Preface
This book is intended as both an easy reference tool and a discussion of many of
the political and cultural issues raging in Arab societies of the Middle East and
North Africa that would be useful to nonspecialists as well as students of Middle
East Studies and related subjects. The chapters are more descriptive than analyt-
ical, laying out major historical and contemporary trends in music, cinema, tele-
visual media, literature and print culture, sports, Internet, and video gaming. The
book provokes two fundamental questions regarding approaches to this region:
understandings of “Arab” and understandings of “popular culture.”
The book looks at the region through the lens of its Arab identity framing,
which is discussed in detail in the Introduction, though there are obvious prob-
lems with this, as will be apparent as the text veers into Turkish, Iranian, or Israeli
territory. There are valid arguments for full integration of all three of those cultural
arenas in a cultural compendium of the Middle East. Within the Arab zone it may
often make more sense to talk of North African, Gulf, Nile Valley, or Levantine cul-
ture, while there are overlaps with Iran and Turkey in both modern pop music and
classical music, which may better be defined as Ottoman. I allude to these issues
at various points while listing source materials where more detailed information
may be found.
Regionalism is another problem when looking at the Arab world. The cultural
life of Iraq, which has undergone major transformation since 2003, is almost
entirely eclipsed in media and academic coverage by its political drama; Mauri-
tania is barely on the map. There is an almost inevitable Egypt-centric quality to
any discussion of Arab culture, whether political, cultural, or otherwise. Egyptian
cultural power was once welcomed across the Arab world (Cheb Khaled once said
that growing up he just wanted to visit the Egypt of the movies and the songs then
die, but with the deterioration in Egypt’s moral and material standing of recent
decades (in Fouad Ajami’s memorable phrase, it has fallen through the “trapdoor
of its history of disappointment” [1999, 243]) other locales have asserted them-
selves at the pan-Arab level, challenging Egypt’s claim to primacy in diverse cul-
tural fields. From my own perspective as the author, after a number of years living
and working in Egypt, I was able to spend time in the Gulf region in particular, and
soften some of the Nasserist approaches I had imbibed in understanding the Arab
world’s politics and culture.
Any discussion of popular culture must take into account notions of the pop-
ular as defined by everything that high culture is not, a problem arguably more
