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Bab Al-Hara, Televising Morality and Everyday Life in the Levant Nassif, H

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WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch Home under siege: Bab al-Hara, televising morality and everyday life in the Levant Nassif, H. This is an electronic version of a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Westminster. © Ms Helena Nassif, 2015. The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the URL of WestminsterResearch: ((http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). In case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail [email protected] Home Under Siege: Bab al-Hara, Televising Morality and Everyday Life in the Levant HELENA NASSIF A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment to the requirements of the University of Westminster for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy July 2015 The Arabic language evolved slowly across the millennia, leaving little undefined, no nuance shaded. Bayt translates literally as house, but its connotations resonate beyond rooms and walls, summoning longings gathered about family and home. In the Middle East, bayt is sacred. Empires fall. Nations topple. Borders may shift or be realigned. Old loyalties may dissolve or, without warning, be altered. Home, whether it be structure or familiar ground, is finally, the identity that does not fade. (Shadid, 2012: xiii) What disappointments await the naive traveller to the famous cities of the fabulous East! Were all those old story-tellers lying? Did they see things differently then? Can things and people have changed so much? The eagerly awaited wonders, the marvellous surprises, the ruins, the monuments, the stories from the Thousand and One Nights, the folksongs and dances - they are no longer enough to colour the spectacle and transform it for us. Naples, Baghdad, Calcutta: the same sun shines down on the same rags, the same running sores. The myths have disappeared, the rituals and magic spells have lost their glamour. All we can see now are the destitute masses, and the ignoble apparatus of domination which lies over them, the unlovely art of power. There is nothing left to seduce us. Everywhere a bare- faced display of force: rifles, armoured cars, policemen. (Lefebvre, 1991a: 44) I ABSTRACT This PhD research investigates the role of television in representing the past and constructing an idealized society using a case study of a phenomenal Ramadan drama series, Bab el-Hara. The television drama, a Syrian production, was funded by the pan- Arab satellite conglomerate, the MBC group, and it is set in a fictitious Damascus of the 1930s under the French Mandate. The series, airing its seventh season in Ramadan, 2015, succeeded in achieving pan-Arab fame and gave a boost to the “Damascene Milieu” drama genre. The study approaches this television phenomenon ethnographically, looking at the fiction's implicatedness in the everyday life of viewers and makers in Damascus and in Beirut, through a multi-sited approach investigating content, context and agency, engaging in questions on space, morality and patriotism. The objective is to investigate audiences, text and makers as distinct yet connected sites of meaning. This context based analysis of Bab al-Hara takes place against the backdrop of 2010/2011; the liminal state of a Levant entering deeper into a complex local, regional and international power struggle. The everyday life of Bab al-Hara’s viewers was characterized by a general sense of loss and mistrust, and an unclear and threatened future. Contrastingly, Bab al-Hara provided the nostalgic promise of ontological security, grounded as it was in the courtyard houses of Old Damascus. The Damascene courtyard house constituted the spatial anchor for an idealized moral past, an ahistorical Damascus- focused Arab cultural history, and an imagination of the domestic as sovereign. It thus promoted a view of the neighbourly, the city and the country as a system based on kin, or the family, as the frame in which to understand the collectivity. Bab al-Hara's cultural, moral and spatial telos, a fusion of religious and nationalist worldviews, amongst others, is negotiated by Bab al-Hara’s viewers. The older generation, with situated experience of the social relations during the 1930s, and the younger generation that is appreciative of the virility of the “real” Bab al-Hara man that they no longer encounter in their everyday life. The multiple generational readings in regard to the absent idealized strength and authority, became a dominant reading in relation to chastity and unity as two idealized values that are necessary to conserve, but that are facing serious challenges in the everyday. Bab al-Hara idealizes a moral domestic society that is set in the past and it aims to advance a discourse on unity and patriotism. In so doing, however, it only exposes the weakness of the national project. The Syrian social upheaval in 2011 shows how unity and patriotism as the binaries to sectarianism and treason, have not succeeded in protecting the inner domain of the house from external invasions or internal divisions. In fact, accusations of treason, instead of forcing the outsider to the outside and building solidarity within, accentuates mistrust between the insiders and reveals the power and the limits of t h e Bab al-Hara imaginary of a kin based collectivity, and the omnipresence of imperialism. II CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...............................................................................................................VI A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION.............................................................................................VIII DECLARATION............................................................................................................................. IX Chapter 1.......................................................................................................................................... 1 INTRODUCTION: ACCESSING THE NEIGHBOURHOOD GATE............................................. 1 1.1. The Present Cultural Tense.................................................................................................... 4 1.2. Arab Television Scholarship.................................................................................................. 8 1.3. Contribution to Arab Media/Cultural Studies...................................................................... 11 Chapter 2........................................................................................................................................ 15 THE POLITICS OF MEDIATING THE PAST.............................................................................. 15 2.1. The Past in “Arab Contemporary Thought”.........................................................................16 2.2. History in Postcolonial Literature........................................................................................ 21 2.3. Home in the past, present or future...................................................................................... 25 2.4. History as a Screen Discipline............................................................................................. 29 2.5. Arab Cultural Studies and Syrian Drama Series.................................................................. 31 2.6. Conclusion...........................................................................................................................33 Chapter 3........................................................................................................................................ 35 MEDIA ETHNOGRAPHY BETWEEN BEIRUT AND DAMASCUS.........................................35 3.1. The “Native” Researcher..................................................................................................... 36 3.2. Studying the Politics of Television Drama in Context......................................................... 39 3.3. The Research Journey.......................................................................................................... 48 3.4. Reflections on the Researcher’s Positionality...................................................................... 57 Chapter 4........................................................................................................................................ 64 BAB AL-HARA COURTYARD HOUSES: CONSTRUCTING THE MORAL HOME..................64 4.1. Damascene Courtyard Houses: The Place of Nostalgia....................................................... 66 4.2. The Production of Old Damascus........................................................................................ 72 4.3. Damascene Milieu Fantasia................................................................................................. 76 4.4. Domestic as Moral...............................................................................................................81 4.5. Conclusion...........................................................................................................................84 III Chapter 5........................................................................................................................................ 86 WATCHING BAB AL-HARA AT Q/AHWAT AL-RAWDA............................................................ 86 5.1. The Sea Café......................................................................................................................
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