In a 2003 post titled “Aphrodite Will Not Be Denied,” I linked to Muslim clerics’ criticism of Lebanese pop star Haifa Wehbe.
Another Muslim singer with more complicated ancestry, Deeyah, “irked the Muslim world” with her music videos, and I said, “As I once wrote, ‘Aphrodite will not be denied.’ You either acknowledge the powers of the gods, or they will assert themselves in uncontrollable ways.”
Now it’s an Egyptian’s turn
A female pop star in Egypt has been arrested after posting a “sexually suggestive” music video, in the second such case there in recent months.
Leila Amer appeared in an online video called “Boss Oumek” or “Look at your mother”, which includes sensual oriental dance and provocative gestures.
It also includes household laundry, meal preparation, and ducks. Very sensual ducks.
No joke for Leila Amer, however.
Prosecutors in Egypt have detained the singer for four days for “incitement to debauchery” after the clip sparked controversy in the increasingly conservative country.
Not knowing Arabic, I wonder if the message is somewhere between “Listen to your mom, you slacker” and “A woman’s work is never done.”((From an old folk saying, usually given as “A man may work from sun to sun [dawn to dusk]. but a woman’s work is never done.”)) There is what could be considered a visual allusion to watching online porn.
Even here in the woods, I do know one thirty-something Egyptian woman in the nearest little town. I could ask her to translate, but then, she comes from a devout Coptic Christian family and is now married to an American evangelical Christian, so answering the question, “Why are you interested in this singer?” could get complicated. Or maybe not. Who knows?
I’m discussing this with a friend who lives in Kuwait, and am being told that the issue is not the dancing, exactly. Official Egyptian TV has much more sensual dance without issue. It is that the song lyrics are some pretty lurid wordplay. The song title means “look at your mom”, apparently, while it is sung so that it can be misheard (and the male character in the video does so the first time she sings it, clearly) as an exhortation to do something quite a bit more blue to your mother (“kos omk” apparently means, literally, “fuck your mom”). That plus the dancing and the actual meaning add up to the charges. The singer has, I am told, done this sort of thing before, with similar results.
Thanks for the insight. So does that make the man on the sofa the “incestuous slacker son”? That Leila, what a minx! Arrest her!
Egypt is certainly managing to best the West in prudery. Not that the US, at least, isn’t trying.
Maybe it’s not Aphrodite who is being denied, but Eris.