The Lebanese people have longed for peace and unity since the beginning of the 15-year civil war in April 1975. While the post-war government paid a concerted effort to recover the country from mayhem and destruction, it focused exclusively on reconstruction and urban development. The government’s investment in social reconciliation, on the other hand, remained deficient. In recent years, political upheavals and violence reemerged presenting the Lebanese people with a reminder of their traumatic past. Among the few forums for public discourse, television advertising became a unique space that engaged the conflict and offered alternatives. Advertising stepped in where public institutions were absent. Lebanese advertisers introduced narratives that worked through the tragic past and provided audiences with a sense of resolution and closure. Not only did advertising create a platform for negotiating history, trauma, and identity, but it also provided an alternative site to perform a “new Lebanese identity.” In response to the political and social tensions on the street, a number of commercial ads presented their viewers with scenarios of hope and optimism. These ads offered possibilities in which the Lebanese individual can actively participate in building the “new Lebanon.” The narratives in these commercials imagined a Lebanon within secular cosmopolitan terms. The product advertised is carefully situated in an ethnically sterile environment: a cosmopolitan space that could be part of any society in the world. The cosmopolitan setting detached the product from any political, religious, or local color. Essentially, these ads invited their viewers to participate in a collective social transformation through their products. These commercials painted a utopian image where one must shed an identity tainted by sectarian memberships and replace it with that which is unchained to political, sectarian, or even culturally-specific affiliations. The identity these commercials embrace belongs to a global culture: the cosmopolitan. Accordingly, this paper examines television advertising practices and explores the ambivalence of identity that these practices reveal. How do commercial advertisers construct a “new” cosmopolitan identity for the Lebanese? How do producers of television commercials associate attitudes, behaviors, and social status with the featured products? How do they utilize these associations as strategies to engage their publics in a discourse on national identity? This paper will attempt to answer these questions by exploring a number of advertisements while contextualizing the findings within a global, postcolonial, and consumption theories.

In the summer of 2008, the Saudi-owned satellite television network Middle East Broadcasting Center aired a failed Turkish soap opera, Gümü?, as the Arabized Nur, creating an overnight sensation. The 150-episode series, broadcast on the youth-oriented MBC4, attracted mass transnational audiences and generated widespread controversy. Nur sparked a torrent of attention in the Arab—and Western—press, and on internet blogs and website comment pages. Dismissed as mindless fluff by Arab intellectuals and artists, and decried as westernizing moral degradation by religious figures and cultural conservatives, Nur tackled adultery, divorce, rape, pregnancy outside of marriage and abortion, subjects rarely broached—although not unheard of—in Arab television drama. Much of the enthusiasm over the series, and the moral panic it provoked, revolved around the male lead “Muhannad,” played by a twenty-five-year-old, blond-haired, blue-eyed former model. The Arab press attributed a wave of domestic violence and divorce to the series’ handsome lead actor, and his character’s romantic comportment. Women everywhere were said to be comparing the fictional Muhannad to their own partners, and finding the latter wanting. This paper combines content analysis of Nur, examination of internet discourses surrounding the series, and interviews with its producers in Damascus and Dubai. It explores women's use of cyberspace to articulate desire and discontent, arguing that the convergence of new media forms—satellite television and the internet—serves as a catalyst for the formation of new female subjectivities. Women’s adoration of Muhannad, whose appearance and behavior belies dominant ideals and realities, poses a powerful critique of their own objectification. Conversely, opposition to the series—and to the idolization of its male lead—invokes older notions of women’s potent sexual desire as a threat to the social order, and justifies their containment and control. The Nur phenomenon has created a discursive space where conflicting notions of sexual agency and gender relations vie for dominance. The series’ ambiguity, like that of Turkey itself, invokes East and West, Islam and secularism, tradition and modernity, feminism and patriarchy, enabling a range of commentary on the state of Arab society in general, and sexual relations in particular.

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.

Drawing on fieldwork with media producers working for Iqraa and Al-Resalah, this paper examines the idea of “Islamic entertainment” put forward by these two popular Islamic satellite channels airing Arab regional networks. I argue that instead of viewing Islamic piety and consumer entertainment as inherently at logger-heads, a consideration of both the content and infrastructure of new Islamic satellite media shows that within these matrices the exemplary Muslim is not he who shuns entertainment or consumerism to preserve his piety, but rather he who becomes pious through consuming. Piety is re-imagined as an authentic mode of consumption, rather than an authentic alternative to it. While some observers of these new Islamic media practices and their “lay” actors have characterized it as a trivialized “Islam-lite” I show how such a claim fails to see how within Islamic frames of reasoning entertainment, leisure and pleasure can have a disciplinary rationality. Rather than positing an inherent or normative binary between consumer entertainment and religion, a more interesting question to explore would be what ethic and theory of entertainment and leisure are reasoned within an Islamic frame of reference. Indeed, Islamic channels such as Iqraa or Al-Resalah do not see entertainment as an object of prohibition, but rather as an object of regulation – their project does not ask if entertainment is permissible, but what kind of entertainment should be allowed, and what evaluative criteria should be marshaled in making these decisions. Far from being located at a tense interstice with a pious ethic, within this discourse entertainment is necessary to bolster Islam as a viable alternative to dominant secular mediascapes.