The Foreign Service Journal, December 2005

profiles abound. Slick televangelists like the Egyptian- born Amr Khaled implore audiences to sanctify their daily lives. The greatest change, however, has been the rise of game shows and reality television. For several years in the early part of this decade, the most popular show in the Arab world was not a news broadcast or a debate show, not a religious program or a drama. It was the Arab version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Contestants from throughout the Arab world wracked their brains, quivered, and called friends and relatives for help. On Tuesday nights in many cities, life would seemingly grind to a halt as viewers raced for their TVs — many to watch Al-Jazeera’s signature debate show, “The Opposite Direction,” and even more to watch “Millionaire” on MBC. This all seems horribly mundane, but it is vitally important. The reason is that game shows are culturally specific; they rely on questions to which a contestant should know the answer. There are 22 member states in the Arab League, each with its own dialects, history and culture; yet a successful regional show cannot ask ques- tions that neither the contestant nor the audience could be expected to know if he or she were not from a specif- ic country. The questions have to be somehow universal, and a viewer in Yemen has to feel he has the same chance of competing successfully as one from Lebanon. In this way, pan-Arab game shows serve to build a body of infor- mation that people are expected to know as Arabs; in the same way, it helps accentuate common identities. Such shows do more to nurture a shared Arab identity than decades of government-sponsored regional radio broad- casts that urged Arab unity. They foster Arabism from the grass roots, rather than from above. Reality television is the other new arrival on the regional scene. Building on the same models as Western television, popular Western shows like “The Simple Life,” “The Apprentice” and “Fear Factor” are hits in the Arab world as well. No show has been quite as popular, however, as “Star Academy.” Produced for two years run- ning by the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, the pro- gram featured 16 young Arabs from around the region competing for a $50,000 recording contract. Similar to the American show, “American Idol,” viewers voted weekly to eliminate contestants. In addition to Friday night shows with extended performances, LBC ran one- hour updates each night, and dedicated a separate 24- hour channel to document contestants’ weekly prepara- tions. Accurate audience estimates are impossible to come by, but some studies put the proportion of Lebanese 18- to 25-year-olds watching at 80 percent; estimates of close to 50 percent in many other Arab coun- tries would be reasonable. When Western commentators first heard about “Star Academy,” some, such as the New York Times ’ Thomas Friedman, leapt on the idea that this was nascent democ- racy at work. Friedman argued that the “Star Academy” competitions were the first free elections in which many Arabs had been allowed to vote, and that it would create a hunger for democracy. Rising Aspirations, Individual Choices Yet Friedman missed the core of the phenomenon. What the rise of game shows and reality television has captured is the aspirational aspect of popular culture among young Arabs. Youth in the region suffer through rote memorization in school and poor job prospects upon graduation. Infrastructure is often crumbling around them, and they struggle to define a future for themselves that is better than the life they knew growing up. Game shows and reality television not only provide a note of escapism, but they help build models — however unreal- istic — of how their peers can be happy, successful and modern. The sets are modern, the people well-dressed, and they are surrounded by luxury. Television has led (and other forms of media picked up on the trend) in presenting the set of choices that young people in the Middle East have to make every day. How should they talk, and what should they believe? More crassly, how should they consume? How should they dress, and what should they have in their homes? Technology has made the array of choices ever more vivid, and seemingly attainable. Of course, tantalizing and often liberal Western mod- els are not the only ones available for emulation. Neo- traditional (or some argue, pseudotraditional) figures seek to wrap themselves in the language and dress of a simpler time, offering reassuring responses to a world full of temptation and uncertainty. At the extreme of this group are people like Osama bin Laden, whose core mes- sage is a rejection of the status quo. Most, however, rep- resent not so much a rejection of modernity as an effort to be selective about it. In fact, many Islamic institutions in the Middle East actively seek to be more modern than F O C U S 40 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 5