Friday November 6, 2009
Turkish Heartthrob: Kivanc Tatlitug, whose eyes, hair, whiskers and roses he brings his wife after their quarrels have turned "Noor" the Arab world's most successful television soap opera ever. The show was produced in Turkey in 2005-07, where it was a flop. (Michael Buckner/Getty Images)
"Noor," or "Gümüs" in its original language, is a Turkish television soap opera that originally aired in Turkey from 2005 to 2007. It was a flop. When its producer dubbed it into Arabic (in Syrian dialect) and the show aired from 2008 to 2009 on the Saudi-owned, Dubai-based Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC), a pan-Arab broadcasting network, "Noor" became an immediate sensation and one of highest-rated television shows in the world.
The show drew appeal from all demographics through storylines focusing on a large, multi-generational family whose many members lounge through love stories. "We always joked," blogger Ajnabiya wrote on another blogger's post on the show, "that the nicest thing was that each member of the family, from the Jido down to the grand-daughter was in some kind of love story. It is a fun escape for anyone, especially those living in a closed society, or as in Lebanon, always confronted with political problems and the like.
But the show's most ardent gravity centers are Noor, the generously busted dark-haired actress played by Songül Öden, and Noor's husband Mohannad, played by the seemingly blue-eyed Turkish Adonis, Kivanc Tatlitug, and his blond curls. Mohannad, a rose-plucking romantic, treats his wife as an equal, supports her in her professional dreams (she is a designer), knows how to spell the word "tender"--and enact it.
He is an angelic husband, but not an angel, at least not according to the traditional Islamic repertoire of acceptable behavior. He (like other characters on the show) had pre-marital sex and fathered a child out of wedlock. He kisses his wife. On screen. Like more groundbreaking Western television fare of a few decades ago, the show includes a storyline about a character's abortion, alcohol flows freely at mealtime, none of the women wear anything like veils, and religion is subordinate to the challenges and pleasures of everyday life, passions of the heart included.
Read the rest of "The Arab World's Most Popular Television Soap Opera."
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Thursday November 5, 2009
Bye Bye Mahmoud: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will not run again in elections scheduled for 2010. (Thaer Ganaim/PPO via Getty Images)
Late tonight from Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas preempted the regular television schedule with a speech and announced that he would not seek the presidency again in elections scheduled for January. The announcement is a rebuke to the unconvincing fits and starts of the Obama administration and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. Abbas is especially embittered by the administration's about-face on demanding that Israel halt its illegal settlement building in the West Bank.
But Abbas, 74, is also looking for cover for his own perceived weaknesses and misjudgments. He hasn't been a strong Palestinian leader. He has not responded effectively to the challenge posed by Hamas in Gaza, proving incapable of finding ways either to reunify Palestinians under one banner or to counter Hamas' perceived legitimacy among a sizable chunk of the Palestinian electorate. Palestinians perceive Abbas' Fatah as still more corrupt and less socially responsive than Hamas.
Abbas' popularity among Palestinians, never beefy, has been plummeting in the past few weeks. The steep decline was triggered by his decision to give in to American and Israeli pressure and withdraw his endorsement of the so-called Goldstone report, the United Nations' Human Rights Council-sponsored investigation into atrocities and war crimes committed by Israel and Hamas during the war over Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009. Abbas subsequently reversed course. But his credibility hasn't. He squandered what had been a brief reversal of fortune between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
Opting not to run for reelection was therefore not quite a surprise, especially in light of what may happen next: elections scheduled for January may not take place as long as Hamas chooses to boycott them, or as long as Fatah chooses to use Hamas' position as an excuse not to hold the elections. That would enable Abbas to stay in his post indefinitely, much as his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, never a friend of democratic processes, did. Abbas may have stumbled on a way to look like he is protesting without actually doing so. Whether Palestinians buy the act is another story.
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Wednesday November 4, 2009
Air Rendition: One of the planes operated by the CIA's front, North Carolina-based Aero Contractors, believed to have been used in CIA renditions of suspected terrorists to third countries such as Egypt. The European Union has documented more than 1,200 illegal CIA flights in European air space. (Photo by Pavel Horejsi/Getty Images)
Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, is an Egyptian cleric and member of al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, the Egyptian group chiefly responsible for the assassination of Anwar el Sadat in 1981. Nasr was living in Italy to avoid arrest following the designation of al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya as a terrorist organization by the Egyptian and American governments.
On Feb. 17, 2003, while he was walking to his mosque in Milan, Nasr was kidnapped by several CIA agents working in concert with Italian agents. Nasr was subjected to "extraordinary rendition," the illegal practice, utilized by the CIA since the Clinton administration, of kidnapping individuals and rendering them to other countries for imprisonment, and, usually, interrogation and torture by local officials not covered by American prohibitions against torture or illegal imprisonment. Nasr was flown from Italy to Germany through Swiss air space on what was one of at least 1,245 secret C.I.A. flights, some of them involving rendition, during the Bush administration, according to a European Union report.
Nasr was then being rendered from an American military base in Germany to Egypt. Egyptian prisons notorious for their brutality. According to Nasr, he was tortured repeatedly. The Chicago Tribune reproduced a letter he wrote describing his kidnapping and experience at his jailers' hands.
Soon after arriving in Egypt, Nasr wrote,
they presented me with some food and about an hour later they opened the cell door and blindfolded me and tied my hands and took me to an office and the interrogations and torture began, they removed all my clothes and removed the binds on my hands and replaced them with other binds that were like three binds; 2 binds on my hands behind my back and one bind which they tied around one foot so that I was standing on one foot and I would fall to the floor naked as they laughed and lifted me back up and again and again and the electric shocks began as well as the hand beatings and the threats to rape me if I refused to talk and if I held back anything I knew and then they gave some paper and a pen and asked me to write everything about my life and to the day that I departed Egypt and what I did outside Egypt. The interrogations were repeated a number of times.
On Feb. 16, 2007, an Italian judge indicted 26 Americans on kidnapping charges, including an Air Force colonel, along with Nicolo Pollari, who until 2007 was Italy's chief of military intelligence. Three of the Americans were later granted diplomatic immunity.
Today--Nov. 4--the CIA station chief in Milan at the time, Robert Seldon, was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison while 22 other Americans were given five-year terms. Not one American is going to serve his sentence. They were all tried in absentia. But the convictions carry considerable symbolic force in their repudiation of the Bush administration's unilateral subordination of international law to a form of big-power vigilantism. The convictions are also, implicitly, a repudiation of the Obama administration on that score. Obama has embraced extraordinary rendition as a potential tool of anti-terrorism.
As for Nasr, he was released in 2004, imprisoned again, and released again in early 2007, the charges against him that he belonged to a terrorist organization having been dropped. He's living in Alexandria. "The ruling," The Times reports, "may bear on suits filed by Mr. Nasr and his wife. Mr. Nasr, who is now living in Alexandria, Egypt, is seeking $14 million in damages from the defendants. His wife, Ghali Nabila, is seeking $7.4 million against the Italian authorities 'for their refusal to cooperate' with justice, according to her lawyer, Luca Bauccio. In August the couple also filed a suit with the European Court of Human Rights."
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Wednesday November 4, 2009
East Meets West: The Prophet Muhammad in a 17th century Ottoman copy of an early 14th century image from northwestern Iran or northern Iraq. Note the saintly halos, a reflection of Christian Byzantine influence. These days, East and West are about to influence each other by way of Hollywood. (Reproduction from the Bibliothèque nationale de France / virtual exhibits)
Bahrain last year held its first human rights film festival. Dubai has been holding film festivals since 2004. Abu Dhabi has a couple, and if you look hard enough in Jeddah, in puritan Saudi Arabia, film festivals are held there, too, albeit not too successfully.
Not to be outdone, Qatar this year--last week, to be precise--held its first Tribeca Film Festival in Doha, with Robert DeNiro (Tribeca's co-founder) and 31 movies headlining the launch.
The biggest surprise: Qatari investment company Al Noor Holdings' decision to plunk down $150 million for a feature film about the Prophet Muhammad, to be produced by Barrie Osborne, the producer of "The Matrix," the Lord of the Rings series, the violence fest known as "Face/Off" and the delightfully cartoonish "Dick Tracy."
Osborne had Keanu Reeves play the messiah in The Matrix. Reeves isn't about to be Muhammad: Word has it the Muhammad flick will follow the Islamic (though not Koranic) precept against showing the likeness of Muhammad or even his immediate family (no Julia Roberts in the role of Aisha). So it'll be an interesting creative challenge for whoever directs the flick. How to show Muhammad's lives and wives without showing him or them.
It'll also be cause, I hope, for an interesting debate about that rather silly tradition that prohibits depictions of the Prophet (and engenders all sorts of more than silly conflicts and often bloody over it). And it should be cause for debate over the producers' agreement, if there is such an agreement, to subordinate artistic license to religious edict. The artistic work is compromised before it's even begun.
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