Television in the Middle East remains a uniquely collective, even communal, medium, certainly for sports events but also for serialized fiction (Arabic, musalsal; Turkish, dizi; Persian, seryal). True, individuals spend hours in front of television screens either alone or oblivious to others who may be sharing their viewing space. Computers and smartphones have periodic communal moments as well, whether through streaming television programs or putting out personal footage, but they are built for individual and portable use. Televisions, on the other hand, are domestic furniture, electrically tethered awaiting common viewing. With the explosion in satellite channels since the 1990s and the availability of DVDs and streaming options, not to mention individual schedules and preferences, watching television as a group is no longer the commonplace it was when viewing options were scarcer.Footnote ¹ Still, television's collective draw for families and friends is very much a part of domestic sociability. In any case, viewing “together” is sometimes more a matter of shared experience than physical and temporal togetherness. Wall-to-wall programming, consecutive-night serials, and more relaxed working hours during Ramadan in the Arab world and Turkey, and Nawruz in Iran, boost both collective and shared viewing. Notwithstanding peak holiday viewing, the higher cinematic values and appealing narratives of new regional television fiction, serialized and one-off, at least since the turn of the twenty-first century—with Syrian, Turkish, and Egyptian offerings particularly in the mix—have alerted audiences and more than one political regime to the potent possibilities of scripted entertainment programming.Footnote ²

A recent conference organized by the Middle East Field Committee and the Department of History of the University of Maryland, in line with stated themes, considered three trends of recent years that have deepened the social and political impact of televised fiction.Footnote ³ The first is the well-documented breakthrough of Turkish soaps and dramas into the Arab world, as well as throughout the Mediterranean and Latin America. Turkish romantic and historical serials resonated beyond Turkey especially with Arab and Balkan audiences—most notable of the latter, Magnificent Century (Muhteşem Yüzyıl; 2011–14) about the reign of Sultan Süleyman I “the Magnificent” (r. 1520–1566) extended even to Latin American audiences as El Gran Sultán. Although “winning hearts from Kosovo to Cairo,” as Haaretz put it, not everyone was charmed.Footnote ⁴ Detractors condemned the series as an assault on national honor by the “great Turkish enemy” (Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria) or a whitewashing of Ottoman and Turkish imperialism (Arab states). Audiences nonetheless remained huge and enthusiastic in all those locales.Footnote ⁵ Regional competitors, meanwhile, took note of the series’ superior production values, although Syrian and Iranian directors were among those who had already abandoned sterile studio sets for real-life locations. The Egyptian series, Saraya Abdeen (ʿAbdin Palace, 2014), about the reign of Khedive Ismaʿil (r.1863–79), capitalized on Magnificent Century’s royal turn, with lavish sets and costuming and gripping female roles. As with the Turkish drama, however, women's place and power were firmly—and perhaps nostalgically—anchored in a domestic environment of family relationships and the ambiguous power of female sexuality. These material and thematic features accounted for much of the appeal of ʿAbdin in some quarters, but the criticisms leveled against it echoed those directed against Magnificent Century’s harem-bound hero as well.Footnote ⁶

The second trend in the Middle Eastern context is the kind of cultural opening prompted by intraregional imports. The appealingly diverse geographical settings of historical and contemporary dramas offer novelty but also strike familiar notes, thanks to their “culturally adjacent” social issues and relationships. In these cases, too, conservative critics in the Arab world and Iran condemned the “immorality” and “non-Islamic” representation of gender relations, as in Turkish mega-hits like Nur (Turkish, Gümüş, 2005–7) and “Forbidden Love” (Turkish, ʿAşk-ı Memnuʾ, 2008–2011), but to some extent in Turkish telenovelas generally.Footnote ⁷ Regardless, for many Muslim women living in socially conservative countries, or in authoritarian-style marriages in any case, such programs presented an alternative Muslim reality. It is a reality that, unlike Western productions, cannot easily be dismissed as alien to Islam and Muslim culture. That being said, Turkey's Westernizing modes and Western alliances and aspirations do open the way for critics to paint Turkish soft power in imperialist colors.Footnote ⁸ In the kind of serials such critics deplore, though so far without reducing viewer numbers, Muslim women are publicly and socially mobile, prominently through their own exertions. They have career interests as well as families, and usually (eventually, in the case of the female protagonist Nur) loving, companionate marriages.Footnote ⁹ And when a female protagonist has not achieved such a marriage, her expectations and demand for a relationship of equality are taken as a normal, though not necessarily uncontested, social reality.

In a different vein, fans of various historical series have expressed unease about non-native actors in nationally themed dramas, for example, Syrian actor Jamal Suliman as Egyptian President Nasser in a 2014 production. For many Arab viewers, small-state national identity trumps pan-Arab sentiment. Imported programming and actors, though their foreignness is usually attenuated by dubbing and cutting, pose a threat not only to cultural norms and national identity but often to the national media industry itself. Such a combination of critiques and censoring discourages ground-breaking national programming. Meanwhile, it serves to drive production outside national borders, thus, ironically, increasing transnational casting. Transnational investment and production are already widespread, with Gulf and Saudi backers underwriting programs throughout the region, often in the form of dramas that could not pass censors in their own countries. On the creative side of the industry, co-productions featuring writers and directors from different countries, especially among Arab-state nationals, are another evidence of regionalism that is on trend to increase, assuming that current conflicts and tensions do not deteriorate further.

A third conference theme, one that many of the conferees directly addressed, was that of political intervention in televisual narratives.Footnote ¹⁰ Blanket censoring and channel blocking are business as usual for the region's governments. Self-censorship by media companies is equally common in the culturally conservative environment of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).Footnote ¹¹ Egypt's Ministry of Information is one of the most active censoring offices outside the Arabian Peninsula, but Egypt's complicated history since the so-called “Arab Spring” has also made it one of the most conflicted and sometimes unpredictable regarding what it will or will not permit to surface on the country's television screens. State authorities throughout the region work their way into televised fiction by vetting scripts prior to airing, as in Iran; strong-arming production companies to alter scripts, as with Turkish efforts to force a rewrite of certain Ottoman-themed historicals; or even more cannily by backing shows of their own, as with Turkey's Diriliş Ertuğrul (Resurrection Ertuğrul; 2014-), about the thirteenth-century tribal ancestors of the Ottoman Turks, and Egypt's The Society (al-Gama‘a, also as The Group), on the Muslim Brotherhood. Ertuğrul has provided exactly the kind of muscular masculinity, apparently best realized on horseback, that Turkey's conservative leadership found lacking in Magnificent Century.Footnote ¹² The Society, broadcast in twenty-eight episodes during Ramadan 2010, served more purposeful political ends in hammering home the Mubarak regime's take on the Brotherhood as essentially “alien to the Egyptian nation.”Footnote ¹³

Conservative critics might have been expected to be mollified by what can be called “praise productions,” typically uncritical depictions of revered Islamic forefathers. These have been staples of Ramadan airtime, including the 2012 Saudi-backed miniseries Omar,Footnote ¹⁴ on the second Islamic caliph, ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab (d. 644). The series’ solid production values measured up to the new standard for elaborate historical dramas, its script also relied on standard Sunni Islamic texts, and its multi-national authorship and vetting guaranteed its popularity and acceptance.Footnote ¹⁵ Nonetheless, the serial drew protests from a variety of Islamic groups across the region. Unlike historical dramas and biopics that have been taken to task for deviating from nationally preferred renditions of the past, Omar was faulted on religious grounds. The series dared to portray sacrosanct Islamic exemplars, not only the four Rashidun or “rightly guided” caliphs, but the Prophet Muhammad himself.Footnote ¹⁶ Audience numbers remained high, however. As with many other film controversies, popular serials for the most part have maintained their audiences unless regimes banned them entirely. Insofar as televised histories are concerned, the historical past is “contested terrain” in scholarly circles but, with few exceptions, regional productions seldom veer from monolithic national narratives. If they do, they are soon brought to heel in one way or another.Footnote ¹⁷

The staying power of viewerships, through 300-plus episodes in the case of Magnificent Century and twenty or more for Ramadan productions (though not every Ramadan offering has been a hit) is a telling measure of the opinion-shaping potential of resonant narratives. Another is audience diversity. Audiences for many regionally produced serials generally cut across the MENA in a horizontal band of middle- and middling-class viewers. As many scholars of MENA media have noted, aspirational embourgeoisement helps explain the appeal of materially rich dramas, most noticeably in recent years those from Turkey but also and perennially from the U.S.Footnote ¹⁸ Well-appointed residences, modish clothing, fast cars, and beautiful scenery by themselves are no substitute for compelling romance and suspense. For many viewers the “proximate culture” of Turkish imports is an added, identity-affirming, Muslim-inhabited, “accessible modernity.”Footnote ¹⁹ “Modernity,” though, is not for everyone, especially if it means mixed-sex sociability and belittled patriarchy. Nonetheless, the full spectrum of television dramas, historical and contemporary, national and transnational, is varied enough to attract consumers who possess equally varied worldviews. Indeed, it is neither rare nor surprising that individuals hold multiple, even contradictory, views.Footnote ²⁰ But the genius of individual productions is not just that they depict relatable lives. It is also their narrational multivalence: strong, male-led, family attachments in tandem with female characters who buck social conventions; the validation both of urban society's more open social relations and of the close-knit reciprocities of neighborhood and village; and nostalgic period dramas whose plot lines move between two modes of retrospection, satisfying some with a socially more congenial past and others with an embedded and not so embedded reproach of the present.Footnote ²¹

In successful serials, there is something for almost everybody, whether one's tastes run to upholding authority or subverting it.Footnote ²² Minority groups, women, and the rural tradition are perhaps hardest done by whether they are depicted or denied.Footnote ²³ The rural arguably offers the densest symbolic field, as well as the most variegated, between countries and over time.Footnote ²⁴ Villagers and other provincials can be bumbling, brutal, cunning, generous, well-meaning, clever, pure, authentic, moral, uncomplicated, a burden on the nation, the nation's everyman, and much else. Where Egyptian and Syrian productions have tended toward an appreciative construction of (supposed) village versus city norms, their Turkish counterparts often do the same but just as often allude to a specific, less savory, rural geography. The Anatolian east and southeast, regions associated with Kurds and Armenians, present and past internal enemies, are often rendered in “othering” registers of treason, violence, misogyny, and/or backwardness.Footnote ²⁵ Here, as with the conference's other themes, conferees noted the omnipresence of governments and contingent regional politics as unavoidable determinants of content and distribution. Just how television's scripted entertainments will reflect those stringencies and strains in coming years is, of course, an open question. It goes without saying that broad similarities and sharp differences among the various countries and producers will inevitably mark the genre, but no doubt in even more unpredictable ways given the volatility of both political and media environments.