early Turkish Republican popular press, this study will demonstrate how mass-generated images have occupied a pervasive, if not notorious place in modern political and cultural discourse in the Middle East. For better or for worse, mass-produced and widely disseminated images have played a pivotal role in shaping everything from collective identities to consumer behavior. Yet, since images are misleading, manipulative, and often constructed, their simultaneous ubiquity and falseness is precisely why they are valuable sources of information that require more than a perceptive gaze to become useful in scholarship. Focusing on questions of representation, motivation, and function, this presentation will consider how a systematic interrogation of mass-circulated images can significantly enhance and enrich the narrative fabric of twentieth-century histories in the Middle East.
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Dr. Golbarg Rekabtalaei
The eventful course of international and domestic politics in Iran in the 1940s has facilitated a scholarship in the field of Iranian Studies that has solely concentrated on politics, and that has disregarded the cultural events that surrounded political upheavals during this sensitive period. In this paper, I will attend to Iran’s popular culture, especially cinema, during and after World War II to investigate the role of international films in the formation of contestatory popular opinions, bolstering of international war propaganda, and shaping of sentiments for a sovereign country and national cinema after the Allied invasion of Iran in 1941. After the production of the first Persian-language films in the late 1930s, Iranian feature film production came to a halt for almost a decade. The reasons for this drought have been attributed to many factors arising from political and economic conditions of the time. The lack of feature film production, nevertheless, created a vacuum that enabled the influx of Russian, German, American, Indian and British films which functioned to shape public opinion and popular culture throughout World War II, and especially during the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran. Investigating a wide range of film journals, newspapers, magazines, and official documents, I will tease out and explore Iranians’ competing public opinions about the war and their reception of war propaganda through the prism of cinema and cinematic activities. I will also examine the ways in which international political relations were unfolded in the activities of a number of Societies established to facilitate cultural (and especially cinematic) exchanges between Iran, Russia, Britain, and the United States during World War II. I will show that domestic and international politics were enacted in cinema politics, which then impacted the production and screening of documentaries/newsreels about Iran in various parts of the country. On the other hand, these cultural interactions further aroused aspirations for cinematic sovereignty and the formation of a sustained national cinema in the late 1940s.
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Dr. Andrew Simon
“Pious” sounds have received significantly more attention than their “vulgar” counterparts in Middle East studies. In the case of Egypt’s cassette culture, religious recordings, though enjoying the lion’s share of attention from scholars, constituted only a small fraction of the audio content available to listeners. The widely ranging material in circulation in the mid-to-late twentieth century led many local commentators to argue that “crass” cassettes were poisoning public taste, undermining high culture, and endangering Egyptian society. This presentation breaks down these arguments and shows that tapes actually broadcast a vast variety of voices. Thus, underlying many criticisms of cassettes, I contend, was not simply a concern for the “wellbeing” of citizens but also a desire to dictate who created “culture” and what constituted “art” during a time of tremendous change. By critically unpacking these debates, this presentation enriches prevailing discussions of sound, mass media, and popular culture in Egyptian historiography. To intervene in these arenas, this research draws upon audio, visual, and textual materials from formal and informal collections that comprise a “shadow archive.” At the center of these sources is the state-controlled Egyptian press. Contrary to the claims of some scholars, who downplay or entirely dismiss the usefulness of the Egyptian press as a historical source following its nationalization in 1960, this presentation demonstrates how an incisive reading of articles, illustrations, and letters to editors in two leading magazines may shed new light on a period plagued by missing documents, shuttered state archives, and restrictive research clearances.
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Dr. Nahid Siamdoust
Video Home System technology (VHS) appeared in Iran in the late 1970s and early 1980s, not only still at the height of the cold war but also at Iran’s own most tumultuous historical and political moment in many decades. For a while, one could argue, the VHS was Iran’s only window onto the outside world. And yet, no research exists on the significance of this media technology within the Iranian sphere of this period. Whereas state television was highly controlled – whether under the Pahlavi monarchy that was deposed in 1979 or the Islamic Republic that followed it – the VHS provided a free channel wherein political and cultural content that was otherwise prohibited was distributed and consumed by a large segment of at least the urban population. The VHS streamed Western pop culture into Iran, with certain cultural “it” items that were the talk of the town, such as Pink Floyd’s music video “The Wall.” But equally if not more importantly, it offered a venue through which recent Iranian expatriates streamed their politically oppositional content to an Iranian populace that during the 1980s had little mediated access to the rest of the world. In which ways did the existence of the VHS technology and this mediated content affect cultural and political developments in the sternly revolutionary Iran of the 1980s? This paper will contribute to our understanding of the ways in which people through everyday consumption of uncensored content on this now defunct media format critically engaged with their political realities and constructed utopias of belonging. It will examine some of this content, question how the format of the VHS shaped the production and consumption of this content, and venture conclusions about its impact on the political discourse within Iran.
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Febe Armanios
In 1981, Christian television came to the Middle East. Based in South Lebanon, and with the primary goal of evangelizing to Israeli Jews and of hastening Christ’s Second Coming, “Middle East Television” (METV) was managed by American televangelist Pat Robertson, a dispensationalist and charismatic Christian whose political and financial influence were on the rise in the United States. Until the Israeli withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000, Robertson ran this station as part of his global Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). The channel variably reached audiences in Lebanon, northern Israel, Jordan, as well as parts of Syria and Egypt. METV was known for its eclectic shows, intermixing American Christian programming (subtitled in Arabic) with NFL football games and wholesome comedies or dramas.
But the channel should also be credited for introducing Arab televangelism to the region. Long before ‘Amr Khaled became known for his dynamic preaching and before Islamic televangelism in the Arab world exploded through the “satellite revolution” of the 1990s and 2000s, there was Elias Malki (1931-2015) and “The Good News Program.” In 1982, Malki—a Pentecostal Lebanese-American minister—had been asked by Robertson to develop an Arabic version of the “700 Club.” His style, modeled on that of American televangelist Oral Roberts (1918-2009) was novel and controversial. Audiences were invited, within the privacy of their own homes, to participate in performances of mimetic prayer, as Malki commanded those afflicted with any ailment, physical or spiritual, to press their hands on their television screens and ask God for healing. In the Middle East, there had been nothing like Malki’s televangelistic ministry. Indeed, leaders of traditional Christian denominations balked at this “foreign” preaching style and suggested that these ostentatious performances were “not our Christianity.”
Despite this resistance, my paper suggests that Malki’s program had a palpable influence on the region’s mediascape. The program aired for a decade on METV and later on new Christian satellite channels that sprouted in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Malki’s “native” style, among the earliest to develop in the Global South, exemplified how religious television became a new “point of contact” between local charismatic preachers/healers and viewers/seekers. This model would be later emulated, be it directly or indirectly, by scores of Arab Christian preachers but also by the likes of Khaled and other charismatic Muslim televangelists.
