The image of the religious person in Arab visual media

Tareq al-Suwaidan gave an episode of the programme Al-Wasatiyya to the image of the religious person in Arab visual media: is it unjust or fair? ^{1 2} He limited the discussion to visual media, that is television, cinema above all, theatre and the newer media, and to the present rather than the 1930s and 1940s; by "religious person" he meant a young man or woman, a religious woman, a marriage registrar (ma'dhun), a shaykh or a scholar. ^{2 3} He set the questions: is the image true, is most of it good, is the distortion a reflection of reality or deliberate, who is responsible, and how can it be improved? ^{4 5} His guests were experts in visual media, with a number of young men and women in the studio. ^{5 6}

The presenter asked the audience about the dominant image of the religious person in Arab visual media today, granting that there are exceptions, with three choices: negative, positive or neutral. ^{6 7} Seventy-seven percent said negative, 18% positive and only 5% neutral. ⁸

A student who voted positive said the image is no longer confined to the soap operas, since religious channels show the religious person as he really is in their series and talk shows, and she gave talk shows that present him as open to dialogue as her example. ^{9 10} A young man who voted negative said the image in films has been negative from the old days to now, though it has improved a little, and that most recent Ramadan series portray religious people as terrorists without showing religious people who reject that image and without offering solutions. ^{11 12 13} Others in the audience held that drama and film portray him negatively while talk shows show his true image, and that people prefer drama to talk. ^{14 15 16}

The presenter introduced Muhammad Hilmi Hilal as a film and television writer with well-known works. ¹⁷ Hilal argued that most talk-show hosts are scholars and men of religion, that the discussion should be about the ordinary religious person, and that drama, on television, in cinema, on the internet or the mobile phone, plays a far more serious role because ordinary people are affected by it and because it deals with ordinary life. ^{18 19} He agreed that the man of religion in robe and turban, registrar or shaykh, has a negative image in films. ²⁰

A broadcaster and television host among the guests said the result did not surprise him and he had expected a higher negative share; he added the factor of the news flow, which makes the latest item erase the first and piles up images without reflection. ^{21 22} The presenter commented that news without sensation has no value to the media: if he wrote a book, or a hundred people became Muslim through him, the news would not cover it, but a man who blows up a car appears with his beard on every channel. ^{22 23} The same guest said television first appeared in 1924 with John Baird, that research on how the religious character appears on screen is old, and that the distortion is not always deliberate. ^{23 24 25}

A critic and journalist among the guests said the recent focus has been on the violent, rigid, terrorist religious person, and named works including the series "Al-Hur al-'Ayn" and "Du'at 'ala Abwab Jahannam", the film "Dam al-Ghazal" and Adel Imam's films such as "Al-Irhabi" and "Al-Irhab wa-l-Kabab"; she saw in them a flattening of terrorist thought itself. ^{26 27 28} She described a scene in one of these series in which the terrorist character sends his wife to a nightclub to lure the people he means to bomb, and called it an absurd picture that does not happen in reality. ²⁹

Dr Abdallah, a university professor of literature, said the religious person has been portrayed in Arab visual media in several stereotypes: simple-minded, weak, deprived, withdrawn; and that the terrorist dimension rose after the events of 11 September with "Al-Hur al-'Ayn", "Tash ma Tash" and "Du'at 'ala Abwab Jahannam". ^{30 31} He went back further, to Naguib Mahfouz's novel "The Thief and the Dogs", which he said appeared in 1961. Mahfouz, in his view, is the summit of the modern Arabic novel, yet in it he drew Shaykh Ali al-Junaydi as an absent-minded Sufi imam who offers people no solution: Sa'id Mahran leaves prison, finds his wife married to his friend, finds shelter only in the shaykh's house, and is told only to make ablution and read. ^{32 33 34 35} He said the novel became a television series in the early 1970s. ³⁶ The presenter stressed that the episode was not putting Adel Imam or Naguib Mahfouz on trial but giving examples, and that the accumulation of bad examples is what produced the 77%. ^{37 38}

Another guest cited the film "Al-Sifara fi al-'Imara", which she said cast political Islam as the terrorist and showed terrorists as a hallucinating group strapping a belt on one of them to blow up parliament. ^{39 40} She said more than half the laughter in the play "Al-Wad Sayyid al-Shaghghal" rested on the character of the marriage registrar who is pedantic in classical Arabic, and that other plays used religious phrases such as the takbir as material for laughs. ^{40 41 42} She added that the veiled woman fared no better: in the films "Ahla al-Awqat" and "Sahar al-Layali" the veiled women appear downtrodden, from a modest class, lacking freshness and culture. ^{42 43} One guest answered that Adel Imam is a comic actor, that comedy rests on exaggeration, and that he does not represent all visual media. ^{44 45} One guest summed up the stereotypes as the dervish, the naive, the fool, the swindler, the charlatan, the hypocrite, the womaniser and the man of many marriages. ^{46 47}

Dr Ahlam, a specialist in literature and in the criticism of the visual image, questioned the poll itself: it should take into account age, sex, education and how much drama each voter has watched; and she saw in the Arab character a tendency to self-flagellation that justifies a sense of grievance. ^{29 48 49} Another guest disagreed and cited a foreign book whose Arabic title is "The Bad, Evil Arabs", whose author, he said, watched about 900 Hollywood films portraying the Arab, who for them is the Muslim, as backward, evil and a thief; he held that Arab media inherited this image from Western media and that it must be confronted rather than met with self-blame. ^{50 51 52} The years the guest gave for the book come out contradictory in the recording, so they are not recorded here.

The presenter asked whether the distortion of the religious person in Arab media is deliberate, unintended, or a reflection of religious people's reality. ⁴⁷ Seventy-six percent said deliberate, only 8% unintended, and 16% a reflection of the reality of some religious people. ⁵³

Dr Ahlam gave a historical analysis of Egyptian cinema: the religious person, or the "traditional person" as she calls him, appeared rarely; women appeared more, as the local girl or the closed-in woman of Upper Egypt; the veiled woman appeared for seconds in a minor role such as the nanny, and the religious man as an old shaykh with a gown and prayer beads in a minor role. ^{54 55 56} She said religious characters now appear in leading roles, and gave as a positive example the series "Habib al-Ruh", in which Suhayr Ramzi plays an intelligent, successful woman, an ideal wife and mother. ^{56 57} She held that secular liberal thought dominated the media establishment before the 1980s and that its people drew the image of the religious person. ^{58 59}

Muhammad Hilmi Hilal voted for the third choice, a reflection of reality, and asked: if it is deliberate, who is the conspirator, and why would we conspire against ourselves when the writer, director and actors are Muslims? He said he does not deny that there are extremists who use religion for their own ends. ^{59 60 61} Speaking of his own work as an author, he said he dealt with the religious character before 11 September and stopped afterwards, because he saw a confusion between those who commit terrorist acts and Islam as a religion; and that writers are squeezed between two pressures: authorities that want things expressed their way and withhold information, and men of religion who are not enlightened enough. ^{62 63 64} The broadcaster agreed that the image reflects reality, but sometimes without competence, and said some of the finest portrayals of religious people on screen came in older films such as "Port Said". ^{65 66 67}

Dr Abdallah voted with the majority. He held that the dominant current in writing is not Islamist, and that Islamists long stayed away from literature, theatre and cinema, busy with preaching, thought and fiqh, some of them treating art as forbidden and the people in it as unworthy, and so left the field to others. ^{68 69 70} He noted that the pioneers of the novel, the theatre and the short story in Egypt, Naguib Mahfouz, Tawfiq al-Hakim and Mahmud Taymur, were not Islamists, and that Ghassan Kanafani's novel "Umm Sa'd" made the religious character the one who advises wearing the veil, while the woman who became a fighter left religion behind. ^{71 72} He added the political situation, which he said barely lets the Muslim writer breathe while giving non-Islamists wide room. ^{73 74} An argument followed among some guests over classing writers as Islamist or not; one warned against a "fever of classification" that could look like takfir, and the other apologised and said he meant no such thing. ^{75 76 77}

The presenter asked who is first responsible for improving the image of the religious person in the media, preachers and religious institutions or media people, producers and artists, while granting that both are responsible. ^{78 79} Fifty-one percent chose preachers and religious institutions and 49% media people and artists, which the presenter read as a shared responsibility. ^{80 81}

The critic held that the distortion is deliberate but driven by what the audience wants; when the religious revival spread, productions began inserting a veiled woman and religious phrases to follow the market; religious institutions lack the artistic sense to compete with other media, and the remedy is for them to reach out to professional media people. ^{81 82 83} She gave the example of the presenters Muna Abu Sulayman of Saudi Arabia and Khadija Bengana of Algeria, both veiled, neither presenting religious programmes, both successful through their professionalism; the presenter added that he knows both personally and that they are deeply religious and highly professional. ^{84 85} A young man in the audience said preachers show only a religious person withdrawn between Qur'an and prayer, never the brilliant engineer or the creative merchant; a student put the blame on media people who exaggerate to attract audiences. ^{86 87}

Dr Ahlam said religious channels already offer a positive image, and that media people and producers follow two currents, one of globalisation and one that courts European thought. ^{88 89 90} The broadcaster said both sides are responsible and the larger burden lies on the media person, because market ethics turned religious discourse into a commodity, though there was originally no hostility between media and religious discourse. ^{91 92 93} Dr Abdallah said he had voted for the preachers and institutions, that a single play or series may affect millions more than a hundred sermons or a hundred books of exhortation, and he cited Mahmoud Darwish's poem "Passers-by in Passing Words", which he said led the Israeli cabinet to hold a small meeting to discuss its effect. ^{94 95 96} He pointed to what he called Najib al-Kilani's Islamic trilogy, "Giants of the North", "Nights of Turkistan" and "The Virgin of Jakarta", which he said never found its way to the screen as Mahfouz's trilogy did; the presenter said he had read them and sees them as ready to be world-class films, and asked whether we should wait for media people or whether preachers, institutions and Muslim businessmen should produce them. ^{97 98 99} The presenter said that in his view many actors want to serve the religion but have found no one to take them up, and that classing them as sinners wrongs them. ¹⁰⁰

Muhammad Hilmi Hilal said satellite channels are commercial projects aiming at profit, and recounted that after a series about Shaykh al-Sha'rawi he proposed to the committed actor Hasan Yusuf that they draw the religious Muslim at home with his wife and children and the problems of society, not the man of religion in his robe; Yusuf wore jeans, spoke normally, laughed and joked within an ethical frame, and the series was "Masa'il 'A'iliyya Jiddan" (Very Family Matters). ^{101 102 103 104} He said Egyptian drama usually draws the man of religion as a historical figure, while what is needed is the Muslim family's problems now. ¹⁰⁵ The broadcaster, who is from Damascus, raised the preacher's dress and said the change of appearance took shape in preachers such as Amr Khaled; the presenter agreed that religion has no uniform, and that for Abu Hanifa and others religion had no set look. ^{106 107 108}

The presenter summed up the episode with a saying he attributed to Muhammad al-Ghazali, to the effect that the time has come for people of art to become religious and for people of religion to become artistic; he said the estrangement between religion and art is what led to the religious person appearing in this way, and that the question of intent is now history. ^{108 109} He held that the Islamic revival has appeared in institutions, banks and every field, that media is its slowest-growing field, that it is wrong to tie the matter to conspiracy theory, and equally wrong to equate the image of the extremist with that of the religious person. ^{109 110} He said artists and media people bear a historical and religious responsibility to show the religious person in his civilised form, as intellectual, scholar, statesman, economist and politician; that Islamists should not imagine all artists to be sinners; and he called for bringing the two sides together and building on models that have proved their worth, closing with the middle way as the remedy. ^{111 112 113}

Earlier in the episode he said he knows the Islamic groups and their orientations, that even one terrorist in a thousand religious people would be higher than reality, and that as an Islamist he rejects Islamists being shown as terrorists in large proportions, just as he rejects their being shown as 100% positive models, because he rejects and resists terrorism and the terrorist's image harms him. ^{114 115 116 117} This is his opinion, and his figures are his estimate.

The vote results here are the opinions of that episode's studio audience, not representative surveys. An academic view from media studies on the question has not yet been added.