Page 228 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

now aggressively marketed to Egyptian consumers as a haven for sanitized “folk-
lore”); then a delightful Meatland advertisement in which chickens and cows
cluck and moo to the tune of the “1812 Overture” as their carcasses are ef¤-
ciently hacked up in a clean industrial packing plant; juice concentrate, corn oil,
smokers toothpaste, more wedding dresses, crystal chandeliers. In an intriguing
Juhayna Yogurt advertisement a cow metamorphosed into a beautiful spinning
woman. A perfume ad showed a woman who appeared to be going out on a date
(she is shown waiting to be being picked up by a handsome man in a red sports
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car). And, ¤nally, the advertising segment ends. 22
In terms of ®ow, the overall effect was that the handful of state-sponsored
and religious messages blended into a veritable sea of commercialism. If, as
Raymond Williams (1975, 92) argues, television programming creates an “irre-
sponsible ®ow of images and feelings,” then as a whole this segment sutured
religious discourse with commoditization, even as, in more formal terms, it
sought to set off the formally religious from the commercial.

Fawazir Ramadan
When I ¤rst watched Fawazir Ramadan in 1986 the program attracted
a large audience. In that year I often attended iftar with a lower-middle-class
family. This particular family had two daughters, and although the Fawazir
were an aggressively secular counterpoint to a religious holiday, it would not be
far wrong to say that they watched them religiously, missing few, if any, episodes.
They were also trying to guess the answers to the riddles, for reasons we will
come to shortly.
In 1986 Fawazir Ramadan (not, I should note, the program broadcast in the
year described below) was a mass ritual. I generally joined the iftar, then stayed
through the Fawazir, which began about an hour and a half after iftar (just after
the "isha# call to prayer) and lasted for roughly an hour. After the Fawazir I re-
turned home or went on to other social engagements. The family I was visiting
found it odd if I tried to leave early, and it appeared that their pattern was typi-
cal. When the sign-off music of the Fawazir program played I said my good-
byes and headed for the street. When leaving their apartment the streets were
usually empty but ¤lling rapidly. Everyone seemed to be leaving at the same
time. On the occasions when I did leave early the streets were abandoned, and
the program could be heard wafting from many a window.
The popularity of the Fawazir Ramadan is not constant. In 1994, for example,
the Fawazir program was either losing its hold over audiences or was perhaps
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getting lost in an increasingly large shuf®e of programming. My own percep-
tion of the popularity of the program might also have been affected by segmen-
tation of the audience. By 1994 most of my friends and acquaintances were
male college students. In all likelihood homebound people (disproportionately
women) are more avid watchers than those who enjoy higher mobility (i.e.,
men). It is also probable that the Fawazir Ramadan more effectively hailed a
lower-class audience than an af®uent one.

Synchronizing Watches 217