http://slate.msn.com/id/2076531/
Imagine it were possible to stem the rising tide of anti-Americanism in the
Arab world. (I like to think this is the kind of speculative, optimistic
sentence tossed around all the time at the State Department.) You would want
to target an audience of middle-class and working-class men between the ages
of 18 to 30-the demographic most likely to attack Americans and American
property. To that end, the State Department recently announced that it is
exporting an anthology of American writers, in the hopes that this will
persuade Arabs that the American experience is more varied, and less evil,
than the state-controlled Arab media say it is.
Regardless of whether you buy into this kind of cultural marketing, it's
clear that the State Department chose the wrong medium. American book
publishers can tell you that American men between 18 and 30 don't read a lot
of books. The Arab street reads even fewer-just one book, mostly: the Quran.
The United States should have followed the lead of Arab governments, which
know that music is the region's most powerful form of expression. That's why
they use it for propaganda-and also why they ban so much of it.
The classic example of this is Umm Kulthoum, the voice of Egypt, the diva of
the Arab world. In 1975, her funeral, legend has it, drew an even larger
crowd than Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's in 1970. Nasser's rise to
power coincided with a golden age of Egyptian music, and in Umm Kulthoum he
found a willing participant in his campaign to promote the image of a
charismatic nation on the rise. She recorded several nationalistic songs,
like "Watani Habibi Watani el Akbar" ("My Beloved Nation, the Greatest
Nation") (scroll to the bottom of the page, and listen to the second clip),
which are still widely known in Egypt-as are a host of singer Abdel Halim
Hafez's patriotic numbers, like "Ya Gamal, Ya Habib El Malayeen" ("Gamal,
Beloved of Millions") and "Ehna El Shaaab" ("We Are the People").
Of course, few Arab leaders have enjoyed as loyal a supporting chorus as
Nasser did. Many have had to check the efforts of musicians not in sympathy
with their policies. Sayyid Darwish is more or less the founder of the
engaged, or oppositional-the sense is like the French intellectuals' sense
of "engag�"-school of Arab music. His "Quom Ya Masry" ("O Egyptian Arise")
is one of the earliest examples of music used to wage cultural war against
an unpopular government; it served as one of the forces driving the 1919
revolution. The song was banned at the time, but today every Egyptian knows
it by heart. Marcel Khalife, a Lebanese musician, is the contemporary leader
of the engaged school. His albums are officially unavailable in Egypt; many
of his songs are powerful and subtle odes on the Palestinian issue, which
the government fears will further flame resentment against Israel. Khalife's
very beautiful "Ana Yussef Ya Abi" ("Oh Father, I Am Joseph"), from a poem
by the Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish, takes the biblical-and
Quranic-story of Joseph's treatment at the hands of his brothers as a
metaphor for Palestinian suffering.
Curiously, while the Egyptian censors banned Khalife's quiet songs of
protest, they more or less ignored Egyptian singer's Shaaban Abdel Rahim's
recent hit, "Bakrah Israel" ("I Hate Israel"). The censors probably aren't
making any genuine aesthetic discrimination here; they tend to distinguish
simply between what's merely embarrassing and what is truly threatening to
the Egyptian government. Hence Rahim's latest song, in praise of Osama Bin
Laden (with its catchy chorus, "Bin Bin Bin Bin Bin Bin Laden"), was removed
from the airwaves. After all, Bin Laden and other hard-core Islamists
haven't targeted only America but also Arab regimes that cooperate with
America. Evidently, the Mubarak regime acted so quickly and forcefully that
Rahim, a commercially and politically savvy buffoon, denies that he ever
made any song about Bin Laden. This has got to constitute one of the more
compelling chapters in the psycho-biography of the Arab street. It's a
testament to the power of a police state that the song now remains only in
the memory of the masses-but the fact that it remains suggests that the
memory of the masses may be yet more powerful. This only makes the goal of
reaching the Arab world's frustrated unemployed (and underemployed) young
men all the more important.
Unfortunately, this is where the State Department miscalculated again. The
people most likely to read a book about America are the Arab world's
well-educated professional and intellectual elite, who-unlike the
underclasses-already have extensive experience of America and the rest of
the West. Not only are they the least likely to change their minds, they're
the ones, like members of the Arab media, who have been most active in
fanning the flames of anti-Americanism. What the State Department ought to
have done to reach those underemployed young men, then, is call Miles
Copeland, a music producer who specializes in world music (like that of Cheb
Mami, a French-Algerian singer, and the Egyptian singer Hakim). Copeland
became interested in Arab culture while he and his brother Stewart, the
former drummer for the Police, were growing up in the Middle East, where
their father worked for the CIA. Maybe Copeland can start turning out
Arab-American fusion hits for another federal agency, the Broadcasting Board
of Governors, which oversees Voice of America and its latest initiative,
Radio Sawa, an Arabic-language news and entertainment station with
frequencies throughout the Middle East.
In any case, the State Department needs to recognize that Arab culture is
predominantly an aural one. This is largely due to the Quran itself, which
institutionalized the sovereignty of the spoken word. From the outset, God's
word to the Arabs came to its audience-including the Prophet
Muhammad-primarily as a heard text, not a written one. Arab Muslims still
mostly experience the Quran that way and listen to it all day long, in
taxis, coffee shops, stores. Quranic reciters are something like pop stars.
(One of the major figures from the heyday of the Egyptian school of
recitation, Sheikh Abdel Baset, can be heard here.) Long before the Quran,
classical poetry in Arabic issued from an oral tradition; it wasn't written
down until well after the text of the Quran was established. The Arabic
language itself, its rich vocabulary, argues for the overwhelming pleasure
of sound in a culture that was not very visually interesting. There are, I
believe, nine different words for "desert" in classical Arabic-which reminds
you that 1,500 years ago most Arabs were looking at desert most of the time.
Even today, as one Egyptian pointed out to me, Arab cityscapes are all of a
piece. In Cairo, the sands and sun have worn art-deco apartment buildings
down to the same dulled gold as the pyramids. So, she said, we stay at home
and listen to the music of singers like Umm Kulthoum, marveling at her
perfect diction, piecing out the phrasing, the repetitions, the variations.
The battle for the hearts and minds of the Arab world, then, should go
through CD players, cassette decks, and radios, not libraries.
xponent
Muslim Mind Control Maru
rob
________________________________
You are a fluke of the universe.
You have no right to be here.
And whether you can hear it or not,
the universe is laughing behind your back.
_______________________________________________
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
