As a guide to the preoccupations of young Arabs, the Middle-Eastern chaos currently splashed across the front pages is only part of the story. Vying with bearded Hizbollah commanders for the hearts and minds (or at least cash and attention) of Middle-Eastern youths is a well-funded and altogether better-looking army: a gang of half-naked girls. Stars of the omnipresent Arabic music videos (video-clips), the girls — led by Maria, Elissa, Ruby, Nancy Ajram and Haifa Wehbe — are the region’s super-groomed, cosmetically enhanced sweethearts — or its “porno clip devils,” according to one Egyptian newspaper.
Their grip on “the morals of Arab youth” is so strong that in 2004 conservative Egyptian legislators called for a ban on the clips — supported by letters and petitions from young Egyptians.
But how do the region’s armies of under-30 video-lovers and haters square up? Early last year Allegra Stratton, a young BBC producer, set off on a tour of Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Dubai, Kuwait City and Damascus with the aim of finding out.
Stratton is in search of a cultural revolution — experts on the Middle East have told her that a massive rise in the number of educated young people coupled with a stunted job market have led to a situation that parallels the English Civil War, the French Revolution and 1968. So, at first, she goes looking for a Haight-Ashbury-type counterculture, hanging out with TV producers, struggling artists, MCs and curators.
Her findings are less romantic than she had hoped — there are no flower children in Damascus, and Amman’s only nude portraitist is, she disappointedly remarks, “crap.” The verdict is characteristic of Muhajababes, which is written in a jaunty conversational tone that allows Stratton to feel “rubbish” about “shit” things, such as the invasion of Iraq or badly produced Arabic music. The chirpiness can grate — “Here, everyone has a telly on their desk,” she observes artlessly of BBC Westminster — but it has an upside. In comparison with many products of the Middle-Eastern comment and analysis industry, and despite its off-puttingly trend-spotting title, Muhajababes is direct, energetic and unpretentious. Stratton is out on the street accosting passers-by and counting the number of veiled women with a persistence that makes her a likeable and instructive guide to the lure of extremism for Palestinian refugees or why What Not to Wear will never air in Beirut.
And what she learns is fascinating. The video-clip girls are indeed a serious cultural force — Nancy Ajram was recently voted one of the region’s most influential Arabs by the Arabic version of Newsweek — but their eminence grise is the Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the eighth-richest man in the world and the owner of the Rotana satellite stations and record label that 80 per cent of Arab pop stars are signed to.
Despite the acres of flesh on display at Rotana, the singers’ most fervent fans are the eponymous “muhajababes”: veiled girls (muhajaba is Arabic for one who veils) who nevertheless wear skin-tight jeans, stiletto heels and plenty of make-up. To describe them, Stratton learns a great new Arabic word, rewish, which means somewhere between hip and distracted — these are the Dazed & Confused-sters of the Middle East. Nominally strict Muslims, some sneak cigarettes, date boys and engage in other behavior that is technically haram (forbidden).
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