Beyond the spiritual observance of fasting and prayer, Ramadan in the Arab world ushers in a cherished cultural tradition: the annual broadcast of eagerly awaited television drama series.
Once the daily fast is broken, families gather to watch their chosen series, which range from intricate soap operas to compelling political and historical dramas.
This communal viewing is often accompanied by sweets, nuts, tea, and coffee, extending late into the evening.
The most anticipated productions are frequently Syrian. While Egypt is renowned for its cinema and Lebanon for its pop singers and composers, Syria’s television series have for decades been considered the gold standard in the region.
As the country emerges from 14 years of civil war, more than a year after Islamist-led insurgents brought the authoritarian Assad dynasty to an end, Syria’s TV industry is seeking its footing in the new order.
In the Assad years, when political expression was strictly curtailed, “television became the main sort of platform for freedom of expression and also for employment for artists and intellectuals,” an area where they could subtly push boundaries, said Christa Salamandra, a professor of anthropology at Lehman College and the City University of New York who has researched Syrian drama.
In 2011, mass anti-government protests were met by a brutal crackdown and spiraled into civil war.
After that, “the industry fractured,” Salamandra said. “Creatives went into exile — or they stayed, but it split.”
Since Assad’s fall, actors and directors formerly divided along political lines are working together again. Series about once-taboo topics, like torture in Assad’s notorious prisons, are being shot inside Syria.
But like everything in the new Syria, the postwar trajectory of TV drama has been complicated.
On a chilly day the week before Ramadan, a television crew had transformed a street in central Aleppo into something magical.
In the background, collapsed buildings were a reminder that the city had been a central battleground in Syria’s civil war, but the cameras had transported the street back to a more innocent age. Classic 1970s cars and a horse-drawn court lined it as a vendor wearing a tarboush hat sold sahlep, a sweet drink of hot thickened milk and spices.
The series, “Al-Souriyoun al-Aada” (“The Syrian Enemies”), is based on a novel of the same name that was banned during Assad’s time because of its focus on dark moments in Syria’s history, including the “Hama massacre” of 1982. When then-President Hafez Assad ordered an attack on the city of Hama to quell a rebellion by the Muslim Brotherhood, 10,000 to 40,000 people were killed or disappeared in the monthlong assault and siege that left the city in ruins.
In the small-screen version, Yara Sabri, a prominent actor who left the country for years due to her opposition to Assad, appears as the mother of a troubled young man from an Alawite village who will become a major player in the country’s oppressive security apparatus.
