Before we begin wallowing in the pleasures of vulgar cultural ephemera, at least as one encounters it in the Middle East, I am going to focus for a moment on something else entirely: the Arab avant-garde novel.

I appreciate that critics find pop culture to be ephemeral, but there is a good case to be made that nothing anywhere is more ephemeral than your standard-issue avant-garde novel. That is true for most European and American examples, and given the relatively small market for fiction in much of the Arab world, it is even more the case in the Middle East.

An author of experimental prose would be quite happy, I think, to have his or her work receive sustained critical attention for as long as an Arab music video remains in rotation on the various satellite music channels, and to have a fraction of a video’s impact on the lives of his or her readers.

Nevertheless, literary activity is perceived as a serious matter worthy of the attention of learned people, whereas music videos, serial dramas and the like usually are not. So let us talk literature, give the evening a little class, and our subject some context.

A couple of years ago, a scholar named Samia Mehrez at the American University in Cairo discovered something quite interesting about the direction of the Arab novel. Reading through the major works of the 1990s from Egypt’s younger novelists--and Cairo remains the center of the Arab literary world--Professor Mehrez realized that the Arab family was not what it used to be, at least not in literary terms. It was playing a much smaller role in these works than had been the case in earlier Arab works. The family, as she put it (in an article for the Arab Studies Journal) was receding from the Arab imagination.

This is no small matter. Arab storytelling about the contemporary world has revolved around the family. No matter what kind of story one was telling, or what kind of characters one was presenting, no matter whether one was addressing an elite readership, as in the case of the Nobel Prize-winning writer Naguib Mahfouz, or a more popular readership, the narrative frequently turned on the impact that events have on a family.

Many stories centered on families to begin with, but even genre stories--crime or cop stories, romantic stories--tended to turn into family stories. Just the other day I watched a rare Arab horror movie and even that became a family story. This is all quite natural; Arab society has been very tight-knit, very much centered around the family. That the stories most interesting to an Arab audience would focus on families is not surprising. It remains true of stories in many popular media, especially movies and the region’s month-long television serial melodramas.

But in the 1990s, it seems, it stopped being true in literary fiction. What, then, were such novels about, if they were not about families? Well, they were about characters who were presented as being separate from the groups they belonged to, "cut loose," as Samia Mehrez puts it, "from conventional icons of family and nation." In short, they were about individuals. More than that, they were in many cases about the struggle of these characters to become individuals.

Unfortunately, these new Arab authors were pessimistic about the kind of emotional and psychological effort involved. Indeed, they appear to have concluded that the effort was futile. Purportedly speaking on behalf of a generation of Arabs that is supposedly disempowered both personally and collectively, the major theme that runs through these works is, to quote from Professor Mehrez’s essay, "The impossibility of becoming what you want."

Well, this is certainly a depressing picture. Disempowerment. Isolation. Futility. Frustration. Mehrez, as I noted, was writing a couple of years ago. Had she put aside her avant-garde reading on any given evening and turned on her television instead, she would have seen a very different Arab world before her eyes.

She would have seen a world that celebrates Arab individuality, provides an ever-increasing number of models for Arab identity, subverts state power, challenges restrictive social and moral norms, portrays socially marginalized groups in sympathetic terms, seeks solutions to societal problems, portrays women in roles of power, and ultimately increases social tolerance. She would have seen a world, in other words, that reflects an increasing degree of dynamism and innovation. I am speaking, of course, of the world reflected in popular Arab culture.

Almost all of these attributes can be found in the remarkable world of the Arab music video, which also took shape in the 1990s. That is, at the very same time that the pessimistic elite Arab novel was beginning to appear, an alternative arose as well, one that offered a very different version of the Arab imagination. We have a case in which two centers of culture recognize what appears to be a vitally important shift in Arab identity, and react to it. One of them becomes depressed at the prospect of greater Arab individuality, which it sees in terms of isolation and futility. The other celebrates that individuality, and in fact is providing the tools for intensifying individuation, because that is how the consumers of pop artifacts everywhere else in the world use these artifacts.

This kind of argument between elite culture and popular culture should be quite familiar to us, because we live in the same dualistic cultural circumstances. Western elites also sing an unending song of woe; much of what they see happening around them is, they believe, probably happening for the worse and is at a minimum a cause for alarm. Our popular culture, on the other, remains undeterred and largely optimistic.

Before leaving behind the subject of highbrow literary fiction and entering the world of ephemeral sensuality, I cannot resist a certain digression that has to do with the American role in this development.

The United States is often accused not only of attempting to achieve global cultural hegemony, but of spreading a culture that is essentially superficial trash, a culture of hamburgers and vulgarity. One of the better known accusers is Professor Benjamin Barber, currently at the University of Maryland, and the author of the book Jihad vs. McWorld, which makes such a case at some length.

In the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks, there was a flurry of newspaper and magazine stories explaining "why they hate us," and Professor Barber was among those called upon to address the issue. In November of 2001, he discussed it with the Washington Post.

He told the Post, "We don’t even export the best of our own culture." Our cultural best, thinks Barber, is "defined by serious music, by jazz, by poetry, by our extraordinary literature, our playwrights--we export the worst, the most childish, the most base, the most trivial of our culture. And we call that American."

That may not be quite right. Of the various cultural artifacts we will be discussing tonight, only a few can be said to be specifically American in origin, and one of them happens to be the Arab avant-garde novel. That type of self-conscious narrative has a very specific origin in the Middle East.

In the 1960s, a Palestinian novelist named Jabra Ibrahim Jabra translated William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury into Arabic, which if you ask me was quite a courageous undertaking: Faulkner’s novel has four different narrators, one of them mentally defective and another emotionally disturbed and suicidal. In any event, it was apparently the first example of narrative polyphony--multiple narrators--to appear in Arabic. Jabra himself soon tried his hand at the technique, producing a now classic novel of territorial loss titled The Ship, using two narrators.

Arabic avant-garde narrative has gone through many interesting stages since then. One prominent Egyptian author, Sonallah Ibrahim, has worked in the so-called "documentary" style pioneered by another American, John Dos Passos. Lebanese authors writing about the anguish of their long civil war have undertaken their own narrative experiments.

But the cultural bottom line is this: the world of Arabic literary prose would not be what it is without American influence. Indeed, I am prepared to argue that in the debate over popular culture in the Mideast, some of the secular critics of vulgar culture owe just as much if not more to American influence than do those who are creating the controversial popular artifacts themselves.

And while I am digressing, let me also say two sentences about the hamburger half of the charge of American hegemony. As far as I know, the only scholar to study the impact of McDonald’s in any Middle Eastern market is an ethnologist named Holly Chase. When burger franchises first opened in Istanbul, Ms. Chase set out to document what she expected to be the decimation and denaturing of Turkish cuisine. Instead, to her own amazement, she ended up a witness to the renaissance of old fashioned, quickly prepared Turkish street dishes. She was not the first to discover that dynamic, competitive markets are remarkable phenomena, unpredictable and filled with surprises.

Now, let us look at the cultural markets of the Arab world, and some of the surprises to be found in them.

The fact is, contemporary Arab popular culture is filled with surprises for everybody. Visitors to the region are usually unprepared for what they encounter, because most of them know little more about the region than what they deduce from stereotyped imagery. Arab emigrants returning for visits are usually taken aback at what they see, because they are unprepared for the shifts and changes that have occurred in the culture. Even the people who live in the region may well be surprised when they turn on their television sets and enter the movies. Some are delighted at what is happening, and others are enraged.

Indeed, the region’s pop culture is the source of a great deal of conflict and contention among Arabs. A very popular and even more controversial Egyptian singer named Ruby, for example, is currently being sued by an Islamist lawyer. This is Nabih Al-Wahsh, the same lawyer who recently sued to end the marriage of the Arab world’s leading feminist, Nawal Sadawi, on the grounds of her alleged blasphemy. He failed in that effort, and now he is trying to end Ruby’s career on the grounds that she is a threat to the moral order.

When another of the region’s so-called "seductive" singers, Lebanon’s Nancy Ajram, staged a concert in Kuwait last year, her fans were attacked by rock-throwing Kuwaitis who did not approve of the music.

Of course, it is not only Islamists who are unhappy with suggestive videos. The region’s secular talk shows have also been debating whether to censor Ruby’s unabashedly suggestive music videos, or those of Tunisia’s Najla, or Lebanon’s Ellissa. It is probably not surprising that there are many voices in the region objecting to the explosion of public eroticism. But it may be surprising how many voices have been raised in defense of these controversial performers on a variety of grounds. Among these, that erotic material does no harm, and that far more erotic material is in any event available on the Internet.

A serial melodrama presented throughout the Mideast last Ramadan suggested that Arab culture might have something to learn from America’s approach to domestic problem solving. Titled "Aunt Noor," the series centered on an Arab-American emigrant who returns for a visit home, encounters a family in disarray, and applies the directness and therapeutic techniques she has learned in the U.S. to resolve her family’s dysfunctions. (Arab culture can be quite circumspect.) The family lived happily after, but not the audience. It too was the subject of heated debate, as Arabist critics objected to what they perceived as a yet another cultural humiliation.

A series scheduled to be shown this past Ramadan was pulled after only a few episodes. "The Road to Kabul," as it was called, was about an Arab woman who marries an Afghan man, and who ends up living through the brutal Taliban regime. There had been some anticipation in the region that the series would spark a popular debate about the role of women under Koranic law. It never happened. A threat to the lives of everyone involved in the series, including its cast and crew, was posted on an Islamist Internet site, and the Qatar-based producers of the series suddenly discovered fatal technical flaws in the series and cancelled the airing.

Years ago, political satire was rare in the Arab world; a well known rule that governed the relation between culture and politics was that nothing should be allowed to distract from major PanArabist aims, especially the confrontation with Israel. In the 1960s, a Syrian comedian named Duraid Laham--sort of a cross between Woody Allen and Groucho Marx--was famous for what were then considered to be daring comedy films, which were understood to be poking indirect fun at the Syrian regime. But he would deal with such subjects as substandard housing and other daily-life frustrations for which the regime might be responsible, not with politics directly.

Today, the corruption, hypocrisy, and even legitimacy of the Arab political leadership are regularly under attack in a variety of television comedy programs. I will mention two. One is a direct knock-off of Saturday Night Live, and is broadcast weekly on the Emirates-based MBC. (It is called "CBM," which is merely MBC backwards.) The show mixes music and satire in a manner familiar to American audiences, and frequently does so at the expense of the region’s political players.

A second source of subversion is a Syrian genius named Yaser Al-Azmeh, who in his occasional television series has skewered the Baathist Party, the complicity of the Syrian populace in their own political frustrations, the region’s hypocritical exploitation of the Palestinian issue, the often insincere anti-American posturing in the Middle East, and a great deal more. Al-Azmeh and other Syrian artists are really part of the story of the "Damascus Spring," which is a separate subject. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the most interesting and creative television work currently being done in the Arab world is, in my view, coming out of Syria.

Cultural conflict is a daily enterprise in the region. Movie posters are torn down because people do not like the images on them. Controversial television formats are introduced to Big Brother, the European television enterprise that sets up a house filled with people and trains cameras on them week after week, attempted to do a version of its format in Bahrain. Despite making adjustments for the culture--the men and women inhabitants did not have to sleep under the same roof--the attempt sparked widespread outrage, and the show was soon cancelled.

A rich example of imported formats involves the show, Superstar, which is closely based on the successful U.S. program, American Idol. It is a singing competition involving contestants representing the various Arab countries, it lasts for weeks, and it draws an enormous audience from all over the Arab world. The winner is chosen by audience vote.

This year, the two finalists were the Palestinian contestant and the Libyan contestant, both men. Their prominence occasioned unaccustomed frenzies in Libya, which had not previously been known for a fan culture, and among Palestinians. For example, people can cast their votes online, and the operators of Libya’s Internet cafes reportedly forced their customers to vote for the Libyan contestant before allowing them to use their rented computers for anything else. One Palestinian computer geek wrote a program that supposedly enabled fellow Palestinians to bypass online safeguards and vote repeatedly for their champion. Of course, the pictures of the singers were on every surface, and their voices boomed out over Tripoli, Ramallah and elsewhere.

The Libyan government was not happy about any of this; it condemned the phenomenon as threatening to distract citizens from the real issues before them, which Col. Ghaddafi himself identified as Palestine and Iraq. Similarly, Palestinian clerics denounced the contest as a trivial distraction. None of that mattered: the season’s final episode drew huge numbers of viewers who wanted to know who would win. And by the way, Ayman al-Aathar, the Libyan, won.

These are only a few instances of what is a sustained conflict between Arab commercial pop culture and various portions of Arab societies. The new pop culture is obviously appealing to huge segments of these societies; they are supporting it with their money, time, attention, and energy. And it is also obviously discomfiting a lot of other people. Some of the people critical of the popular culture are reasonable people steeped in traditions that are important to them, and who are unhappy to see these familiar patterns and norms threatened. Others, however, are the region’s ideologues and authoritarians, specifically the entrenched remnants of Arabism, and the rising Islamists.

The war between ideologues and popular culture is an old story, and a very interesting one. Some of the arguments taking place in the Mideast about music echo the debates over jazz, movies, and rock music that took place under communism and fascism.

For example, the first music video to emerge from post-Baathist Iraq was a very sexy presentation called "Bortugala." It featured some attractive women dancing in an eye-catching fashion. The reaction at Al Jazeera’s website was striking; the video was called an example of "U.S. occupation culture," degrading to Iraqis and Arabs alike. My sense is that a lot of Arabs quite liked it, but what was notable about the Arabist criticism is that it sounded like the sort of thing that communists used to say about jazz, or later rock music: that they were decadent and degrading forms.

Authoritarian systems have managed to control both traditional folk culture and even high culture, either by harnessing them to their own purposes or destroying the types of high culture they have not liked. But no authoritarian system has ever been able to deal effectively with pop culture. Not the fascists, not the communists (who tried to create socialist dance music and indeed a whole alternative socialist "pop" establishment), not even the Taliban, who banned everything associated with pop culture, including its content and its technology, and still ended up with a fad for Leonardo di Caprio haircuts in Kabul.

Now let us take a look for ourselves at some examples.

These videos are fun, they are titillating, they are pretty good examples of the cultural syncretism that Tyler Cowen discusses in his book, Creative Destruction. That is, they involve cultures that borrow from elements one another, with the result that neither devours the other so much as that new forms are created. There are a lot of foreign influences apparent in them, but in almost every case they are unmistakably Arab.

The erotic element may stand out in many of these videos, but that is in many ways their least compelling feature. I think the most important aspect of these videos is that they offer their audience an imagined world in which Arabs can shape and assert their identities in any way they please. These are men and women cut off, as Samia Mehrez’s description had it, from the familiar icons of family and nation. They are individuals, but they are not examples of isolation and futility. In fact, they largely seem to be having a pretty good time, and are enjoying their individuality.

The imagined Arabs of the music video stretch from the plausible to the fantastic: not only Arab femmes fatales in designer lingerie but cool Arab race car drivers, Arab cowboys, and Arab motorcyclists decked out in Harley-Davidson paraphernalia. There are Arab football players; Arab lovers driving a pickup truck through the American desert; Arab heroes of Gothic vampire melodramas being stalked by beautiful ghouls; veiled Arab women of the Islamic golden age; Arab couples searching for each other in a chromed, retro 1950s universe; Arabs haunted by mysterious desert symbols that hold the key to forgotten identities; medieval Arab countesses in their Spanish castles; and even science fiction Arabs confronted by mustachioed alien children from outer space.

What this low, "vulgar" genre is offering, I believe, is a glimpse of a latent Arab world that is both liberal and "modernized." The reason is that the foundation of cultural modernity is the freedom to achieve a self-fashioned and fluid identity, the freedom to imagine yourself on your own terms. The videos offer a route to that process. By contrast, much of Arab culture remains a place of constricted, traditional, and narrowly defined identities, often subsumed in group identities that hinge on differences with, and antagonism toward, other groups.

The videos also do much more. Numerous videos present women in the roles of power, and play with around in other ways with gender types. At least three of Nancy Ajram’s videos feature male characters who are probably intended to be understood as gay. They are treated in either neutral terms, or positively. Several videos confront the nature of Arab identity directly, especially in encounters with non-Arab "others." A video from the singer Edal Menhali portrays a Gulf Arab who meets a Western woman in a hotel, and lays aside his Arab garb to assume a more Western identity. By the time the short video ends, he must make a choice about who he really is. There is a rich subtext here.

But it is the issue of individuals versus groups that is really central here. Cultures that have been transformed by individualist, consumerist self-fashioning all share important things in common. Most of the members of these cultures are far less tied to the groups they were born into than are traditional cultures. As a result, they tend to be far more willing to tolerate each other than is the case in many traditional societies. If you like this phenomenon, then you call it liberationist. If you do not, then you call it social atomization, a charge that has been made for two centuries.

If you are ambivalent about it, then you do what Gilles Lipovetsky did. He is a Swiss academic who studies ephemeral culture. He is not sure he likes all the results, but he is sure he likes some of them. His formulation is that the less we care about each other, the more likely we are to put up with each other and cooperate.

Tom Segev, the Israeli journalist, believes that he has watched precisely this process take place in Israel in his lifetime. As a result of various cultural forces, Segev writes, many Israelis have gradually gone from a plural "we" identity" to a singular, individualistic "I" identity. That shift, he thinks, changed many Israelis’ views of sexual equality, military service, and even Zionist ideology.

As for the role of ephemeral and disposable pop cultural artifacts, their use by audiences to assert and validate a shifting sense of self is a well-known phenomenon. In seventeenth-century Holland, the members of that country’s suddenly enriched middle class latched onto paintings of themselves and their world as a way to express their new social power. At the time, such subject matter was a departure for painters; indeed, it was the first time that anyone outside the aristocracy had owned paintings.

The emerging British middle class of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries went through a fiction-reading frenzy (of Grub Street "trash," mostly) as it looked for models for its new social opportunities, and identified with characters grappling with an industrializing, urbanizing world. Similarly, movies and rock music were powerful forms for different generations of twentieth-century Americans. They used such forms to play with the new possibilities of identity that were coming within their grasp.

I have to acknowledge that not all the pop culture of the Mideast is liberationist. There is a Panarabist marketm too, and it is served by singers who sing such songs as "I Hate Israel," and by serial melodramas about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and in praise of Hezbollah. But that kind of material has long been in circulation anyway. There is a cultural argument now, and we will see who ends up winning it.

For nearly a century, a series of utopian political systems has been advanced in the region to attempt to break its cycle of conflict and stagnation: Pan-Arabism, Ba’athism, Nasserism, Islamism, Kamalism, even, under Sadat, an unsuccessful market approach.

These have all failed. What may yet work in the region is what has worked elsewhere for centuries: commercialism that does not transmit a regime’s utopian dreams but addresses the personal dreams of the audience. Let people make their own revolution. And if they can dance themselves there, so much the better.

Charles Paul Freund is a senior editor of Reason magazine.