New York:
The Egyptian entrepreneur Ahmed Abu Haiba isn't having a good day. A Saudi columnist has accused him of corrupting the country's youth. A music video he has been working on for months is behind schedule. He hasn't had time to prepare for his weekly talk show, an Islamo-Egyptian version of "Dr Phil."
Worse, one of the program's financiers has become upset because there was to be a woman on the show -- unchaste behavior, to some. We're driving along Sheik Zayed Road in the desert outside Cairo on a bright day as the radio plays Sami Yusuf, a saccharine-sweet Muslim pop star based in London. Abu Haiba theatrically throws his arms in the air to perform his frustration. At the age of 42 he is tubby and, as a sign of his deep faith, has a large zabiba -- a dark smudge on his forehead born of rubbing his head repeatedly on a prayer mat. And yet he is not a conventional man and certainly not a conventional Muslim. Today he looks more like a hip-hop mogul, with a black knit golf cap on backward and a suit of all black. And a pink tie.
As the brains behind 4Shbab, the world's first Islamic version of MTV, Abu Haiba is the consummate man in the middle -- situated between the dictates of Islam and those of the pop-music business. Introduced in the spring of last year, 4Shbab, which means "for youth" in Arabic, broadcasts music videos, variety shows (including Abu Haiba's own), news and even a reality program called "Your Voice Is Heard" -- which might as well be called "Who Wants to be an Islamic Pop Star?" Imagine MTV without the gratuitous gyration and skin, and with videos about family, public service, Palestine and, above all, salvation. In trying to make Islam relevant to youth, 4Shbab is part of a recent trend that, from Cairo to Kuala Lumpur, has inspired restaurants with Islamic themes, Islamic entertainment centers and even Islamic water parks and beaches.
4Shbab's mission seems to be communicating that there is a middle ground between the rigid Islam of stern-faced elders and jihadists on one hand and the louche ways of the West on the other. On 4Shbab, you can be traditional and modern at once, Islamic and hip, pious and fun. The channel's music videos speak to real life, from the difficulties of finding work to the pain of depression to the burn of spurned love. And in all of 4Shbab's promotional spots a tremendous smokey voice booms: "Lissssssten . . . to the tune of Islam."
4shbab' s headquarters occupy a floor of one among many anonymous high-rises in Cairo's Mohandiseen district. The office furniture is fashioned from red plastic, as if to urgently communicate 4Shbab's modernity. As I sat down with Abu Haiba, young men -- all of them under 30 -- came in every few minutes to show him this or that letter or to go over the schedule for a coming shoot. The core team also gathered there at prayer times. At one point, Abu Haiba's iPhone rang with the distinctive harp sound that indicates his wife calling. I could hear her excitedly telling him how many fans 4Shbab had on Facebook.
"The media is changing everything," Abu Haiba told me. "Television, the Internet, Facebook. We have to think faster, move faster. Time flies! 4Shbab is part of that change. It's more than music. We have 25,000 members in the 4Shbab Forum. We get 3,000 S.M.S. a day from viewers. I have fans in Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Iraq -- you name it. We think of it as a new kind of preaching for the 'rebound generation.' "
Abu Haiba maintains this audience includes some 60 percent of Arab youth. When asked directly about audience numbers, he tends to offer only misty, unverifiable optimism. After all, there are no Arab Nielsen ratings. "The rebound generation doesn't want old men telling them what to do and what not to do," he said. "But they also don't feel comfortable with all that sexual stuff. They are young. They care about Palestine. They have a religious touch. But they also go to the cinema. They go to parties. They want to be part of the world. They might have a companionship with a girl. But not" -- he emphasized -- "a girlfriend!"
The television flickered on.
It was one of 4Shbab's biggest hits, a video by the Syrian singer Yahia Hawa. The clip opens with a young man in a smart blue suit jauntily walking through the alleys of what appears to be old-town Damascus. Suddenly, everything goes wrong. An old lady empties a bucket of water onto his head from a balcony above; he is nearly run down by a passing car; the parents of the woman he wants to marry reject him. Later, he falls from a window. While he lies injured in the hospital, he falls for an attending nurse. She is as tightly veiled as can be and has her head down in a Koran: a picture of piety. Everything begins to look brighter. The young man exits the hospital, people greet him on the street, even the parents who had spurned him now welcome him. By the end, he has given up his jacket and tie for Islamic chic. The narrative is not exactly subtle, but the song is infectious.
Abu Haiba is audibly tapping his foot. I ask if we can watch another video.
This one begins with a young man dancing in a disco marked by abundant smoke and strobe lights. He is chugging a bottle of vodka. We cut to the next morning, as our protagonist is bent in pain, looking very sad and very hung over. The lyrics run, "If you need him, go back to him." The "him" is God. In the next scene, the young man is bent over again -- but this time in prayer, on a pretty Oriental rug.
Abu Haiba turns to me for a reaction: "Good, yes?"
Nightclubs and tales of love are far from the images normally associated with Islamic television. Channels like Iqraa, Al-Resala or Majd TV -- most of them financed by Saudi conservatives -- tend to feature Koranic reading, wagging fingers, overlong beards and men speaking in contemptuous tones about sin, redemption and the dangers of the West.
"They are very, very boring," Abu Haiba says of these channels. "When this is the only face of Islam, you have a problem. Very boring."
Still, he had a difficult time at first convincing investors that the Arab world needed another music video channel -- there are some 50 already, including MTV Arabia, which mostly broadcasts Western videos. "No one would listen," he told me with feeling. To make his case to financiers (mostly Saudis), Abu Haiba prepared a 15-minute documentary featuring clips from various Arab music videos, each more scandalous than the last. One scene featured the bosomy Lebanese singer Dana Halabi twisting about in minidresses singing, "At your service, Sir." A grave voice-over piped in: "You might think we are exaggerating, but this is what your children are watching on television."
"At that point some of them just jumped up and asked for it to be turned off," Abu Haiba told me. "They had seen enough."
He raised all the money he needed within a month.
I met Samer and Tamer Abd El Shafy at Al-Horreya, an old cafe in Cairo's belle-epoque downtown. Brothers from Alexandria, they make up half of a pop group called 4Hearts. Their debut video, shown on 4Shbab, features the band members walking around a town praising God while distributing money to small children. Samer is tall and angular, Tamer short and round. Both wore stonewashed jeans and had mousse in their hair the night we met. While Tamer has long been of a religious bent, Samer only recently found Islam after spending years playing music in the seedier nightclubs of Cairo's Pyramids Road. "I did everything," Samer said when I asked him if he used to do the sorts of things that commonly occur in such clubs. He even became engaged to an American girl. "Jennifer. From Texas." (His brother rolled his eyes at the memory.) Back then, his musical heroes were Michael Jackson and Jay-Z.
But two years ago, after a friend died from drinking too much, Samer changed his ways. Today he prefers Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens). He likes Sami Yusuf, the British-Azerbaijani Islamic singing sensation, too.
Another friend, Ayman, joined us. I asked Samer if he still listened to Michael Jackson. He smiled. "No," he said.
"Really?" I said.
"Really?" Ayman asked.
Samer quickly capitulated: "Sometimes I listen to 'Man in the Mirror.' " As in, "I'm starting with the man in the mirror/I'm asking him to change his ways." At least it was a self-help song.
"People say you can't mix God and music," Tamer said. "But we're trying to show you can."
I asked if they ever watched MTV or Melody Tunes, a popular Cairo-based music video channel that is occasionally racy. Ayman nodded yes. "I love Shakira," he said with a giggle. But the brothers emphatically denied watching such channels.
"The biggest problem with those channels is that they say nothing about the life we live," Samer said. "Fancy cars, girls, swimming pools: they are about short-term happiness. What do they have to say to me?"
I left the brothers and walked off with Ayman, a young artist with a streetwise manner. I asked what he thought of the music the brothers were making with 4Hearts. "I like it," he said. "I used to think it was the same propaganda as bin Laden. But it's actually good!"
Abu Haiba's path to becoming a pioneer of the pious-pleasure industry has been roundabout, at best. At 15, he says, he experienced a sudden urge for spiritual direction and threw out all his records. Mohamed Abdel Waheb, Abdel Halim Hafez, Oum Kalthoum, Fairuz -- the Elvis Presleys and Diana Rosses of Arabic song -- all of it had to go. Especially difficult was parting with the albums of Fairuz, the delicate flaxen-haired queen of Lebanese music. "I was in love with Fairuz," he remembered. "She was my hero."
Still, firm in his conviction that most music was haram, or forbidden in Islam, he began listening to nasheed, a cappella music with little or no instrumental accompaniment (instruments often being considered haram). Soon Abu Haiba was spending every afternoon in his neighborhood mosque in Cairo. He went on a retreat with Tablighi Jamaat, a grass-roots Islamic revivalist movement. He stopped communicating with girls outside his family. His evenings were spent memorizing the Sura el Baqara with his mother and grandfather, a longish chunk of the Koran that, in great part, involves urging the pagans and Jews of Medina to embrace Islam. He attended demonstrations for Palestine. He distanced himself from many of his schoolfriends, believing they would have a negative effect on his character.
When, in the late 1980s, Abu Haiba entered Cairo University's engineering school, the Egyptian government was at war with homegrown Islamists in Islamic Jihad and Jemaah Islamiyah and elements of the more moderate Muslim Brotherhood. He became involved with the student union, wrote and acted in Islamic-themed plays and associated with people who would later join the brotherhood. His new heroes were the leaders of the Afghan mujahideen -- long-bearded men with names like Rabbani, Sayyad, al Afghani.
After completing his engineering studies, he wrote more plays. There were early setbacks; his very first play, he told me, involved a tale about the Prophet and starred only men. "People fell asleep," he said. "I learned a lot from that." He studied episodes of "Friends," "Frasier" and "Third Rock From the Sun" in writing future plays. He began to include children and even, in one case, a woman.
Nightclubs and tales of love are far from the images normally associated with Islamic television. Channels like Iqraa, Al-Resala or Majd TV -- most of them financed by Saudi conservatives -- tend to feature Koranic reading, wagging fingers, overlong beards and men speaking in contemptuous tones about sin, redemption and the dangers of the West.
"They are very, very boring," Abu Haiba says of these channels. "When this is the only face of Islam, you have a problem. Very boring."
Still, he had a difficult time at first convincing investors that the Arab world needed another music video channel -- there are some 50 already, including MTV Arabia, which mostly broadcasts Western videos. "No one would listen," he told me with feeling. To make his case to financiers (mostly Saudis), Abu Haiba prepared a 15-minute documentary featuring clips from various Arab music videos, each more scandalous than the last. One scene featured the bosomy Lebanese singer Dana Halabi twisting about in minidresses singing, "At your service, Sir." A grave voice-over piped in: "You might think we are exaggerating, but this is what your children are watching on television."
"At that point some of them just jumped up and asked for it to be turned off," Abu Haiba told me. "They had seen enough."
He raised all the money he needed within a month.
On my last day in Cairo, I visited Abu Haiba at his home in Sixth of October City, one of the city's original gated communities in the desert. His two-story house was one of scores of identical red and yellow stucco homes, each with lawn, satellite dish and SU.
His wife, Carmen (named after the opera), greeted me. She was dressed in figure-hugging sparkly jeans and wore many necklaces. The couple met at a play he staged in 2002, Abu Haiba told me, as Carmen went around the house lifting doilies and cleaning surfaces with Windex. A TV flickered with cartoons for their 5-year-old daughter, Laila. She was studying the Koran in French at an International Islamic school. "The first in Egypt," her father said.
Seated on a wine-colored couch in their strenuously decorated living room, Abu Haiba and Carmen looked like newlyweds. I asked them what they did in their spare time. "We're addicted to cinema," Carmen said. "We love American movies." Her favorite film? "I loved 'The Devil Wears Prada.' " Her husband nodded sweetly in agreement.
Later, we moved outside to the backyard to eat, and Carmen put a Dior scarf atop her head, "for the neighbors." She told me of a business scheme she had cooked up to open a salon for working moms in the posh district of Zamalek: "A beauty salon with day care!"
At one point, I looked over at little Leila, whose mouth was filled with pink marshmallows, and asked if she would eventually have to veil. "It will be up to her," Abu Haiba said. "The social sin is bigger than the religious sin. If the man who goes to Mecca doesn't help his hungry neighbor, what is he worth?"
We were eating ful medames, an Egyptian staple of mashed beans. As we battled flies, the conversation shifted to debates over Shariah. Abu Haiba raised hadd el zina, Islamic law's punishment for adultery, one of the most contested stipulations and also one of the most talked about by Islam's detractors -- especially because it can involve stoning the offending woman. "There is no clarity about the punishment," Abu Haiba maintained. "The Koran says you need four witnesses to prove it. When will that ever happen? There is flexibility built into Islam. I am trying to push Islamic scholars to rethink these things."
So why work in entertainment, I wondered, and not law or scholarship or politics for that matter?
"You reach more people through entertainment," he said. "I started 4Shbab because we need to redefine Islam. People think of Islam as a series of restrictions and limitations. Don't speak to girls! Don't listen to music!
"The voices speaking for Islam today are extremists," he went on, with his own sort of evangelical zeal. "We see an angry man throwing a stone at an embassy more often than an Amr Khaled."
Can 4Shbab combat extremism?
"4Shbab is changing the way young people look at Islam. I know we can change people at the far end, the Salafists or jihadists. Some of the people who listen to us now used to not listen to music at all!"
It makes sense that this could be 4Shbab's moment. These days, every established pop star in the Islamic world, no matter how suspect his or her religious credentials might seem, tends to produce one song in praise of Allah each year -- usually around the holy month of Ramadan. Even Egypt's secular government is trying to catch up, particularly given that its only real competition comes from the Muslim Brotherhood, which is more than happy to pose as the guardian of public morality. The National Democratic Party, Egypt's ruling party, is increasingly carrying out activities with an Islamic bent, like passing out treats during Ramadan. When an Egyptian woman named Marwa el Sherbini was stabbed to death in a Dresden courtroom last summer, Egyptians called her a "martyr of Islam," and officials seized the moment, publicly mourning her fate. President Hosni Mubarak, in his 82nd year, is increasingly photographed praying or handing out prizes to children who have memorized the Koran.
Whether this is modernity adjusting to Islam, or the opposite, is impossible to judge. What's clear is that the space for accommodation is growing. As we moved on to a fizzy pineapple drink and dessert, Abu Haiba spoke of drafting a rebuttal to an anti-4Shbab campaign on a conservative Islamic Web site. He would fight back, he said, work harder, maybe even extend his work into the world of television dramas with a next project: an HBO-style channel. "Imagine 'Big Love' or 'The Wire' with Islamic themes," he said. You could see the optimism and excitement in his eyes. "I think in a short time we will be at the top of the charts. You see, Islam is like a big bus. You can be standing at the door, or you can be at the steering wheel. My plan is to be at the steering wheel."
Worse, one of the program's financiers has become upset because there was to be a woman on the show -- unchaste behavior, to some. We're driving along Sheik Zayed Road in the desert outside Cairo on a bright day as the radio plays Sami Yusuf, a saccharine-sweet Muslim pop star based in London. Abu Haiba theatrically throws his arms in the air to perform his frustration. At the age of 42 he is tubby and, as a sign of his deep faith, has a large zabiba -- a dark smudge on his forehead born of rubbing his head repeatedly on a prayer mat. And yet he is not a conventional man and certainly not a conventional Muslim. Today he looks more like a hip-hop mogul, with a black knit golf cap on backward and a suit of all black. And a pink tie.
As the brains behind 4Shbab, the world's first Islamic version of MTV, Abu Haiba is the consummate man in the middle -- situated between the dictates of Islam and those of the pop-music business. Introduced in the spring of last year, 4Shbab, which means "for youth" in Arabic, broadcasts music videos, variety shows (including Abu Haiba's own), news and even a reality program called "Your Voice Is Heard" -- which might as well be called "Who Wants to be an Islamic Pop Star?" Imagine MTV without the gratuitous gyration and skin, and with videos about family, public service, Palestine and, above all, salvation. In trying to make Islam relevant to youth, 4Shbab is part of a recent trend that, from Cairo to Kuala Lumpur, has inspired restaurants with Islamic themes, Islamic entertainment centers and even Islamic water parks and beaches.
4Shbab's mission seems to be communicating that there is a middle ground between the rigid Islam of stern-faced elders and jihadists on one hand and the louche ways of the West on the other. On 4Shbab, you can be traditional and modern at once, Islamic and hip, pious and fun. The channel's music videos speak to real life, from the difficulties of finding work to the pain of depression to the burn of spurned love. And in all of 4Shbab's promotional spots a tremendous smokey voice booms: "Lissssssten . . . to the tune of Islam."
4shbab' s headquarters occupy a floor of one among many anonymous high-rises in Cairo's Mohandiseen district. The office furniture is fashioned from red plastic, as if to urgently communicate 4Shbab's modernity. As I sat down with Abu Haiba, young men -- all of them under 30 -- came in every few minutes to show him this or that letter or to go over the schedule for a coming shoot. The core team also gathered there at prayer times. At one point, Abu Haiba's iPhone rang with the distinctive harp sound that indicates his wife calling. I could hear her excitedly telling him how many fans 4Shbab had on Facebook.
"The media is changing everything," Abu Haiba told me. "Television, the Internet, Facebook. We have to think faster, move faster. Time flies! 4Shbab is part of that change. It's more than music. We have 25,000 members in the 4Shbab Forum. We get 3,000 S.M.S. a day from viewers. I have fans in Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Iraq -- you name it. We think of it as a new kind of preaching for the 'rebound generation.' "
Abu Haiba maintains this audience includes some 60 percent of Arab youth. When asked directly about audience numbers, he tends to offer only misty, unverifiable optimism. After all, there are no Arab Nielsen ratings. "The rebound generation doesn't want old men telling them what to do and what not to do," he said. "But they also don't feel comfortable with all that sexual stuff. They are young. They care about Palestine. They have a religious touch. But they also go to the cinema. They go to parties. They want to be part of the world. They might have a companionship with a girl. But not" -- he emphasized -- "a girlfriend!"
The television flickered on.
It was one of 4Shbab's biggest hits, a video by the Syrian singer Yahia Hawa. The clip opens with a young man in a smart blue suit jauntily walking through the alleys of what appears to be old-town Damascus. Suddenly, everything goes wrong. An old lady empties a bucket of water onto his head from a balcony above; he is nearly run down by a passing car; the parents of the woman he wants to marry reject him. Later, he falls from a window. While he lies injured in the hospital, he falls for an attending nurse. She is as tightly veiled as can be and has her head down in a Koran: a picture of piety. Everything begins to look brighter. The young man exits the hospital, people greet him on the street, even the parents who had spurned him now welcome him. By the end, he has given up his jacket and tie for Islamic chic. The narrative is not exactly subtle, but the song is infectious.
Abu Haiba is audibly tapping his foot. I ask if we can watch another video.
This one begins with a young man dancing in a disco marked by abundant smoke and strobe lights. He is chugging a bottle of vodka. We cut to the next morning, as our protagonist is bent in pain, looking very sad and very hung over. The lyrics run, "If you need him, go back to him." The "him" is God. In the next scene, the young man is bent over again -- but this time in prayer, on a pretty Oriental rug.
Abu Haiba turns to me for a reaction: "Good, yes?"
Nightclubs and tales of love are far from the images normally associated with Islamic television. Channels like Iqraa, Al-Resala or Majd TV -- most of them financed by Saudi conservatives -- tend to feature Koranic reading, wagging fingers, overlong beards and men speaking in contemptuous tones about sin, redemption and the dangers of the West.
"They are very, very boring," Abu Haiba says of these channels. "When this is the only face of Islam, you have a problem. Very boring."
Still, he had a difficult time at first convincing investors that the Arab world needed another music video channel -- there are some 50 already, including MTV Arabia, which mostly broadcasts Western videos. "No one would listen," he told me with feeling. To make his case to financiers (mostly Saudis), Abu Haiba prepared a 15-minute documentary featuring clips from various Arab music videos, each more scandalous than the last. One scene featured the bosomy Lebanese singer Dana Halabi twisting about in minidresses singing, "At your service, Sir." A grave voice-over piped in: "You might think we are exaggerating, but this is what your children are watching on television."
"At that point some of them just jumped up and asked for it to be turned off," Abu Haiba told me. "They had seen enough."
He raised all the money he needed within a month.
I met Samer and Tamer Abd El Shafy at Al-Horreya, an old cafe in Cairo's belle-epoque downtown. Brothers from Alexandria, they make up half of a pop group called 4Hearts. Their debut video, shown on 4Shbab, features the band members walking around a town praising God while distributing money to small children. Samer is tall and angular, Tamer short and round. Both wore stonewashed jeans and had mousse in their hair the night we met. While Tamer has long been of a religious bent, Samer only recently found Islam after spending years playing music in the seedier nightclubs of Cairo's Pyramids Road. "I did everything," Samer said when I asked him if he used to do the sorts of things that commonly occur in such clubs. He even became engaged to an American girl. "Jennifer. From Texas." (His brother rolled his eyes at the memory.) Back then, his musical heroes were Michael Jackson and Jay-Z.
But two years ago, after a friend died from drinking too much, Samer changed his ways. Today he prefers Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens). He likes Sami Yusuf, the British-Azerbaijani Islamic singing sensation, too.
Another friend, Ayman, joined us. I asked Samer if he still listened to Michael Jackson. He smiled. "No," he said.
"Really?" I said.
"Really?" Ayman asked.
Samer quickly capitulated: "Sometimes I listen to 'Man in the Mirror.' " As in, "I'm starting with the man in the mirror/I'm asking him to change his ways." At least it was a self-help song.
"People say you can't mix God and music," Tamer said. "But we're trying to show you can."
I asked if they ever watched MTV or Melody Tunes, a popular Cairo-based music video channel that is occasionally racy. Ayman nodded yes. "I love Shakira," he said with a giggle. But the brothers emphatically denied watching such channels.
"The biggest problem with those channels is that they say nothing about the life we live," Samer said. "Fancy cars, girls, swimming pools: they are about short-term happiness. What do they have to say to me?"
I left the brothers and walked off with Ayman, a young artist with a streetwise manner. I asked what he thought of the music the brothers were making with 4Hearts. "I like it," he said. "I used to think it was the same propaganda as bin Laden. But it's actually good!"
Abu Haiba's path to becoming a pioneer of the pious-pleasure industry has been roundabout, at best. At 15, he says, he experienced a sudden urge for spiritual direction and threw out all his records. Mohamed Abdel Waheb, Abdel Halim Hafez, Oum Kalthoum, Fairuz -- the Elvis Presleys and Diana Rosses of Arabic song -- all of it had to go. Especially difficult was parting with the albums of Fairuz, the delicate flaxen-haired queen of Lebanese music. "I was in love with Fairuz," he remembered. "She was my hero."
Still, firm in his conviction that most music was haram, or forbidden in Islam, he began listening to nasheed, a cappella music with little or no instrumental accompaniment (instruments often being considered haram). Soon Abu Haiba was spending every afternoon in his neighborhood mosque in Cairo. He went on a retreat with Tablighi Jamaat, a grass-roots Islamic revivalist movement. He stopped communicating with girls outside his family. His evenings were spent memorizing the Sura el Baqara with his mother and grandfather, a longish chunk of the Koran that, in great part, involves urging the pagans and Jews of Medina to embrace Islam. He attended demonstrations for Palestine. He distanced himself from many of his schoolfriends, believing they would have a negative effect on his character.
When, in the late 1980s, Abu Haiba entered Cairo University's engineering school, the Egyptian government was at war with homegrown Islamists in Islamic Jihad and Jemaah Islamiyah and elements of the more moderate Muslim Brotherhood. He became involved with the student union, wrote and acted in Islamic-themed plays and associated with people who would later join the brotherhood. His new heroes were the leaders of the Afghan mujahideen -- long-bearded men with names like Rabbani, Sayyad, al Afghani.
After completing his engineering studies, he wrote more plays. There were early setbacks; his very first play, he told me, involved a tale about the Prophet and starred only men. "People fell asleep," he said. "I learned a lot from that." He studied episodes of "Friends," "Frasier" and "Third Rock From the Sun" in writing future plays. He began to include children and even, in one case, a woman.
Nightclubs and tales of love are far from the images normally associated with Islamic television. Channels like Iqraa, Al-Resala or Majd TV -- most of them financed by Saudi conservatives -- tend to feature Koranic reading, wagging fingers, overlong beards and men speaking in contemptuous tones about sin, redemption and the dangers of the West.
"They are very, very boring," Abu Haiba says of these channels. "When this is the only face of Islam, you have a problem. Very boring."
Still, he had a difficult time at first convincing investors that the Arab world needed another music video channel -- there are some 50 already, including MTV Arabia, which mostly broadcasts Western videos. "No one would listen," he told me with feeling. To make his case to financiers (mostly Saudis), Abu Haiba prepared a 15-minute documentary featuring clips from various Arab music videos, each more scandalous than the last. One scene featured the bosomy Lebanese singer Dana Halabi twisting about in minidresses singing, "At your service, Sir." A grave voice-over piped in: "You might think we are exaggerating, but this is what your children are watching on television."
"At that point some of them just jumped up and asked for it to be turned off," Abu Haiba told me. "They had seen enough."
He raised all the money he needed within a month.
On my last day in Cairo, I visited Abu Haiba at his home in Sixth of October City, one of the city's original gated communities in the desert. His two-story house was one of scores of identical red and yellow stucco homes, each with lawn, satellite dish and SU.
His wife, Carmen (named after the opera), greeted me. She was dressed in figure-hugging sparkly jeans and wore many necklaces. The couple met at a play he staged in 2002, Abu Haiba told me, as Carmen went around the house lifting doilies and cleaning surfaces with Windex. A TV flickered with cartoons for their 5-year-old daughter, Laila. She was studying the Koran in French at an International Islamic school. "The first in Egypt," her father said.
Seated on a wine-colored couch in their strenuously decorated living room, Abu Haiba and Carmen looked like newlyweds. I asked them what they did in their spare time. "We're addicted to cinema," Carmen said. "We love American movies." Her favorite film? "I loved 'The Devil Wears Prada.' " Her husband nodded sweetly in agreement.
Later, we moved outside to the backyard to eat, and Carmen put a Dior scarf atop her head, "for the neighbors." She told me of a business scheme she had cooked up to open a salon for working moms in the posh district of Zamalek: "A beauty salon with day care!"
At one point, I looked over at little Leila, whose mouth was filled with pink marshmallows, and asked if she would eventually have to veil. "It will be up to her," Abu Haiba said. "The social sin is bigger than the religious sin. If the man who goes to Mecca doesn't help his hungry neighbor, what is he worth?"
We were eating ful medames, an Egyptian staple of mashed beans. As we battled flies, the conversation shifted to debates over Shariah. Abu Haiba raised hadd el zina, Islamic law's punishment for adultery, one of the most contested stipulations and also one of the most talked about by Islam's detractors -- especially because it can involve stoning the offending woman. "There is no clarity about the punishment," Abu Haiba maintained. "The Koran says you need four witnesses to prove it. When will that ever happen? There is flexibility built into Islam. I am trying to push Islamic scholars to rethink these things."
So why work in entertainment, I wondered, and not law or scholarship or politics for that matter?
"You reach more people through entertainment," he said. "I started 4Shbab because we need to redefine Islam. People think of Islam as a series of restrictions and limitations. Don't speak to girls! Don't listen to music!
"The voices speaking for Islam today are extremists," he went on, with his own sort of evangelical zeal. "We see an angry man throwing a stone at an embassy more often than an Amr Khaled."
Can 4Shbab combat extremism?
"4Shbab is changing the way young people look at Islam. I know we can change people at the far end, the Salafists or jihadists. Some of the people who listen to us now used to not listen to music at all!"
It makes sense that this could be 4Shbab's moment. These days, every established pop star in the Islamic world, no matter how suspect his or her religious credentials might seem, tends to produce one song in praise of Allah each year -- usually around the holy month of Ramadan. Even Egypt's secular government is trying to catch up, particularly given that its only real competition comes from the Muslim Brotherhood, which is more than happy to pose as the guardian of public morality. The National Democratic Party, Egypt's ruling party, is increasingly carrying out activities with an Islamic bent, like passing out treats during Ramadan. When an Egyptian woman named Marwa el Sherbini was stabbed to death in a Dresden courtroom last summer, Egyptians called her a "martyr of Islam," and officials seized the moment, publicly mourning her fate. President Hosni Mubarak, in his 82nd year, is increasingly photographed praying or handing out prizes to children who have memorized the Koran.
Whether this is modernity adjusting to Islam, or the opposite, is impossible to judge. What's clear is that the space for accommodation is growing. As we moved on to a fizzy pineapple drink and dessert, Abu Haiba spoke of drafting a rebuttal to an anti-4Shbab campaign on a conservative Islamic Web site. He would fight back, he said, work harder, maybe even extend his work into the world of television dramas with a next project: an HBO-style channel. "Imagine 'Big Love' or 'The Wire' with Islamic themes," he said. You could see the optimism and excitement in his eyes. "I think in a short time we will be at the top of the charts. You see, Islam is like a big bus. You can be standing at the door, or you can be at the steering wheel. My plan is to be at the steering wheel."
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