![]() The serial was approved and is airing on government and private channels. On the first night of Ramadan, officials visited el-Adl’s office and watched all thirty-one episodes of “The Preacher” in one sitting-a heroic feat of television viewing in the service of state censorship. But a new minister took his place after Morsi’s removal. The Ministry of Information initially banned the program from state television the minister had been Morsi’s media campaign manager. He wrote the script last summer, soon after Morsi took office, and filmed the episodes this past spring. Their celebratory tone now feels simple and naïve.īut el-Adl’s timing, it turns out, couldn’t have been better. Most of the films about the 2011 revolution have not done well commercially. Events in Egypt are progressing so rapidly these days that dramas with political themes fall quickly out of date. “We felt this was the right time to speak.” ![]() “I started feeling that this was a very important time for our country: we will either advance, or we will go backward five hundred years,” Medhat el-Adl, who wrote the script for “The Preacher,” told me. People accused the Muslim Brotherhood of hijacking the country-and destroying their vision of a cosmopolitan, tolerant Egypt. The clash between art and extremism culminated in the spring with a sit-in against the appointment of an Islamist culture minister. One Salafi sheikh has called for the destruction of Egyptian antiquities several have accused famous actresses of promoting immorality. Clerics have traditionally gained followers through their knowledge of the Koran, but the new televangelists attracted people with their accessibility, charisma, or religious fervor. Television preachers started appearing in Egypt a decade ago, helped by a rising conservatism and the proliferation of private satellite channels. “It feels like this was the only chance for artists and creators and dramatists to voice their opinions.” “This year it seems that TV producers have decided to gang up on not just the Brotherhood but all forms of political Islam,” Joseph Fahim, a Cairo-based film critic, told me. These programs were filmed when Morsi still held power, and they appear to be the cultural establishment’s collective protests against extremism. Conservative sheikhs are popping up in supernatural thrillers (“Neeran Sadeeqa,” or “Friendly Fire”) and police procedurals (“Moget Harra,” or “Heat Wave”). ![]() “Bedoun Zekr Asmaa” (“Without Mentioning Names”) tells the story of Islamist groups recruiting members in poor neighborhoods during the nineteen-eighties. ![]() Moltaheen-“people with beards”-are all over TV this Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting, which Egyptians mark by staying up through the night and watching multi-episode soap operas. “I’ll watch the first ten episodes,” he said, “then decide if I’ll continue.” Like the Egyptian electorate-which voted Mohamed Morsi into office a year ago but offered broad support when the military removed him from power-he does not have unlimited patience. “I like this show because it tells you a lot about the thinking of the Islamists,” Remon Amin, a stockbroker who hates the Brotherhood and hasn’t followed any other TV series in years, told me. But the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that was underground for almost sixty years and governed the country for just one, still fascinates people, even those who despise it. Its popularity may seem strange, since millions of Egyptians recently took to the streets to depose their conservative Islamist President. The most talked-about television serial in Egypt this Ramadan season may be “Al-Da’iea” (“The Preacher”), the story of a conservative Islamist sheikh whose views draw him closer to the fundamentalist camp even as they alienate his family. “My God, he’s as beautiful as the moon!” says a veiled camerawoman.
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