Speaking of images of Arab night life, M…
Speaking of images of Arab night life, Muslimah Media Watch has a critique of the “Funky Arabs” video from Jad Choueiri:
My biggest problem with this music video is not the gratuitous amounts of flesh on show by the scantily clad women–which let’s face it, has become the norm in many similar Arabic music videos–but the political implications of Choueiri’s message. Because if not a parody, then the video is certainly a textbook case of cultural appropriation. Listening between the lines, you could well take home the message: the only way we can prove we are not evil is if we try to erase our identities and emulate selective (read: the most materialistic) aspects of Western culture.
Choueiri’s only concessions to Arab culture: bellydancing and shisha smoking, of course! Nothing else we have “over here” is worth anything anyway. The orientalist image is complete once an x-ray machine shows us that a woman is carrying on her person handcuffs, a mask, and a whip. Arabs are all hypersexual, doncha know?
johnpi, 
sui sen, and 
razib are discussing.
razib 10:09 pm on June 23, 2009 Permalink
two points
1) the video is talking about arab culture. muslims and arabs like to emphasize that muslim != arab, and to a lesser extent arab != muslim (considering that this is a lebanese video that makes total sense), so howz come *muslim* media watch is focusing on this?
2) i think the criticism of the crassness of this sort of stuff is totally cool personally. but i would, unfortunately, add the dehumanizing sexualized materialism might be most prominent in western culture, but it hooks into the “Id” of many human societies, no matter cultural context. instead of focusing on the orientalism, or western aspects of these things, i think a better long term project would be a cross-cultural front against “bling-bling” satisfaction-now tendencies which seem to be accompany modern capitalism.
johnpi 10:44 pm on June 23, 2009 Permalink
Ethar is on to something when she writes, “emulate selective (read: the most materialistic) aspects of Western culture.” To a great extent the participants here are dressed down tourists ‘slumming’ it in a one-dimensional stereotype fed by the worst fantasies about ‘Westoxification.’ Therefore, Ethar’s conclusion has it backwards: I don’t think they are devaluing Arab culture so much as they are playing in a devalued Western culture stereotype, from which most of them will probably return, get married and settle into conservative cultural defaults later in life.
a better long term project would be a cross-cultural front against “bling-bling” satisfaction-now tendencies which seem to be accompany modern capitalism.
Agreed.
razib 11:13 pm on June 23, 2009 Permalink
yeah. i kind of felt that way. people can totally see different things in the same images. i can accept that such videos could *both* be orientalist and occidentalist, depending on your viewpoint. i don’t think there’s some “objective” assessment of these sorts of things. on the last point, both the west and the islamic world tends to focus on exoteric aspects of each culture that the other finds objectionable. but the key issue are the inner-values. there is a culture war going on across the world. there’s no excuse, IMO, for apologizing for subsistence level premodernity. we want people to grow wealthy enough to have some affluence. but that doesn’t mean stripping away all values aside from immediate satiation. i don’t think that the west has a monopoly on this tendency, i think it’s simply our common human “baser nature” derived from the constant battle on the malthusian margins.
razib 11:14 pm on June 23, 2009 Permalink
also, from another perspective you could say that the video was a bit racist, exploiting a stereotype of black hip-hop bling-bling culture. a house with a thousand rooms and all.
johnpi 6:25 pm on June 24, 2009 Permalink
‘Pretty fly (for an Arab guy)’
sui sen 11:40 am on June 24, 2009 Permalink
This is the classical exampe of modernity gone bad. Since most Arab countries are under repressive rulers, Arab people would find it quite hard to understand and manage freedom they see in the West. Both the conservatives and the liberals in this part of the world would agree to interpret democracy and freedom as the right to do whatever they want without limitations or restrictions. So for the conservatives complete rejection of “western” democracy and for the liberals complete liberation without regards to the traditions of their ancestors. This is because they have not been allowed to taste the trial and error of developing a democratic society. For hundreds of years Arabs were and still are under occupations from foriegners and from the tyrants of their own kind and thus they have not actually been given the chance to see “real” democracy in action. The increasing sexuality of most music videos and even soap operas and tv programs in the arab world is a manifestation that arabs as a people are longing for true freedom in social, political, and economic scenes and yet could not express such longing in public platform so they tend to focus more on self-expression and as far as we can see they have been expressing themselves in far worse manner than the western world…A copycat would always be worse than the original. While sexuality is the west can be considered as an art form, here in arab world it is plainly a cheap version of perverted pornography…
The Muslims of SoutheastAsia like in Malaysia and Indonesia are tasting democracy too and yet you can not find women in music videos exposing their flesh as what arabs are doing. The situations of the people are different and seldom you can find conservative Malaysian and Indonesian clerics denouncing or rejecting democracy…
The Arabs would still have to learn more and while waiting for that, I would prefer to turn off my TV when those cheap pornographic music videos are being played…
What a waste of time and resources.