Watching Ramadan television this year, Hani Mustafa finds himself imbibing a higher dose of politics than he has banked on As is the case every year, television channels are battling viciously for the attention of viewers in the hours after Iftar -- a battle that, with the increasing predominance of satellite channels, translates into numerous advertisements, which in turn finance the visual media. Soap operas are both the instrument and subject of this process. While social drama has always had the lion's share in this department, in the mid-1980s the famous script-writer Osama Anwar Okasha started sprinkling his stories with political commentary. His epic and vastly popular, five- part series Layali Al-Hilmiya (Hilmiya Nights) starts two decades before the 1952 Revolution and ends three decades after it, and documented not only the lives of its characters but the vicissitudes of their historical situation. Much as it remained superficial, the resulting, retrospective atmosphere attracted many a nostalgic viewer -- middle-aged and senior citizens particularly. Other shows have since followed suit, portraying society before and after the Revolution and in so doing making political statements: Zizinia, Hawanim Garden City (Garden City Ladies), Bawabat Al-Halawani (Halawani Gate)... When this trend took off, some two decades ago, only local channels were available, but satellite channels soon entered the equation, expanding the political scope of soap operas to include the entire region. Issues of general interest to the Arab masses began to assume a position of prominence, and works that touch on the Arab-Israeli conflict -- Fares bila Jawad (A Knight without a Horse) and Al-Shatat (The Diaspora) -- emerged, with Western pressures to take them off the air only increasing the number of viewers -- evidence of the fact that Arab politics in a global context are an increasing factor in soap opera production. This year pressures managed to take at least one soap opera off the air: Al-Tariq ila Kabul (The Road to Kabul), which follows the life paths of a Palestinian student of history and his Afghani colleague, a female medical student, in London. In the wake of the Soviet invasion of 1979, the Palestinian decides to join the mujahidin in Afghanistan; the show follows the Afghani civil war, the Taliban takeover and the American invasion of 2002. Eight episodes of the drama had aired on the privately owned Saudi channel MBC when clandestine organisations said to be affiliated with Al-Qaeda, threatening the media personnel responsible with grave consequences, prompted them to stop broadcasting; agreements and production deals notwithstanding, the show never aired on Morocco's Channel 2, Jordan, Orbit or even Qatar TV, its original producer. By way of apology MBC announced simply that Qatar TV had not provided the remaining episodes. Though Qatar TV claims that the remaining episodes are not ready for broadcast, Mohamed Azizeyia, the director of the channel, announced that the show was complete. Some commentators speculate that American agencies supporting the mujahidin were behind pressures to discontinue the soap opera -- in order to prevent debates about the American role in Afghanistan during the Cold War and suspicions about early American funding for Al-Qaeda. Others speculate that the Saudi regime was the force behind banning the show, since it too is eager to prevent discussions of its support for the Taliban, particularly under post-11 September American pressures to join the so called war on terror. A similar uproar has accompanied the Syrian soap opera Al-Taghriba Al-Filistinia (The Palestinian Exodus), which depicts the Palestinian struggle starting with the Arab revolution of 1936. The show appears to be a large-scale production as it features several army vehicles very like those of the British army at the time, with excellent battle scenes that make use of huge numbers of extras. The portrayal of the Palestinians' non-stop, ongoing struggle is so convincing that Bassem Al-Jafary, a cartoonist for the Jerusalem based newspaper Al-Quds made the front page of the London-based Al- Hayat with an ironic cartoon in which a Palestinian woman asks her husband while they watch together, "Is this taped or live?" Egyptian soap operas offer less politics compared to these two shows, but the trend initiated by Okasha unequivocally continues. In the show Abbas El-Abyad fil-Youm Al-Iswed (Abbas White on a Black Day), political developments force a man to live with a family and pretend to be husband and father. In the first episode we meet Abbas (Yehia El- Fakharani), a history teacher working in Iraq who casually takes issue with his students' absurd claims about Saddam Hussein's historical achievements. On his colleagues' advice he goes into hiding, only to stumble on a dead man's body, another Egyptian whose ID he appropriates to avoid the death penalty -- only to realise that he must now spend 25 years in prison, a verdict having passed on the dead man. When he is released and returned to Cairo he remains stuck with the dead man's identity, for the latter's wife, eager to have a man at all costs, refuses to let him reveal the truth; he also realises that another man has taken over his family, who now disown him -- a bleakly comic take on the effects of dictatorship on individual lives. Likewise Mahmoud El-Masri, with Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz in the title role, has numerous political overtones. Directed by Magdi Abu Emeira, it was originally promoted as the autobiography of the Egyptian businessman Mohamed El-Fayed, owner of, among other British enterprises, Harrods. El-Fayed refused to authorise the work, however, so changes had to be made to differentiate his story from that of the lead character. Structured like the rise-to-glory stories that brought television stardom to Nour El-Sherif in past years with such hits as Lan A'isha fi Jilbab Abi (I Will Not Live in My Father's Robes) and A'ilat El- Hag Mitwali (Hag Mitwali's Family), it caters to the ordinary viewer's dream that he too may prove so astoundingly successful himself, becoming a pillar of society and a star. Actor Mohamed Sobhi was the first artist to bring this Egyptian version of the American dream to television with the now classic Ramadan hit, Rihlat Al-Million (The Million-Pound Journey), better known by the name of the lead character, Sonbol. Mahmoud El-Masri appears to want to make the best of two worlds by combining the imagined with the biographical, avoiding parallels that may cause legal problems with El- Fayed. Its overarching theme notwithstanding, the show is peppered with political events and situations such as the Revolution, Nasser's death and Sadat's struggle with public opinion before the 1973 War. Drama assumes a different form in Al-Dam wal-Nar (Blood and Fire), in which director Samir Seif applies the methods of Greek tragedy, playing out political themes in a symbolic context. The segments making up the show are connected one to the other through the agency of a folk story-teller who sings his stories; and the plot provides for a blind character reminiscent of the blind fortune-teller. The main story is that of a woman, Amna (Maali Zayed), who returns to her village to avenge the murder of her son, killed in the burn-down of a house he was in by the village strongman, Hamzawi (Farouk El- Fishawy), who sought to murder the owner of the house, El-Tayeb. Hamzawi takes El- Tayeb's baby daughter into his care in order to control her property; only her brother survives, saved by Amna at the last minute. It was El- Tayeb's son, not Amna's, that the village people thought they were burying. Now Amna returns, disguised as a beggar, and she brings along a young man (Fathi Abdel-Wahab) with whom she plots for revenge. The young man starts to incite the village people against Hamzawi, employing Marxist discourse, while at the same time, at Cairo University, Hamzawi's own son (Ahmed Azmi) joins the radically oriented Student Movement that rises in opposition to Sadat's policy -- the minute workings of power exchange in the village context acquire broader, and often ironic, national significance as the story of Amna and Hamzawi echoes the story of an Egypt betrayed... Such varying doses of politics will no doubt contribute to the quality of the seasonal condition afflicting people during Ramadan, for, with or without politics, Ramadan TV is an addiction as powerful as the compulsion to consume Oriental sweets and gather for family banquets.
