Every Ramadan is more or less the same. People are tired, traffic is bad. Every day at dusk, thankful families gather at home to break their day-long fast. And afterwards, they indulge in another holiday tradition: Ramadan soap operas. This year saw the usual glut of such entertainment, produced in …

Arabic language satellite television has over the past three years broadcast a number of excellent historical dramas set in late antiquity or in early Islamic periods.(1) These programs usually are first shown as part of the Ramadan line up, guaranteeing a large viewing audience.(2) One of the new aspects of …

The Road Not Traveled One of the most intriguing Arabic-language television dramas in recent years was The Road to Kabul (2004), which told the story of the Arab and Afghan mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Or rather tried to tell, since The Road to Kabul never made it past episode eight. The state of Qatar, …

An elderly man lays bedridden in his lower middle-class home in Shoubra, a largely Christian neighborhood near the heart of Cairo. Paralyzed for some 14 years following an injury to his spine, the man rarely leaves his home, as doing so has become an unbearable hassle. Until recently, this misfortunate …

“Any work that I do depends on the will of the audience.” (Ibrahim Nasr, Akhbar al-Nuguum, 433, 1/20/2001) Introduction Over the past few years, a growing trend in television is the seeming willingness to push the envelope of so-called “good taste.” While this is not a new phenomenon, we are …

Islamists have been some of the most ardent foes of reality programs on Arab television, forcing MBC’s Al Ra’is (Big Brother) off the air and staging protests or boycotts against LBC’s Star Academy and Al Wadi (The Farm). But now it seems at least some Islamists have decided to adopt a different approach: If you can’t …

The neo-conservative Weekly Standard has called it “the best hope of little Americas developing in the Middle East.”(1) New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman enthused that it was the closest thing to democracy the Arab world has ever seen.(2) Sheikh Abd al-Rahman al-Suadais, imam of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, has denounced them as …

Anyone who visits Lebanon will be struck by the excessive Lebanese use of space: Urbanisation literally is filling the space perpendicularly, up into the skies and the mountain ranges, and horizontally, as sprawling resorts or “developments” eat up huge chunks of the coast in Beirut and Doura, where two dumps …

(This article is based on a presentation at the Foreign Policy Research Institute on 19 April 2005). News in the Arab World Before the Age of Satellite TV Little more than a decade ago there was no such thing as television journalism in the Arab world. State-owned national television channels …

In the Middle East, as elsewhere, politics sometimes receives an unexpected jolt that produces unanticipated consequences. This has happened during the past decade as information and communication technologies have become more pervasive and influential. This process is accelerating. A key factor in this expansion of reach and power is the …