Stay with this to the end:
Rory McCarthy in Damascus
Tuesday November 1, 2005
The Guardian
The month of Ramadan is a time of captive late-night television audiences. When families gather to eat after a day of fasting and to tune into the year's best television serials they are usually offered the same diet of sweeping historical epics or intense, romantic dramas. Budgets are blown on vast costume dramas: make-up is applied lavishly and the acting hurtles from the slapstick to the melodramatic and back again in the blink of an eye.
Occasionally there is a programme that challenges the Arab world's accepted norms and tackles the vexed question of Islam's place in the modern world. Last year it was a critical drama about the mujahideen in Afghanistan, called the Road to Kabul; it so enraged conservative clerics and Arab governments that it didn't even make it on to the main channels.
This season there is a new rebel, a show called al-Hour al-Eyn, The Beautiful Maidens, which got past the censors and has run for an hour every night during Ramadan, to culminate in a final episode tomorrow night. The acting is good and the directing sophisticated, but the series stands out because it offers a rare, nuanced criticism of militant extremism that is neither patronising nor imposed from the west. It is one of the few times that Arabs have seen the debates they have in private echoed in popular entertainment.
The Middle East Broadcasting Company, which airs the series, is one of the main satellite channels in the Middle East, with a potential audience of many millions across the Arab world. "I want the whole of society to see it. The young to the old, ordinary people, everybody," the Syrian director of the series, Najdat Ismail Anzour, told the Guardian.
The story tells of a group of families from across the Arab world who live together in a compound in Saudi Arabia. Each family has their own problems and aspirations. All hoped that moving to Saudi Arabia would provide both financial and religious fulfilment. In reality it has done little to resolve their personal troubles.
At the same time a group of Saudi militants preaches, talks and trains in the mosque and desert, enticed by the calling of their hardline cleric. "Jihad needs courageous knights," one tells another as they prepare to fight.
Before long the militants attack the compound. Several civilians from among the different Arab families are either killed or injured, including children. Real news footage is woven in from the many actual attacks on Saudi compounds in recent years. "The world is horrifying now," says one of the injured as he looks over the wreckage of their homes. "Inside ourselves we are dangerous and horrifying and we should start to change." Only in the final episodes do the militants begin to question their actions.
From the start, Anzour set out to mount a challenge. The name al-Hour al-Eyn (his translation is "The White Maids with Beautiful Big and Lustrous Eyes") represents the 72 virgins that militants believe wait in paradise for the martyrs to jihad. Anzour heard a recording made by Saudi security officials of two militants talking to each other over the radio, counting down to a suicide attack. "You hear one of them saying to the other: 'Seven seconds to al-Hour al-Eyn, six seconds to al-Hour al-Eyn, five seconds ...' And then the explosion comes," he said. "This really gives you the mentality of these people. I was very affected by this."
Each episode begins with a written appeal on the screen: "Silence towards injustice is another injustice. Forgetting a crime is another crime. This is dedicated to the victims of terrorism."
Some are not ready for it. The MBC, a Dubai-based satellite channel, has been deluged with criticism that he has misrepresented Islam and unfairly criticised Saudi Arabia.
"When you approach this idea, it's like crossing a minefield," Anzour said. He filmed the series in Syria, with only a couple of days filming general shots in Saudi Arabia. Had he been a Saudi director based inside the country, it is unlikely his film would have been made.
Anzour is clear that this is not just entertainment, but part of a broader debate that challenges the feared jihadi movements who now dominate in Iraq as they once did in Afghanistan, and who still succeed in recruiting thousands of young men to their cause every year. "My target is the people who are sitting on the fence and who haven't yet decided which way to turn," he said.
Anzour, who has a shock of swept-back, long grey hair and a short, neat beard, has won recognition and awards across the Arab world for his historical dramas. He plans to reduce the 30 hour-long episodes to a mini-series with subtitles aimed at a European market. He is also planning another long drama on the question of extremist Islam among Arabs living in Europe. "It is time we talked to people directly, not just skirted around these issues," he said.
The final episode centres on a suicide car bomber en route to his target in Riyadh, who stops on the way and begins to question himself, to ask whether he is right to kill, whether this is indeed a worthy cause for which to die.
How can we stop terrorism happening? Anzour asks. "We need to develop our society, to give everybody the chance to work and to improve the information we see in our media. And we need to hear more from the moderates. I am not promising that we can solve this problem in 10 years. We need more time. But we have to start taking a different approach."
