Page 225 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

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Audience reaction to advertising is similarly open to question. In the mid-
1980s, when I ¤rst began spending time in Egypt, it was sometimes said that
many people considered the advertising segments more interesting than the
programs. At that time television advertising was less ubiquitous than it is now.
If it was ever true that advertising segments were an “event” in and of them-
selves, it seems unlikely that anyone would consider them so in the much more
advertising-saturated environment of the present. In Ramadan of 2003 (1424
a.h.) the advertising drew little commentary and did not seem an object of
great attention for anyone I knew. One advertising producer I met, who was
inactive in this business in 2003, remarked sourly in a casual conversation that
all the advertising that year would be for food and mobile phones, as opposed
to a more diverse and lucrative range of products. From the television I saw and
recorded that year he appeared to have been roughly on the mark. 16
In 1990, between the low-budget “caricature” riddle program described above
and the broadcast of the much more elaborate and expensive Fawazir Ramadan
program, there came approximately twenty minutes of advertising, commenc-
ing just after "isha#—the evening call to prayer. Although most of the advertise-
ments were not tailored speci¤cally to Ramadan, their placement vis-à-vis the
prayer times appears to be deliberate. During the rest of the year the adhan (call
to prayer) came in the middle of ¤lms, dramatic serials, news broadcasts, and
advertising intervals. Whatever happened to be on was interrupted at the cor-
rect time for the adhan. But the post-iftar television ®ow suggests that certain
programming principles were employed. The most important elements of the
experience were both televisual and ritual. They were, ¤rst, the maghrib call to
prayer that marks the end of the daily fast; second, the "isha# call to prayer that
occurs at some ¤xed interval (roughly an hour and a half later, depending on the
length of time between twilight and evening at a given latitude); and, third, the
Fawazir Ramadan program that occurs after the "isha#. I consider the Fawazir
Ramadan program to be the end of the segment by virtue of how audiences
watched it. There was a strongly marked convergence of ritual and social action,
on the one hand, with television programming, on the other. In a nutshell, Egypt
resembles many other Muslim societies in that Ramadan is a time of enhanced
sociability. But many people in Egypt begin visiting friends and relatives only
after the end of the Fawazir Ramadan program. Social practice indicated a
strong suture of the secular Fawazir Ramadan program with Ramadan religious
ritual.
The marking of religious time on a daily basis in the television ®ow was not
comparable to anything in American television programming. The most ¤xed
items in the Egyptian television program were not programs (dramatic serials,
news shows, sports events, etc.). On the contrary, the announced schedule of
these programs were rarely adhered to strictly, as one soon discovered when try-
ing to videotape programs using a timer. The recording often missed the begin-
ning or end of the program. Calls to prayer, by contrast, were ¤xed and inter-
rupted whatever was in progress. Programming therefore operated by a kind of
fuzzy logic overlaid with more ¤rmly structured ritual time. During Ramadan

214 Walter Armbrust