Ranged against (or sometimes, confusingly, alongside) them are members of the conservative anti-clip brigade. But increasingly they, too, Stratton discovers, worship the TV screen. Their idol is a swoonsome young accountant-turned-preacher called Amr Khaled, who appears on religious shows with “young men and women, praying, crying and giving hearty, healthy belly laughs, as if they were in a vitamin-supplement advert.” Stratton is particularly scathing about Khaled, a well-fed BMW driver who announces, televangelist-style, that: “I want to have money and the best clothes to make people love God’s religion.” But it’s only when she ditches her dream of finding the Arab Bob Dylan and focuses on Khaled’s Life Makers initiative that Muhajababes gains in pace and authority.
Capable of mobilizing hundreds of thousands of young Muslims worldwide for causes ranging from the benign (collecting clothes for charity) to the sinister (berating smokers and drinkers in public), Khaled is the well-groomed face of a new, media-friendly conservative Islam that reviles the “degrading display of women’s bodies.”
Between the muhajababes and the Life Makers, there is little room for the handful of arty oddballs (including the gay Kuwaiti who provides the book’s best line, “There’s no such thing as straight in Kuwait”) to whom Stratton, as a liberal Westerner, is instinctively drawn. But this is the point. Social change in the Middle East won’t be led, as Stratton — and many Western policy-makers — had hoped, by the secular trendies, but by those she dismissively describes as the “Life Making, green-fingered, litter-collecting, I’d-like-to-teach- the-world-to-sing Arabs.”
Muhajababes discovers a world in which religion is packaged and sold as slickly as a video clip. And the people behind the scenes are the same, too: Prince Al-Waleed has already diversified into an immensely popular new Islamic channel, Al-Risala, or the message. And it is not a conveniently distant world either: having been banned from preaching by the nervous Egyptian regime in 2002, Khaled now finds refuge in the UK and is soon, Stratton surmises, advising the British government on engaging with the Muslim world.
It is hard, as Muhajababes demonstrates, for secular observers to appreciate the genuine force of belief, however clumsily or confusedly it may be expressed. In the summer of 2004 when I was living in Cairo, I was surprised to meet engineering graduates who believed in djinn with green claws and veiled girls who swapped oral-sex tips. But with bombs falling in the Beirut streets that Stratton scoured fruitlessly for a trendier revolution, the region’s latest crisis is a reminder that it’s essential to try.
Publication Notes:
MUHAJABABES
By Allegra Stratton
281 pages
CONSTABLE AND ROBINSON
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