Syrian TV drama keeps up abuse of women

In the popular Syrian TV drama Al-Dabbour (wasp), the daughter of the neighbourhood’s chief slipped out of her house in old Damascus to see the man who she loves. She had left the door unlocked so she can sneak safely back in.

When the veiled beautiful Karima returned home a few minutes later, she froze just before she was about to step in. Her dagger-bearing brother who has just come home found that the door was open and that Karima was not in.

Sweating and shaking with fear, she realized she has only two choices—either to run away or to face her brother and get killed. She quickly took the first choice.

When he learned of his daughter’s escape, her maddened father Abu Hamdi began to make plots to conceal her escape from the residents as a girl fleeing her home at that time will bring everlasting shame on her entire family.

Abu Hamdi, a key evil character in the series, quickly thought of lying to the neighbourhood that his daughter had died of a fatal disease. To give credence to his story, he killed a young man, wrapped his body and told residents that it was his daughter’s body and that they should not come near it to avert infection.

Over the course of the 65 episodes, Abu Hamdi had to murder several people to silence witnesses to his first crime and protect the family’s honour.

But it was this honour that brought his end when his daughter finally returned and exposed his crimes. At the end of the series, Abu Hamdi is hanged in the middle of the neighbouhood in front of his relatives and the other residents.

“What happened in this series again shows that Syrian drama about old Damascus focuses too much on how women were treated and abused…it is clear that women were secondary creatures and they were more a source of a shame than pride,” said Amal Saeed, who watched the series.

“These works just want to tell us that women had no say in the past but I have a feeling that they are done in an exaggerated way….the problem is that such TV dramas concentrate only on the negative aspect of women…they rarely highlight any positive side…yet I love to watch these series because they show us how simple and pure life was before and how close people were to each other.”

Al-Dabbour, which was shown on many Arab satellite TV channels during Ramadan this year and in 2010, follows the lines of the successful and most popular Syrian TV drama Bab Al Hara, which was broadcast on most regional TV stations over the past five years and is still shown by some channels.

Like its predecessor, Al-Dabbour revolves around an old neighbourhood in Damascus during the Ottoman rule in early 1900s, when most Syrian men wore the traditional shirwal (loose pants), head cover and a dagger.

Its main character Khattab, nicknamed Dabbour (wasp), was expelled by his family and other residents from the neighbourhood when he was young after he was mistakenly accused of flirting with a neighbouring girl. He returns several years later to take revenge and put an end to oppression.

Upon his return, Khattab, played by Syrian TV star Samer Al Masri, is faced by many enemies but enjoys a handful of supporters. In the end, he wins the battle against evil and his archenemy Abu Hamdi (Khaled Taja) is hanged.

Al-Dabbour was directed by Tamer Ishaq, a well known Syrian TV director, who tried to expose anxieties related to the proof of virginity, women's mobility and transgression of home boundaries, restriction on speech and the idolization of silence as a feminine virtue. The series also highlighted the threat of divorce or polygamy which yokes women's daily lives into submission, and the enforcement of this submissiveness through rigorous religious application.

Experts and viewers believe Al-Dabour series is a frank expression of misogyny and it conveys the negative message that women are a source of worry because they are a potential threat to the honor of Al-Hara (the neighbourhood)
The women are also shown as an economic burden to be shouldered by the males of the family as long as these women live. 

“Women, poor women… they lacked economic power, and most of them still do, most of us still do! Women are shown passive and completely insignificant in the scale of the society, and the universe at large. All these women in the TV series are trapped in social and economic conditions which they do not even question. And if they do, they will be murdered or accused of madness,” said Fatima Ferdj, an Algerian school teacher who watched the 65 episodes.

“The women in Al-Dabour live in a patriarchal society under patriarchal control, completely excluded from the society, with covered faces and hidden bodies.

Well, thank you to Tamer Ishaq to remind us today that many women do still live like the women in the TV series called Al Dabour.”

Ferdj said she believes Al-Dabbour conveyed stereotypes of Muslim women who are “doe-eyed, veiled, and submissive and exotically silent.”

“Well, I am glad that women in Tunisia and women in Egypt's Tahrir square were at the front and centre of organising and leading protests… women were a leading force behind the revolution. They are hotheaded young women with megaphones and blogs to cry their ideas out to society,” she said.

“We are tired, Mr. Tamer Ishaq, of these TV series which convey images of women who have no voices in their homes, no voices in their neighbourhood, no voices in their society, and where they are only considered as good cook or sexual being….women's sexuality was linked to the honor of the men and the family, while men's sexuality was not linked to their honor…. therefore, women are restricted to their homes and if they went out, they were responsible of the preservation of their purity.”

In recent press comments, Bab Al Hara’s director Bassam Al Mulla argued that women were treated this way in old Syria but that there were instances when they played a major role in the society and in the struggle against occupation.

He said several scenes in Bab Al-Hara’s more than 150 episodes showed women were joining men in fighting the French colonialists, helping the resistance men, and supporting their families.

Women’s resistance against the French was highlighted in another Syrian TV series called Rijal al Izz (men of glory). In the final episode of the series that was shown on some Arab TV channels last Ramadan, most women from the neighbourhood carry arms and take to the roofs of their houses in anticipation of a French attack while men go out to intercept the troops before their arrival.

Rijal al Izz was directed by Alauddin Kokash, who apparently tried to offset many negative aspects about women highlighted during the series.

During the last episode, the neighbourhood’s chief Nuri asks his mother to take all women and hide before the French come.

She tells him:”No my son we will not hide…we have the right as men to defend our homes, land and country…so please don’t deprive us of this right.”

But this does not hide the fact that women were shown as low-level humans in previous episodes. Earlier in the series, Nuri (actor Rasheed Assaf) drew his dagger and chased his sister and her neighbouring lover to kill them after he caught them speaking to each other on the roof.

The lover flees to a church outside the neighbourhood while Nuri’s sister manages to hide at her aunt’s home. Towards the end of the series, Nuri, who later becomes the neighbourhood’s chief, is made to pardon both and to agree to their marriage to prevent a scandal.

A key character in Bab Al Hara series (Umm Ibrahim) summed up the way women were treated in the past when her husband (Abu Ibrahim) decided to break the engagement of his son to his neighbhour’s daughter after the neighbour (Abu Isam) divorced his wife (Umm Isam).

“What can I do Umm Issam…please don’t blame me …Abu Ibrahim refuses this marriage and I have no choice but to obey…you and all women in the neighbourhood know very well that we have no say in any thing…we are very weak and all we can say to our husbands is yes,” Umm Ibrahim said.

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