What do Brazil, Morocco, a TV show (allegedly) about cloning, and veiling in a Kyrgyz village have in common? Quite a lot, apparently.

Julie McBrien recently wrote a very interesting article in the ISIM Review making such a connection. She argues that a Brazilian soap opera (“El Clon”) about a love affair between a Moroccan woman and a Brazilian man prompted women to think about their religious identity in new ways. (Neither the article or my google searches shed any light on how cloning figures into the plot… of a show named “The Clone.” Feel free to enlighten me in the comments.)

Basically, Kyrgyz women watch the show and observe modern veil styles that are both fashionable and acceptable in Moroccan public life. Although the depictions of Morocco are highly Orientalized, wearing Muslim dress is portrayed as something that normal, trendy, pretty women do.

For instance, here is a group of Moroccan women getting a leg wax; ouch. WARNING: Soap operas are addictive, so view at your own risk.

The appeal is obvious (right?). McBrien writes:

For Shahista seeing beautiful young women veiling in the most fashionable ways confirmed her idea that veiling was not a part of an antiquated religion as the critics in her town intimated.

Eighty years of religious repression left Central Asians with a sense that their understanding of religion was somehow inferior to that of Muslims living outside the Soviet Union. Soap operas like this one consequently became a course on “Islam for beginners,” allowing them an artificial window on Islamic practice in faraway Morocco. According to the Kyrgyz women interviewed by McBrien, this show was a direct catalyst in their decision to wear the veil. (Apparently the belly dancer outfits — also depicted in the above video — don’t have the same popular resonance.)

“Authentic” Islam is an elusive target, yet one that no shortage of groups and individuals claim to have discovered. Disregarding the fact that the show reveals much more about Brazilian culture than Moroccan, even if Kyrgyzstan were to import aspects of Arab Islam, they would inevitably be ascribed with new meanings unique to the Kyrgyz context.

All in all, the visual representations of Morocco were of an a-temporal place of extreme beauty and sensuality that was fundamentally different from “modern” Brazil. The episodes which dealt primarily with Moroccans focused precisely on the subjects where variance with “modern” life was perceived to be the greatest.

One doesn’t have to stretch the imagination too far to see why Central Asian Muslims might find the mythologized Brazilian depiction of the past appealing. Central Asians have a much stronger case that that past was taken from them than the Brazilians, and hence even more of a motivation to conceptualize it in mythic terms.

So long as we make sure to discuss pop culture using academic discourse, it can only be educational to watch as much TV as possible. Now on that note, I’m going to watch some more YouTube to try and find out if ____ really betrayed ____, and whose baby ____ really is.