1. I have employed the spelling of her name that is used on her first four Israeli CDs. Her latest CD, Diva, uses the spelling “Dana.” A wealth of information on Danna International—including pictures and links—is available at Geir Skogseth’s webpage (http://w1.2225.telia.com/u222600821/Geir%20Site/Geir Danna 1.html). Danna’s CD discography includes Danna International (IMP Dance, Tel Aviv, 1993), Umpatamba (IMP Music, Tel Aviv, 1994), E.P. Tampa (IMP Dance, Tel Aviv, 1995), Maganona (Helicon/Big Foot Records, Tel Aviv, 1996), and Diva (IMP Dance, 1998). Her recordings, difficult to find in the United States, are available from Hatiklit, an Israeli import company in Los Angeles (http://www.shalom3000.com). [BACK]

2. I was never able to locate the publisher. Books with unknown or no publisher seem to be a commonplace in the street stalls of Cairo; see Abu-Lughod 1995a, 54. [BACK]

3. The earliest report I was able to find was Majdi 1994. The campaign continued throughout 1995; see Rizq 1995a; Ruz al-Yusuf, October 16, 1995, p. 27; al-Jumhur al-Misri, February 18, 1995, p. 12; al-Hayat al-Misri, December 31, 1995. The New York Times even reported on the campaign in October 1995, (mis)identifying the Israeli singer on the banned tape as Sa‘ida Sultan (Jehl 1995). [BACK]

4. Hereafter, al-Ghayti’s book is referred to in the text as F. [BACK]

5. The author uses terms like “perversion” and “deviance” (shudhudh) throughout to describe gays and lesbians. According to AbuKhalil (1993, 34), this terminology is the product of the importation of Western homophobic ideologies and modern nation-states. He also argues that the term was not used in Arab/Islamic history, which demonstrated great openness with regard to homosexuality. [BACK]

6. The upscale McDonald’s in Ma‘adi, the upscale Cairo neighborhood where I lived, featured posters of Madonna, James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe. According to al-Ghayti (F, 40), Marilyn Monroe was both an inspiration for Danna and a “deviant” (see below). [BACK]

7. Ironically, since the publication of al-Ghayti’s book, Michael Jackson has set up an entertainment company to promote “family values” with Saudi Arabian billionaire prince Alwaleed bin Talal al-Saud (Electronic Urban Report, March 20, 1996 [http://www.leebailey.com/EUR.html]). [BACK]

8. Al-Ghayti’s claim is that Madonna is not “complete” because she is unable to bear children. As the entire world knows, Madonna gave birth to a baby girl, Lourdes, in late 1996. [BACK]

9. Although I have been able to find no information to corroborate this story, apparently Asmahan was involved in intelligence operations. According to Nasser Eddin Nashashibi (1990, 82–83), in 1941 the British High Command paid Asmahan a tidy sum to convince her former husband, Shaykh Hasan al-Atrash, governor of Jabal Druze, to permit the Allies to enter Syria from Transjordan and “liberate” it from Vichy rule. [BACK]

10. The year 1967 is clearly meant to resonate as the year of the Six-Day War and Israel’s overwhelming defeat of the Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian armies. But given the very low status of Arabic music in Israel, especially as recorded by Mizrahim, Rachel Qattawi’s recording must have been a very marginal phenomenon and not, as al-Ghayti implies, an Israeli “theft” of a valuable treasure. I have been unable to track down an Israeli who has heard of her. [BACK]

11. It should be recalled that anti-Masonic/Semitic conspiracy theories also thrive in right-wing circles in the United States. Televangelist Pat Robertson, for instance, believes there is a Jewish-Marxist-Masonic plot to destroy the American way of life. [BACK]

12. These issues included the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian “peace,” which many regard as tantamount to Palestinian surrender and as a complete sham, Israel’s refusal to dismantle its nuclear arsenal and make the Middle East a nuclear-free zone, and the Israeli government’s failure to bring to trial the military officers responsible for carrying out the massacres of forty-nine Egyptian POWs near al-‘Arish during the war of 1956 and of more than one thousand Egyptian POWs during the 1967 war. Public anger in Egypt was also aroused by Israel’s April 1996 attacks on Lebanon, the Israeli army’s targeting of the UN Qana base and the resulting death of more than one hundred civilians, and what was seen as the successful application of U.S. pressure to torpedo any censuring of Israeli actions. Needless to say, Israel’s policies and actions appeared very different from the vantage point of Egypt than they do from inside the United States. A sense of that different perspective can be gained in the United States from the various writings of Edward Said and Noam Chomsky. On the Qana affair, see Robert Fisk’s reporting in the Independent, for example, Fisk 1996; for my own views on the question of Palestine, see Swedenburg 1995, especially chapters 1 and 2. [BACK]

13. For instance, see articles in Ruz al-Yusuf exposing Israeli efforts to steal and destroy Egyptian music (Abu Jalala 1995) and cinema (Khafaji 1994). [BACK]

14. The claim, in fact, is rather ludicrous, as virtually no Israeli products are sold on the Egyptian market, and there are no compelling reasons why Egyptians might harbor desires for expensive Israeli cigarettes. As of this writing, I am unaware of any appearance of this item in Egypt. [BACK]

15. The threat of sexual seduction posed to Egyptian women instead comes from Westernized and culturally hybridized Egyptian men (Walter Armbrust, pers. com. October 20, 1995). A good example would be the Ibrahim Faraj character in Naguib Mahfouz’s famous novel Midaq Alley. [BACK]

16. Novelistic examples include Yahya Haqqi’s The Saint’s Lamp (1973), Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Bird of the East (1966), and Sulayman Fayyad’s Voices (1993). The film Layla features a Brazilian woman who seduces Layla’s love interest (see al-Bandari et al. 1994, 305). Thanks to Walter Armbrust for calling this film to my attention. [BACK]

17. The press reports frequently on army campaigns against heroin and hashish production in the Sinai. The peninsula’s Aqaba Gulf beaches, moreover, are known as freewheeling resort areas: Sharm al-Shaykh (site of the 1995 antiterror summit) caters to upscale Western tourists and the Westernized Egyptian bourgeoisie; Dhahab and Nuwayba‘ are the meccas for scantily clad, drug-seeking Euro-hippies and Israelis. For descriptions of South Sinai’s even wilder days under Israeli occupation, see Lavie 1990. [BACK]

18. A report in the public-sector magazine Ruz al-Yusuf of August 24, 1998, titled “Senior Arab League Official Tells Us: The Story of the Israeli Blood Tainted with AIDS,” claimed that blood units being sold to Arab states by an Austrian firm were being “treated” in Israel with “the AIDS virus, hepatitis B and bilharzia” before being shipped abroad (“Official Egyptian Newspaper” 1998). [BACK]

19. One could read the closing scene of this TV announcement—the opening of the Pan-African Games held in Cairo in 1991—as an implication that the AIDS threat also emanates from sub-Saharan Africa. [BACK]

20. It is significant that the “deviant” Western pop stars al-Ghayti discusses (Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Madonna) are depicted as sexual predators on men. Although al-Ghayti does not make a specific claim that Elvis preyed on males, the fact that he is said to have indulged in sadomasochism could be taken as implying this. [BACK]

21. A number of books on Madonna in Arabic have appeared for sale at Cairo newsstands, such as Madonna’s Diet Book and Confessions of Madonna. [BACK]

22. Since the mid-1980s Egypt’s most prestigious professional syndicates (doctors, engineers, lawyers) have been lobbying for the government to place limits on the numbers accepted into their professions’ university programs in an effort to combat growing unemployment. The engineers’ syndicate even attempted to block the government from opening new university programs and technical institutes. Thanks to Clarissa Bencomo for this point. [BACK]

23. Before a young man can marry, he must, at the minimum, own an apartment, furnish it, purchase an acceptable amount of gold jewelry for his fiancée as an engagement gift (the shabka, which is the bride’s property and serves as a form of insurance for her), and be able to finance a decent wedding party. A significant wedding party expense is the firqa, or music group, and wedding gigs constitute one of the major sources of income for Egyptian popular musicians and are often much more lucrative than recording. Thus, paradoxically, the same weddings that are a major source of support for the music that youths love also function—by virtue of their great expense—to oppress that same generation. [BACK]

24. Still, young people’s sexual adventures before marriage are more frequent than one would imagine from official representations. A survey of one hundred high school and college girls in Cairo reported that 8 percent had had full sexual intercourse, 20 percent had held their lovers’ hands, 23 percent had kissed, and 37 percent had experienced sex without intercourse (Khalifa 1995, 7). [BACK]

25. It is also often claimed that the youth crisis is a significant factor in the rise of Islamist movements. Government-style propaganda, such as the famous 1994 film al-Irhabi (The Terrorist), which stars Egypt’s leading comedian, ‘Adil Imam, asserts that innocent youths are attracted to Islamic militant groups because their perfidious leaders provide women to marry, at no cost (see Armbrust 1995). Although such propaganda is simplistic, it is indeed the case that youths, so heavily affected by the crisis of opportunities, constitute the main adherents of Islamist movements. Whereas in the late 1970s and early 1980s the militant Islamist groups that employed violent means mainly attracted university-educated youths (Ibrahim 1982), by the 1990s such groups were also gaining lower-class youth adherents. The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s main Islamist organization and a mass movement that, although technically illegal, attempts to mobilize through legal channels and above-ground, successfully recruits university-educated youths. Although the Muslim Brotherhood has not “solved” the wedding crisis, the fact that it enjoins simple wedding ceremonies, where music groups and dancing are not permitted, ensures that what it calls “Islamic weddings” are much cheaper than wedding ceremonies that are the norm for the rest of the population. [BACK]

26. This paragraph draws heavily on the arguments of Armbrust 1996. [BACK]

27. On Umm Kulthum, see Danielson 1997. [BACK]

28. The censorship and banning from radio of songs by “respectable” artists is also routine (see Hasan 1993). [BACK]

29. Although class divisions within Egyptian society are gaping and getting wider, and although upper-class youths who are the direct beneficiaries of infitah do not face the same problems as lower-middle and lower-class ones regarding employment and marriage, the former are also alienated from the classical nationalist project and are negatively affected by the absence of public space for youths. One should, of course, make some distinctions. Some middle- and lower-class youths want to bring back the “golden age” of culture and politics represented by the Nasser era, while others would wish for the return of the public-sector safety net through halting or slowing down the pace of privatization and structural adjustment and for an expansion of the possibilities of working in the Gulf. Upper-class youths, meanwhile, are somewhat more focused on cultural liberalization. Thanks to Clarissa Bencomo for helping me to clarify this point. [BACK]

30. The rest emigrated to Brazil, France, the United States, Argentina, England, and Canada (see Beinin 1998). [BACK]

31. Murad’s films are regularly aired on Egyptian television, her music is played on the radio and readily available on cassette, and her death in November 1995 brought forth a wave of laudatory obituaries and tributes in the Egyptian press. The exclusion of Egyptian Jews from nationalist discourse was also noticeable in the favorable tributes to Layla Murad that appeared, following her death, in the Egyptian press during November and December 1995: almost all of them failed to mention her Jewishness. [BACK]

32. See Beinin 1998, chap. 3; Somekh 1987; Bulletin of the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo, no. 10, July 1988. [BACK]

33. Ironically, much of the coverage of Danna in the press is written by poorly paid young stringers who have no real “voice” but merely ventriloquize official discourse. [BACK]

34. Danna’s claim, in an interview with Jerusalem Report, that a half million of her cassettes had been sold in Egypt is credible (Grynberg 1996, 35). [BACK]

35. One of my students purchased Busni ya Susu on the black market for £E 8 (just slightly above the average price of a prerecorded cassette) before the media offensive was launched against Danna; her friends who bought the cassette after the onset of “moral panic” were forced to pay £E 50. [BACK]

36. Algerian Rai star Cheb Khaled’s 1992 hit, “Didi,” also reached the top of the charts in both Israel and Egypt. [BACK]

37. On Whitney’s 1990 CD, I’m Your Baby Tonight. [BACK]

38. Whereas house and “dance” music in the West normally uses major keys, Danna’s dance music deploys Oriental modes; thanks to Smadar Lavie for observations on comparative musical modes. [BACK]

39. According to Lavie, Danna is parodying the parodies of Mizrahi- and Palestinian-accented English by Israeli-Ashkenazi comedians such as Shaike Ofir. [BACK]

40. Such polylingual wordplay is a long-standing tradition for Levantine Jews, going back at least to Andalusian Spain (see Alcalay 1993). [BACK]

41. Telephone in Italian is telefonare, but telefoni rhymes nicely here with pantaloni. [BACK]

42. Representative lines from ‘Adawiya’s “Bint al-Sultan” include “The water’s in your hand / And ‘Adawiya is thirsty…/ Why don’t you look at me / My little fruit, my pineapple / Water me, water me more / The water in your hand is sugar” (Armbrust 1996, 132); from Sahar Hamdi’s “Illi shartit ‘aynuh bitghannin”: “The delicious ones / Because they’re delicious play hard to get / Like this, like this, like this, like this…/ May God forgive you, you who are on my mind” (Lorius 1996, 517). Both singers also frequently mix in English words with the Arabic. [BACK]

43. The song’s supposed lewd lyrics, in fact, got it banned from sales and airplay in Indiana and elsewhere and inaugurated an FBI investigation. Controversy only spurred greater sales, and the record hit number 2 on the Billboard chart and number 1 on the Cashbox chart (http://www.oz.net/craigb/kingsmen.html). [BACK]

44. On the peculiar contradictions of Egypt’s homosexual community, see, e.g., Miller 1993, 68–69. Miller describes the complex situation of Egyptian gay life as follows:

Making contact with a gay or lesbian community in Egypt was difficult. There was essentially no such thing. Egypt was the place I visited where there was the strongest social sanction against an openly gay or lesbian life, where a sense of homosexual identity was weakest, where there was the least degree of AIDS awareness. Paradoxically, in a society where the sexes remain strictly segregated, same-sex relations were commonplace, at least among men. But you didn’t talk about the subject, except to your very closest friends, and perhaps not even then. In Egypt, sex had to be kept secret, and homosexual sex in particular was haram—taboo. Categories of sexual identity and orientation were slippery, elusive in Egypt and in the Arab world in general. Once you crossed the Mediterranean, the terms “gay” and “straight” revealed themselves to be Western cultural concepts that confused more than they elucidated. In modern-day Cairo, male homosexual sex was everywhere and nowhere. (1993, 68–69)

45. This is also true of some of the work of Egypt’s most celebrated director, Youssef Chahine. See, in particular, his film Iskandariyya layh? (Alexandria Why?). On “cross-dressing” and homosexuality in Egyptian cinema, see Menicucci 1998. [BACK]

46. The Mufti of Egypt, Dr. Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, opposed sex-change operations on the basis that what God has created should not be changed (Rizq 1995b). Tantawi replaced al-Haqq as Shaykh al-Azhar after the latter’s death in March 1996. [BACK]

47. Incidentally, sex-change operations are also performed in Saudi Arabia (the cases I have read about are all female-to-male), again with fatwas from religious leaders. [BACK]

48. I saw the ad in 1995 and 1996 on the video monitors that run a nonstop mix of music videos, ads, movie trailers, cartoons, snippets of soccer matches, and bits of “America’s Favorite Home Videos” for passengers waiting to board the metro at downtown Cairo stations. The promotion of Luna 2 opens to the strains of Danna’s song “Sa‘ida Sultan” (the remake of Whitney Houston’s “My Name Is Not Susan”) and shows ordinary-looking (somewhat chubby by U.S. standards) Egyptian women dancing around and mouthing the opening words of “Sa‘ida Sultan,” “Wa-t’ulu eh, wa-t’ulu ah” (And you [pl.] say what, and you say yeah). Danna’s tune rumbles in the background as the ad promotes the shampoo’s virtues, and then the volume of the music comes up again as the spot closes with another chorus of “Wa-t’ulu eh, wa-t’ulu ah.” I am unaware of any press attacks on Luna 2 for its exploitation of the music of Israeli sexual corruption to market its product. [BACK]

49. Al-Ghayti, however, claims that Ofra Haza’s tape was “licentious” (F, 34–35). [BACK]

50. On Israeli “Oriental” music, see Regev 1995, 1996; Alcalay 1993, 253–55; Horowitz and Namdar 1997. [BACK]

51. I depend in this section primarily on the Israeli correspondents Yael Ben-zvi and Smadar Lavie. [BACK]

52. Regev 1996; Yael Ben-zvi, pers. com.; Smadar Lavie, pers. com. [BACK]

53. Danna’s gender and sexuality still resist pigeonholing. Although she is widely reported to be a transsexual, probably it is more correct to say that she is intersexual. In an interview in Yediot Aharanot’s weekly supplement, Danna revealed that she does indeed have a penis and has no plans to have it “cut” in an operation. She stated that she had had hormone injections for breast development and would soon have silicone implants. In response to the question of her sexual preference, Danna—who calls herself “a woman and a man”—divulged that she has a boyfriend and that she is not and has never been physically attracted to women (Birenberg 1996). Thanks to Smadar Lavie for translating this article for me. [BACK]

54. But, according to Lavie, Ashkenazi gays’ real role models are the same as those of straight Israelis, because they are so mainstream. [BACK]

55. It should be noted that Mizrahi youths, because of their place in the economic-racial hierarchy in Israel, have not benefited from the Israeli economic boom in the wake of post-Oslo peace deals with Arab countries and that their hopelessness and alienation resembles that of lower- and lower-middle-class Egyptian youths. The Mizrahi position has worsened since the economic downturn that coincided with Netanyahu’s accession to the prime ministership. The average salary of a Mizrahi, 79 percent of that of an Ashkenazi in 1975, was only 65 percent of that of an Ashkenazi in May 1997. Unemployment was two to three times higher among Mizrahim than among Ashkenazim. Mizrahim constitute more than half of the population, two-thirds of the working class, one-third of government workers and employees, and only one-fourth of university students (Rouleau 1998). [BACK]

57. For an introduction to the position of the Mizrahim in Israel, see Alcalay 1993; Lavie 1996; Shohat 1988, 1989; Swirski 1989. [BACK]

58. Although the word freha (pl., frehiyoot) literally means “chick” (the related word farkha has the same meaning in Arabic), it is more derogatory than “chick” (for young woman) in English. Freha can also be used to refer to an Ashkenazi woman, usually working class, but is mostly reserved for Mizrahim. Thanks to Yael Ben-zvi for translating Assif’s article (1995) and for her gloss on frehiyoot-bivim. [BACK]

59. For an analysis that highlights the critical edge of several of Danna’s songs, see Ben-zvi 1998. [BACK]

60. The administration of Palestinian-Arab citizens in Israel is essentially apartheid, with separate (and unequal) “Arab” sections in the Education Ministry, the Histadrut (Israeli Trade Union Federation), and other institutions. [BACK]

61. Although the report of Israeli involvement in hashish smuggling is believable, its effects appear to have been mixed during the period in question, a fact not noted in the report. In the June 1967 war the Egyptian army failed miserably, but in the October 1973 war, it acquitted itself admirably. [BACK]

62. Interview in Hebrew, at http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/4875/girls.html. Thanks to Yael Ben-zvi for the translation. [BACK]

63. Until now, Danna has remained an underground phenomenon in the United States, largely in the dance-club scene. Dance mixes of her songs have circulated on the scene for several years (Henry Sutton, pers. com.), and Danna performed “My Name Is Not Sa‘ida” in New York City, when it was on the dance hit list (Kerem n.d.). In December 1996 Danna did concerts at the Palladium in New York City and in Miami and Los Angeles. [BACK]