Children regardless of race, religion or gender need heroes. The examples of fictional and non fictional characters help youngsters to shape their own values, attitude and even identity. Since 2001 September the 11.th a dangerous phenomenon seems to rise on the scene. Jehadists and other radicals started to emerge as idols for muslim children around the Globe facing moderate muslim and western governments a great challange. Superhero Comics and Cartoons are products of Western, particularly American culture. Famous storys like that of Superman, Batman, Spiderman and their companions had a great impact on shaping the identities of many generations, among which are Muslims. Although there is a history of Arab fictional heroes, like for instance Ali Baba and Juha, homegrown Arab and Muslim superheroes are a relatively new phenomenon. Heroes, like Jabbar of the 99, Aya, Rakan or the cartoon Saladin, are the new creations who are wrestling to win the adnmiration of Muslim and non-Muslim children living either in the homelands or Diaspora. Until recently secular Arab governments and religious clerics were the most successful in creating heroes and help in forming identities for their Youth. Nowadays, the Arab private sector seems to aspire for a new myth-creation. Companies like Qatar Foundation the Kuwaiti-American “Tashkeel Media Group”, the Egyptian “AK Comics” and their smaller competitors from the Gulf and the Middle East started publishing their own stories. The owners and masterminds of these enterprises are mostly young and middle-aged Muslims who were acquainted with American Comic books and cartoons and wish to create Muslim idols for the Muslim children and also create an appropriate public space for preaching moderate Islam. Muslim Superheros are largely products of globalization. Although the inventors and the sponsors are Arabs or Muslims, the designers and even story writers are westerners who gained experience while working with reputable Western and Japanese companies. This cross cultural background creates an exiting new world where East meets the West and which is attacked by westerners and Muslim clerics as well. The Muslim Superhero phenomenon lead to rise the following questions: What makes a Superhero Muslim? How are Islamic values represented in the strips and storylines? Should western governments support the spread of muslim Superheroes or even deverlop newer characters?

Umberto Eco depicts football (soccer) fandom as a state of psychosis so pathetic that it should be considered perversion if not insanity. Perhaps less acerbic than this is the stereotypical image of the football hooligan with no regards for ethical conventions neither on nor off the pitch. This paper proposes to challenge such images of football fandom by focusing particularly on the concept of fairness and fans’ ethical considerations in football. Football is love and football is war. In Turkey fans write romantic love songs for their teams depicted as “the one and only lover,” “the melancholy of the night,” “the last cigarette,” or the “meaning of life” itself. At the same time, fan rivalries in the biggest Turkish city Istanbul have repeatedly led to physical violence ending in casualties, death and imprisonment. If football is a plane of heightened emotion and affect, then how is the consideration or sentiment of fairness positioned and oriented? In this paper, I argue that instead of writing football fandom off as insanity, we would be better served trying to understand the ways of legitimizing and justifying the various “insane” practices and discourses of fans. For example, the Istanbul club Be?ikta? JK’s (BJK) fans pride themselves for being anti-racist and condemn fans of Bursaspor (from the city of Bursa) for their racist remarks and behavior towards Diyarbak?rspor (from the Kurdish city of Diyarbak?r). BJK fans explain their said anti-racism through a terminology of righteousness and ethics. However, the same group of BJK fans also justify physically attacking rival fans on bases of fairness, fair exchange and ethics. My aim is to highlight the negotiations and the processes of legitimization that take place when recalling and invoking fairness. The productive problematic is the contingency of fairness. This inquiry will both serve to illuminate the cultural practices of a large segment of society (football fans) and also complicate the notion of fairness to include its mutability and circumstantial flexibility. I conducted initial research for this paper between March-June 2009 in Istanbul. In September 2010, I started my PhD dissertation fieldwork on football in Turkey which will continue until September 2011 in Istanbul. The proposed paper is a product of this fieldwork which includes participant observation during matches and interviews with fans, media authorities, football federation officials and football players.

Since the 1980s, Morocco’s adoption of neoliberal policies has transformed the state into a selective advocate of “free” markets. The first generation to mature under these policies and their effects, the "jil jdid" or “new generation,” also hosts the nation's first hip hop musicians. Many scholars of non-US hip hop have depicted the spread of the genre as a drive towards greater freedoms of expression in political or cultural arenas. Commentators frequently describe the explosion of Moroccan hip hop since the early 2000s as similarly ground-breaking, citing the ascension of King Mohammed VI in 1999 as a key moment in the liberalization of national dialogues. While I agree that the constitution of Morocco's public sphere has radically altered in the last decade, and that hip hop's visibility and audibility plays a role in this reorganization, I suggest that the focus on cultural liberalization has obscured other, equally important effects of economic neoliberalization. The state has simultaneously reduced its presence in certain spheres, including the telecommunications sector and the labor market, and increased its presence in others, most visibly in construction of a cultural tourism industry. This forces musicians to take greater responsibility for their own livelihoods, even as they are encouraged to redeploy their energies within the cultural tourism sector. This paper draws on Jocelyne Guilbault's formulation of musical entrepreneurship (2007), which I use in considering musicians as heads of their own capital-forming projects, to make two related arguments. First, it depicts the efforts of hip hop musicians from different cities in order to show that, regardless of the expressive content of their music, their entrepreneurship illustrates and reinforces the effects of growing class inequality under Morocco's neoliberalizing policies. Second, it considers one aspect of their entrepreneurship, the integration of Internet-based social media, as both a condition of entry into translocal hip hop networks and a transformative mode of self-conduct and subjectivation. Using data drawn from interactions, performances, and recorded media, I attempt to show that, as on- and off-line self-representations converge, musicians are encouraged to think of not only their music but also their selves as products of their visibility and successes in an informal musical marketplace. Together, these arguments elaborate upon the role of transnational popular culture in Morocco’s neoliberalization, and serve to problematize the frequently unquestioned association between hip hop products and (locally) oppositional politics.

When free improvised music (FIM) first emerged in Europe in the 1960s, its ideals of aesthetic freedom and inter-cultural communication between improvising musicians were accompanied by significant socio-political aspirations. Since then, FIM has spread to different parts of the world, allowing a truly transnational scene to materialize. In his study of FIM, Stanyek argues that “listening is the way identities are narrated and negotiated and the way differences are articulated or […] ‘woven together’” (Jason Stanyek 1999). Utilizing this premise and the perspectives of my informants, this paper will examine the role of Lebanese FIM in stimulating social transformation in post-war Beirut. Lebanon has been a site of political instability and violent conflict throughout much of its modern history due to sectarianism and foreign intervention; this has hindered the creation of a unified national identity. As Burkhalter has shown, contemporary musicians in Beirut exhibit a complex relationship with violence and war, and this is apparent in their artistic work as well as the discourse around it (Thomas Burkhalter 2011). Based on my recent fieldwork in Beirut, I argue that in its appropriated form, this music has taken on meanings unique to the Lebanese post-war context, as evident in the works of FIM musicians such as Mazen Kerbaj and Raed Yassin. I also problematize the extent to which this genre-neutral musical practice may have facilitated post-war transcendence of sectarian and cultural-linguistic barriers, particularly among musicians of the “war generation” who had grown up separated by the Green Line in Beirut during the civil war (1975-1991). Furthermore, I propose that a Lebanese FIM ensemble mirrors Lebanese society in its individualism, anarchism, and lawlessness. However, I argue that the former additionally offers a modified model for social interaction in a post-war context; in fact, Lebanese FIM musicians believe that their musical ideals of listening, inter-cultural communication, and co-existence represent the tools needed in the Lebanese political realm in order to overcome difference, achieve dialogue, and finally move forward as a single political entity.

This paper will examine the rise of Christian Satellite Television in Middle East over the past twenty years. The ways in which satellite television has altered the transmission of news, culture, and politics has been well-examined in the scholarly literature, but few have explored how this “new” media has allowed, for the first time, the expression of the specific spiritual, moral, and political concerns of Christians in the Middle East. An investigation of channels like SAT-7, Noursat, Al-Haya, Al-Shifa’, Aghaby TV, and CTV reveals how satellite television has created a new marketplace of ideas for oft-marginalized Christian communities in the region. The evolution of American sponsored and funded channels like Al-Haya TV, which frequently promote a charismatic form of Christianity, has encouraged indigenous Christian communities—like the Copts of Egypt—to pioneer their own channels and to develop competitive programming that uniquely represents a local, Middle Eastern perspective. This paper will argue that in this competitive environment, indigenous Christians have been pushed to retool their message and to become more flexible in how they present information to their audiences. In particular, I will focus on the Coptic case in Egypt: for decades, Copts had felt excluded from Egyptian state television and had little space to present their liturgical traditions, religious worldviews, and theological beliefs. With the development of two satellite channels exclusively devoted to Coptic concerns (Aghaby TV and CTV), Copts have a new outlet for religious expression. For the most part, programming has been dominated by Coptic clergymen and blessed by the Coptic Patriarch Shenouda III. A new generation of tech-savvy priests, like the Cairene Abouna Dawud Lam‘i, have become household names among Copts, known for their gentle but charismatic style of preaching. But increasingly the Coptic laity—men and women—have created more “secular” shows, devoted to everything from women’s issues to cooking. Coptic video-films, which are funded, directed, and acted by lay Copts, are regularly broadcast on these channels, and they have allowed for a reinterpretation of classical stories of martyrdom in a more modern guise. Occasionally, Coptic channels have also become an instrument for voicing political concerns, especially following violent, sectarian-motivated attacks targeting Coptic worshippers (in 2009 and 2010). This paper, in all, will emphasize the importance of understanding the role of Christian satellite channels and their ability to interject new and diverse voices in the Middle Eastern media landscape.

Convergence in the Lebanese media system? The Lebanese media landscape can be characterized as an externally pluralistic system where the political and confessional diversity in the country is reflected on the level of the media system. Indeed the broadcasting licenses were distributed after the end of the civil war cautiously along political and sectarian lines and has led to a hypothetical partisanship of audiences particularly with regards to political communication. Some media outlets however have resorted to a mixed strategy including internal pluralism in order to appeal to a larger audience in what already is a small national media market. This 'convergence' can be traced in the case of the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International (LBCI) which has transformed from a corporation initially founded as the organ of the right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces militia during the civil war, to a successful commercial liberal satellite station with links to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Saudi prince Walid Bin Talal. The station however is facing a legal battle over ownership and it remains to be seen if the Lebanese Forces will regain ownership. Yet irrespective of the outcome of that legal battle, it is questionable if other media organizations in Lebanon will converge toward a catch-all, mainstream and commercial liberal media due to several factors including the Lebanese state’s weakness in implementing media laws and policies limiting “political money” from flowing into media corporations, which otherwise would not survive due to the limited media market, as well as the deep political divisions and the highly politicized audience. Against this background, the paper aims to explore the likelihood of convergence in the Lebanese media system despite local political and financial realities. The paper also addresses the external vs. internal pluralism debate drawing on Habermas as well as Mouffe’s views of the public sphere and agnostic public sphere of contestation respectively. The paper draws on primary and secondary research including content analysis, legal and media policy analysis, and a series of semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders in Lebanon conducted in October 2010 and January 2011 as part of a DAAD-funded doctoral research on the Lebanese media system from a comparative perspective.