Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-42gr6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T21:15:20.587Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Viewing Backwards: Egyptian Historical Television Dramas in the 1990s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2018

Joel Gordon
Joel Gordon*
Affiliation:
University of Arkansas
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The 1990s marked an important moment in Egyptian television, when the country turned its attention increasingly (although never monolithically) toward historical drama as a means of recreating and reinterpreting modern Egyptian history. Mahfouz Abd al-Rahman and Osama Anwar Okasha, in particular, scripted long multi-year series aired during Ramadan, the peak season for television viewing, that covered decades of the late ninteenth century and pre-Nasserist history, in many ways re-writing public history, and making historical drama—and history—fashionable. I focus here on the former and his first mega-hit Bawabat al-Halawani (Halawani Gate). Biographical dramas, initially of artists, but later politicians, kings, and religious leaders would follow. As the Egyptian industry atrophied in the following decade these dramatists passed the mantle on to the Syrians, later the Turks, who broke the Egyptian monopoly and brought their own stories to the fore. But a rebirth may be in view.

Keywords

Middle East popular cultureRamadan televisionTelevision drama/serialsHistorical dramaEgypt
Type
Roundtable
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , April 2018 , pp. 74 - 92
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America, Inc. 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Abu-Lughod, Lila, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Televsion in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 9Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., 6.

3 Kraidy, Marwan M. and Khalil, Joe F., Arab Television Industries (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 99–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Ibid., 101.

5 See for example, Armbrust, Walter, ed., Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which featured essays primarily on music and film; and the more recent, Hamdar, Abir and Moore, Lindsey, Islamism and Cultural Expression in the Arab World (London: Routledge, 2015)Google Scholar, which adds video games and features one chapter on religious channels in Lebanon.

6 Kraidy, Marwan M., The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Abu-Lughod, Dramas, 158.

8 My own contributions were based upon a chance encounter with unscripted quiz show host Tarek Allam in a Zamalek garden. Gordon, Joel, “Becoming the Image: Words of Gold, Talk Television, and Ramadan Nights on the Little Screen,” Visual Anthropology 10 (1998): 247–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Golden Boy Turns Bete Noir: Crossing Boundaries of Unscripted Television in Egypt,” Journal of Middle East and North African Intellectual and Cultural Studies 1 (2001): 1–18.

9 Armbrust, Walter, “Synchronizing Watches: The State, the Consumer, and Sacred Time in Ramadan Television,” Religion, Media and the Public Sphere (2005): 214Google Scholar.

10 Kamal, Osama, “Black and White,” al-Ahram Weekly 1008, 22–28 July 2010Google Scholar, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/Archive/2010/1008/entertain.htm, accessed 29 May 2017.

11 Armbrust, “Synchronizing Watches,” 208.

12 My own viewing of the series, which I will discuss below, was spotty during stays in Cairo during seasons 1 and 2. I have watched the full series on DVD that appear to be recorded from a variety of Gulf-based satellite channels. I cannot determine when these episodes aired originally.

13 Abu-Lughod, Dramas; Walter Armbrust, “Synchronizing” and “When the Lights Go Down in Cairo: Cinema as Secular Ritual,” Visual Anthropology 10, no. 2–4 (1998): 413–42.

14 Kraidy and Khalil, Arab Television, 15–19.

15 Abu-Lughod, Dramas, 14.

16 Armbrust, Walter, “Islamists in Egyptian Cinema,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 922–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baker, Raymond W., “Combative Cultural Politics: Film, Art and Political Spaces in Egypt,” Alif 15 (1995): 6–38Google Scholar; Abu-Lughod, Lila, “Finding a Place for Islam: Egyptian Television Serials and the National Interest,” Public Culture 5 (1993): 493–513CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dramas, 163-92.

17 Gordon, Joel, “Piety, Youth and Egyptian Cinema: Still Seeking a Place for Islam,” in Hamdar and Moore, Islam and Cultural Expression, 103–19Google Scholar.

18 Abu-Lughod, Dramas, 167–73.

19 Gordon, Joel, “Nasser 56/Cairo 96: Reimaging Egypt's Lost Community,” in Ambrust, Mass Mediations, 161–81Google Scholar.

20 Gordon, Joel, Nasser's Blessed Movement: Egypt's Free Officers and the July Revolution (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2016), 3–13Google Scholar.

21 Malkmus, Lizbeth, “The ‘New’ Egyptian Cinema: Adapting Genre Conventions to a Changing Society,” Cineaste 16, no. 3 (1998): 30–33Google Scholar; Gaffney, Jane, “The Egyptian Cinema: Industry and Art in a Changing Society,” Arab Studies Quarterly 9, no. 1 (1987): 53–75.Google Scholar

22 Abu-Lughod, Dramas, 15.

23 Ibid., 14–18.

24 Fakharani has acted regularly in major TV dramas ever since, but appeared in only a handful of movies.

25 Cited in Gordon, “Nasser 56/Cairo 96,” 171.

26 It ran twenty-four, forty-one, and thirty episodes over the three non-consecutive seasons.

27 I was pointed toward Abd al-Rahman by the late Younan Labib Rizk, a senior historian of modern Egypt. He, along with other scholars, took issue with the author's dramatic license; see Dhikri, Muhammad Abu, “Wa asatidhat al-tarikh lahum raʾi fi ahdath Bawabat al-Halawani,” al-Akhbar, 28 February 1996Google Scholar.

28 The old-fashioned surname (meaning “dawned” or “brightness”) gained popularity due to the series. Nkrumah, Gamal, “What's in a Name,” al-Ahram Weekly 684, 1–7 April 2004Google Scholar, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/Archive/2004/684/li1.htm, accessed 1 June 2017, also notes other popular names from other historical series, including Layali al-Hilmiyya.

29 We know little about her real origins, save that she was named Sakina. In Abd al-Rahman's treatment, this is the name given her by her abductors. She also dies in the series in the early 1870s, whereas historically she died in 1891.

30 Blunt, Wilfred Scawen, Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), 12Google Scholar.

31 Capua, Yoav Di, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historian and History Writing in Twentieth Century Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 135Google Scholar.

32 Ibid., 164–65; the quote is directly from al-Rafiʿi.

33 Blunt, Secret History, 30–31, has a much more favorable view of Ismaʿil Siddiq (Sadyk).

34 Ibid., 14.

35 Ibid., 30–31.

36 Hunter, F. Robert, Egypt under the Khedives, 1805–1879: From Household Government to Modern Bureaucracy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), 185–86Google Scholar.

37 Mahir Daud, “Hisar al-musalsalat al-Ramadaniyya,” al-Ahram, 26 February 1996; “Dunya al-karikatur,” al-Ahram, 8 January 2000, 15.

38 Mahfouz Abd al-Rahman wrote the screenplay for Halim (2006, dir. Sharif Arafa), which starred Ahmad Zaki as the singer. The serial al-Andalib (The Nightingale) aired during Ramadan 2006; it was watched widely but to mixed reviews.

39 This is a personal reflection based on travels in Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Morocco and Turkey.

40 Dina Ezzat, “TV Series about History of Egypt's Jews Misleading, Says Albert Arie,” al-Ahram Online, 27 June 2015, http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/133801/Egypt/Politics-/TV-series-about-history-of-Egypts-Jews-misleading,.aspx, accessed 31 May 2017.

41 Fahmy, Dalia F. and Faruqi, Daanish, eds., Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism: Illiberal Intelligentsia and the Future of Egyptian Democracy (Oxford: Oneworld, 2017)Google Scholar.

42 Gordon, Joel, “Stuck with Him: Bassem Youssef and the Egyptian Revolution's Last Laugh,” Review of Middle East Studies 48 (2014): 34–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Joel Gordon, “Egypt's New Liberal Crisis,” in Fahmy and Faruqi, Egypt and the Contradictions, 317–35.