Media in Saudi Arabia
Nowhere in the Arab world have anxieties about social and cultural change been as intensely discussed as in Saudi Arabia, where the Salafi doctrine of Wahhabiyya at the heart of the Saudi system as a sacrosanct vision of authenticity grounded in cultural and religious purity and gender separation. The advent of « reality television » in the mid-2000s has activated these debates in the kingdom. Notably Star Academy, a popular Arabic-language reality show broadcast by the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC) via satellite from Lebanon since December 2003 achieved record Saudi ratings and provoked an intense controversy in Saudi Arabia, emptying city streets and animating mosque sermons, opinion pages, and talk-shows. Elsewhere I have mapped how the show became the locus of a battle between Saudi radicals, conservatives and liberals. This article traces overlapping Saudi-Islamist discourses about television, including various rhetorics of censorship and critical engagement, drawing on a variety of primary texts, most centrally a widely circulated sermon titled Satan Academy by Shaykh Muhammad Saleh Al Munajjid. I focus on how public controversies about reality television has crystallized new episodes of long-standing debates.