Pop culture in the Arab world

By Miu

 

In her lecture, Shereen El Feki talks about today’s Arab cultures.

Although proposers of crashes of civilization mention that Western culture and Arab culture cannot avoid crashing, today Arab countries are trying to introduce current Western cultures or different cultures from traditional Islam culture to Arab cultures.

 

One of the examples is 4Shab. It is a new TV channel which means ‘to young people’.

This channel is called an Islam version of MTV. It is being created by an Egyptian TV producer and he said he had created this channel to make young people under the influence of Islam to have a fulfilling life, and he said that the best way of that is using popular music video. The videos which are played on this channel are created to show the large-minded aspect of Islam for young people to face every hardship.

 

Another example is The 99. It is for younger generations.

It is the first Islam super heroes in the world which is created by a Kuwaiti psychologist. His purpose of creating these heroes is to extricate Islam from the impression of intolerance. The characters of ‘The 99’ are expressing ninety-nine characteristics of Allah like justice, wisdom, compassion and so on. For example, one of the characters, Noora is able to see through good and evil in human. Other character, Jami has a great power to invent. They created not only comic books but also a theme park of The 99 and creating TV animation is being planned.

 

These are one of the examples to be mixed different cultures. However she is not talking about crushing of cultures or a chaos of cultures without distinction. She sees that as engagement of different cultures.

 

Even though 4Shbab and The 99 look like new and attractive innovations, that have long history. Islam has taken in different cultures and made them fit in with their culture since ancient times to today. In the Koran, there is one sentence. ‘'We made you into nations and tribes so that you could learn from one another."

 

 

Why I chose this topic? –No reason. Sometimes we do something without reasons. However, this lecture was very interesting. In Japan, we usually do not have religion. To be precise, we have for just funeral ceremonies, but we usually do not care about our religions and we can change our religions if we want. (But because we do not care about religions so much, we usually have the same religion with parents. And parents have the same religion with their parents.) So, since I came here, I have been really interested in other religions and their cultures. I was surprised everything in this lecture but especially The99 is interesting. First, I was surprised that Islam culture did not have heroes until now! As you know, there are too many heroes in Japan. What a dangerous country, Japan! Now, seriously maybe it is Columbus’s egg. Many heroes will come to Islam countries. Islam countries will be dangerous like Japan… I wrote too many joking today. However it is really interesting lecture, so I want you to listen to it.

 

(Shereen El Feki: Pop culture in the Arab world/ Retrieved by: http://www.ted.com/talks/shereen_el_feki_pop_culture_in_the_arab_world.html)