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Muhajababes

Allegra Stratton

Meet the youth of today's Middle East - cool, sexy, and devout.

Opinion

Muhajababes is like watching music videos. It's all gloss, glitz and glamour. Stratton glibly observes that the battle between piety and secularism is being waged on television screens across the Middle East and that some women choose to wear the veil not out of religious devotion or as a political statement,
but merely because it's trendy.
Adair Jones, Courier Mail, 25/11/2006

About this Title

muhajabah noun (Arabic) a woman who veils
muhajababe noun (Arabic) a veiled and sexily dressed young woman

Meet Allegra Stratton, hip young journalist. She's been wrong about the war in Iraq, fallen out with her friend, and is fast approaching a quarter-life crisis. In her disillusionment she takes herself to Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Dubai, Kuwait City and Damascus to understand what daily life is like for Arabs of her own age. She finds that two-thirds of the Middle East population is younger than 25. That there are more graduates than at any time in history, but few jobs to go round.

The youth are trying to come to terms with the Middle Eastern ripple of change: Iraq's first post-Saddam elections, Lebanon's Cedar Revolution, Kuwait giving women the vote. Islamic revival is in the wind. Or is it? While looking for youth culture as she knows it, Allegra soon discovers that it is the massive video industry of airbrushed, heavily produced, scantily clad singers who hold the affections of young Arabs-the Muhajababes. And there's a contradiction: many of the fans of these semi-naked popstrels are also very devout.

Is this trendy Islam, or just another form of religious conservatism? The answer to this question may lie closer to home than Allegra thought.

Allegra Stratton is a producer on BBC Newsnight and before that spent three years producing BBC1's This Week. She has written for the Independent, The Times and the New Statesman. She lives in London.

About the Author

Allegra Stratton read Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University. She is currently a producer on BBC Newsnight and prior to that she spent three years producing BBC1's This Week programme. Before the BBC, Allegra worked on the foreign desk at The Times. She has written for the Independent, The Times and the New Statesman. She lives in London.

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978-0-522-85325-4