Life Under ISIS Gets Dramatic Arabic TV Series
Combatting ISIS with pop culture?
The Arab world’s most-watched TV network, MBC 1, will air a prime-time TV drama depicting life under ISIS.
The 30-part series will debut during Ramadan.
“Black Crows”, “paints a picture of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, as a brutal criminal organization run by corrupt and hypocritical leaders. But recruits are depicted as victims, and women who challenge the militants’ control are heroes,” reports the New York Times.
The stories of women dominate the series, the producers said, because they offered rich dramatic material. A majority of the channel’s viewers are women.
In another episode, Islamic State commanders indoctrinate children into their ranks.
Like the Islamic State’s recruits, the cast comes from across the Arab world, and the program’s plotlines reflect well-known headlines about the group’s atrocities.
Ramadan, which will begin around May 27, is a month on the Islamic calendar during which Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. It is also peak television season in the Arab world, where families gather after breaking their fast to binge-watch shows late into the night.
In television terms, “it’s like the Super Bowl for 30 days straight,” said Mazen Hayek, a spokesman for MBC.
Typical programming includes romances, comedies and historical dramas, some of which reflect current events. Though the new MBC production has the trappings of a drama, and some of the costumes and makeup can be cartoonish, the series, set behind the jihadists’ front lines, is not light viewing.
According to StepFeed:
The actresses of the show took on the role in hopes of depicting the reality of life under Daesh (an Arabic acronym formed from the initial letters of the group’s previous name in Arabic – “al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil Iraq wa al-Sham”) in a way that is often underrepresented in the media.
One of the actresses said she took on the role to “show my hatred and my condemnation of this group, to express it in a concrete way,” Egyptian actress Samar Allam told the New York Times.
“It is important to wake people up and show them that Islam is not that,” said Saudi Marwa Mohamed, who plays the role of a woman who kills her husband for cheating on her and then joins Daesh with her two sons.
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Comments
recruits are depicted as victims
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and right there its gone off the rails
It is important to wake people up and show them that Islam is not that
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centuries of evidence negate that stupid statement
Sounds like rank Islamophobia to me.
Pretty girls.
Great bodies. Not that I noticed.
Gosh, those two in the screen capture were ISIS?
Dang, they are certainly eye candy if anything positive can be said about them.
Wonder how they’ll cover the rapes and beatings.
And where are the burkas? And when the actresses are wearing them, how will viewers know who is who? And can’t stand-ins do all the burka-clad actresses’ scenes?
Maybe they’ll use some of the old Honeymooners scripts. Can you imagine an isis/islamic Ralph Kramden? —
Ralph: “You just decided for me, Alice. You just decided for me! I’m going on “The $64,000 Question”. And do you know why? ‘Cause I’m an expert in one of their categories: Aggravation!”
Add the isis/islamic Ralph dialogue: “Now, I’m going to beat you for an hour, rape you, and honor-kill our daughter! – because YOU, are a blabbermouth! Bang! Zoom!…”
This is good. Egyptians and other Middle East Muslims watch these Ramadan special series extensively. Anything which persuades some Muslims to look at the extremists and reject them will make the world somewhat safer.
The real problem is that Muhammad created Islam as a fanatical religion of war. The terrorists are the true Muslims and the moderates are apostates.
Yes, but any program or teaching which moves Muslim minds towards a modernized (i.e. apostate) version is a good idea.
The real problem is that it doesn’t appear that anyone named Muhammad had anything to do with Islam. According to the Islamic historic legend Muhammad died in 632A.D. And the third rightly guided Caliph Uthman compiled the Quran into perfect written form in 650A.D. and it hasn’t changed since.
The problem is that there is no independent numismatic, documentary, or archeological evidence to support any of this. Probably the most damaging to this historical legend is that there are no texts of the Quran that date back to Uthman. And there should be. We have Christian and Jewish texts that are far older than 650A.D. And the territory the Muslims conquered has, except for Spain and Israel, remained under their control the entire time. Why no 7th century texts?
The earliest texts, which were once thought to be Uthmanic have been examined by Muslim scholars and essentially declared frauds. Those would be the Topkapi manuscript in Istanbul, the Samarqand manuscript from Tashkent, the Husseini manuscript from Cairo, and the Sana’a manuscript from Sana’a, Yemen.
And every single one shows that they were being edited for at a least a century, maybe longer. You can tell because the Arabic script went through a great number of changes during the course of its development. The earliest Arabic script didn’t even have vowels. It was an entirely consonental language, and it wasn’t until it incorporated diacritical marks was it possible to indicate vowels.
Some pages of the Sana’a manuscript are written in the Hijazi script, which could have dated back to Uthman. But they’ve only been dated back to the early 8th century, some 60 or 80 years or so after Uthman. And then the very next page is written in a different script, dating it to the mid or late 8th century.
You don’t need to be an Arabic reader to tell that this …
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Ilkhanid_Quran.jpg
is different from the this.
https://photos5.com/assets/cache/idODc0NDJkMmJkZmRlODVh-7ee664e9a4c3446b53bae1b9eae344d8.jpg
Any observant amateur can tell the difference.
The latter is written in what’s known as the Kufic script. Which didn’t exist before the Abassid Caliphate which was established 758A.D.
The Quran could not have possibly been transmitted in perfect form given the fact that the manuscript evidence demonstratets the Quran was being edited and rewritten for a century or so. The manuscript evident is irrefutable. Every single early Mushaf (manuscript) shows constant editing for a very long time. Muhammad didn’t invent Islam; he appears to have been a minor figure, but he seems to have existed at least as a warlord who fancied himself as some sort of prophet based upon non-Islamic sources who reported on him (although it must be remembered that it doesn’t appear Muhammad was a proper name, it simply stems from the three letter consonental root HMD, which means praise hence Muhammad means the praised one and the numismatic evidence is that Christian Arab rulers used it as a title). But it’s impossible to know what he might have been a prophet of, as the Quran and Sunnah of Muhammad are clearly later inventions. Inventions of the later Caliphs who noticed they were acquiring an empire. And back then it wasn’t anything secular that held empires together, but religions.
Whatever Muhammad we’re talking about could not possibly be the Muhammad described in the biographical literature or the traditions. Whether Sunni or Shia. Because nothing was written down for at least two hundred years after he’s supposed to have died.
This is the real problem, my friend. You might think I’m being just as irrational for believing in Jesus Christ. But Jesus Christ was one of the best documented figures in the ancient world. Contemporary hostile historians such as Josephus and Tacitus wrote about him. In fact, I’ve read that we have more sources attesting to the existence of Jesuns than we do to the existence of Emperor Tiberius. I have not exhaustively explored this claim, but there’s a lot of evidence that Jesus did in fact exist. Even atheist scholars who think the idea of the resurrection is ridiculous will tell you that the fact that Jesus existed, and was crucified, is perhaps one of the best documented facts of the time.
And on the other hand there’s scant evidence if any that the Muhammad described in the Quran existed at all much less, given the evidence of and the constant revisions to the earliest texts extant, had anything to do with writing or transmitting or whatever you wan to call it of the Quran at all.
The real problem is going up against the circular reasoning of Muslims. Of course Muhammad existed. How do we know this? Becuse the Quran and canonincal biographical literature and traditions say so. I when I say I’m going to need more to go on than that they the Muslims go nuts. How dare I deny the Quran and Sunnah when that’s blasphemy?
Because the Quran and Sunnah say so.
Muhammad existed because the Quran and ahadith say so. And the Quran and ahadith exist because Muhammad said so. Wash, rinse, repeat, until your brains fall out.