ABSTRACT
Walk the streets of Cairo or village lanes in Egypt any early evening and one will see the flicker of television screens and hear the dialogue and music of the serial (musalsal). This chapter argues that a look at key serials of the late 1980s and early 1990s reveals that although the writers and producers of the most sophisticated of the Egyptian serials have a certain independence from the government. With one important exception, the serials of the 1980s maintained a noticeable silence on the Islamist movements and deliberately ignored the alternative vision these movements offer of Islam's place in Egypt's future. Television was introduced to Egypt in I960 under Gamal 'Abd al-Nasir and used, along with radio, as an instrument of national development and political mobilization. The segregation of religious and popular programming produces a sense of the separation of spheres, declaring the irrelevance of religion in the public domain of political development, economic progress, and social responsibility.
