Border guards of the "imagined" watan: Arab Journalists and the New Arab Consciousness.(Report)

Media plays a fundamental role in the formation of national identity, most famously detailed in Benedict Anderson's theory of the imagined community. In the Arab world, a media revolution is contributing to the emergence of a reawakened regional Arab consciousness. A comparison of data from the first major regional survey of Arab journalists and the results of various public opinion polls in the region indicate that Arab journalists stand on the borderlands of Arab identity, shaping an emerging "imagined" watan [nation] that, in some ways, transcends the traditional lines in the sand that define the nation-state.

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For seasoned observers of the Middle East, the scene was surreal: Cheering crowds in downtown Cairo made up of secular liberals and members of the conservative Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, waving--side-by-side--photographs of Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Lebanon's Shi'ite Islamist movement Hizbullah, and Gamal 'Abd al-Nasser, the icon of secular pan-Arabism.

It is conventional wisdom in some circles in the West that Arab nationalism and Islamism are warring ideologies, fundamentally incompatible. (1) The celebrations on the streets of the Egyptian capital in late summer 2006 were a reminder that such views are too often based on black-and-white perceptions, which fail to take into account the complex realpolitik of the modern Arab world, the shifting cross-currents of Arab history and, more recently, the impact of Arab satellite television. (2)

"Awake, O Arabs, and turn on your television sets." So might Ibrahim al-Yaziji have begun his famous 1868 ode to Arab nationalism had he written it today. The pervasive influence of Arab satellite television, which exploded on the scene in the 1990s and has had a revolutionizing effect on Arab media across the region, bolstered by the Internet and other forms of digital communication, is fueling the rise of a new common Arab consciousness every bit as salient as the "imagined communities" that Benedict Anderson tells us are at the core of the concept of nation. (3) This new, electronically enhanced "imagined" Arab watan is bound together by many of the classic touchstones of nationalism theory: language, media, and ethnie.

BEYOND BORDERS

Live and incessant coverage of the 2006 Hizbullah-Israel war, which helped vault Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah to the status of most admired Arab leader, (4) is just one example of the degree to which television is helping to craft a new Arab consciousness that co-exists with--and in some ways supersedes--national borders and religious divisions. It is seen in studies demonstrating a link between television viewing and pan-Arab and pan-Muslim identity, (5) in shifts in public opinion following major regional news events, and in surveys that show an increased affinity for the rest of the Arab world, even among Kuwaitis, who were alienated by the support that Palestinians and other Arabs gave Saddam during the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. (6) The result is an increasingly cohesive Arab consciousness that has been given many names: Shibley Telhami's "new Arabism," (7) March Lynch's "new Arab public," (8) or what Khalil Rinnawi somewhat flippantly calls "McArabism." (9) It all amounts to the same thing: an "imagined" community perceived, in large measure, through the camera lens and pen of the Arab journalist.