Page 233 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

day on Nile TV, a state-run station created to address foreigners, I watched a program
in which a young journalist was queried about Ramadan practices for the bene¤t of
his presumed non-Muslim audience. He said, completely straight-faced, that practicing
Muslims were not allowed to shift work schedules into the night hours. The reality is
very different, although the reasons for working at night are not entirely reducible to fast
avoidance.
7. The use of ful as a national symbol in the “Beans Are My Friend” caricature riddle
recalls the notion of cultural intimacy described by Herzfeld (1997). Herzfeld’s example
of an in-group practice that binds people together in private, but is embarrassing when
adopted by outsiders as a “typically” Greek custom, is breaking plates after a meal. Ful
functions similarly here.
8. “The Song of Beans and Meat” was originally published in 1974, when many of
Ahmad Fu#ad Nigm’s poems were being performed by the blind dissident singer Sheikh
al-Imam. My thanks to Clive Holes for pointing out the similarity between “The Song
of Beans and Meat” and the poem recited in the caricature riddle.
9. The suppression of class con®ict in the television reworking of Nigm’s “beans
and meat” theme echoes the Syrian state’s strategy of removing class, ethnic, and reli-
gious con®ict from Ramadan television discourse (Christmann 1996, 2000). Salamandra
(1998; 2001, 163–203), however, argues convincingly that the state’s efforts to erase eth-
nic and regional differences sometimes produce the opposite effect, and that expressions
of social distinction are still central to the production and consumption of Syrian tele-
vision.
10. Williams’s point, however, is unnecessarily limited. He himself conceived “®ow”
as speci¤c to television. But his concept of ®ow was a variant of montage theory—
juxtaposing two unrelated images to create a third meaning, albeit in this case an imper-
ceptible merging of meanings rather than a narrative line. More important, the same
effect of a hegemonic suturing of content (of various sorts) with commercial and (in the
Egyptian television case discussed here) state interests can be seen in other media such
as illustrated magazines (Stein 1989). It is an important technique for insinuating hege-
monic articulation into all sorts of communication processes.
11. It is noteworthy that the programming techniques employed in Egyptian and
Arab television are far more diverse in the satellite-driven mediascape of today than they
were in the early 1990s, when the programs discussed here were produced. But it is none-
theless true that most programs available to Egyptian audiences even now conform to
the distribution of content and advertising described in this chapter.
12. An interview with Nadir al-Tayyib, head of the advertising department of the
economic section of the Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU) (October 3, 2003)
revealed little of the practice of distributing programming. Mr. Al-Tayyib did help crys-
tallize for me the basic framework of advertising rates and was also informative on the
importance of Ramadan programming to the overall operation of Egyptian television.
But he was understandably circumspect about the actual relationships of the ERTU and
its advertising clients.
13. His statement must be quali¤ed. In the mid-1990s marketing research in Egypt
may have been poorly developed, but a number of marketing-research companies do
operate in Egypt today. However, there are many questions about the quality of research
on television-watching habits (and hence on advertising potential) in the Arab world
(Sakr 2001, 113, 114).
14. I do not discount the notion expressed by my informant that vanity was a strong

222 Walter Armbrust