'Issa, the President of Yamama University and author of the book “Education Reform in Saudi Arabia”, has described last week's controversial episode of Saudi comedy Tash Ma Tash as “unfortunate” in terms of timing and simplistic in addressing its theme. “I fear the episode might have harmed efforts to push the education reform process forward,” Al-'Issa told Al-Watan daily this week. “It might put the intellectual dispute back to square one at a time when I thought that we'd got past all that and was sure that many thinkers were moving toward a middle ground, something which was evident from the lighter tone coming from quarters who were previously poisoning the air.” Last week's episode entitled “Development” and its portrayal of religious members of the community as resistant to education reform, Al-'Issa said, had “arrived in injury time, and maybe even after the referee had blown his whistle signaling the end of the match.” According to Al-'Issa, the education debate has moved on with a more complex set of factors now playing their part in preventing advancement. Fear factor “It's clear there is apprehension over calls for curriculum development, particularly in religious subjects, on the part of the extensive number of those who belong to the extremist current of thought,” Al-'Issa said. “This apprehension springs from the fear that education development aims at erasing religious identity from future generations and changing the cultural structure of the country.” “This fear or apprehension is not, however, the only factor preventing development, as there are other administrative, bureaucratic and technical issues perhaps equally as influential as the extremist current of thought.” Al-'Isaa is, however, magnanimous in view of the constraints and nature of the world of entertainment. “Fifteen minutes of a television episode, it's true, are not enough to tackle all the factors, and it's also true that a certain exaggeration is required of artistic work to highlight the main idea in as condensed a fashion as possible,” he said, “but I think tackling the issues from that angle and in a television series has given too narrow a view, which might have been an error on the part of the episode's makers.” Of the aspiring teacher interview scene in which an interviewee is asked to leave the room and get a haircut, provoking many responses of recognition from the Saudi public, Al-'Issa said the episode would have been “better off without it”. “The interviewers and their questions were portrayed provocatively and over-exaggerated, and it was out of context with the rest of the episode which tackled the development of education and not the educational situation in general, including the selection of teachers,” he said. Contradictions As for the “artistic value” of the episode, Al-'Issa felt that it was a “bit too serious”, and would have liked to have seen a little more “craftiness and comedy in pointing out the contradictions experienced by “students who in the morning follow a strict curriculum according to a severe Islamic jurisprudential school of thought, and in the evening are in a climate of tolerance at home and in the street, and exposed to local and international media.” Citing those contradictions, Al-'Issa said: “Music is haram (forbidden) in the school curriculum, yet you can hear it everywhere. Women are told to cover up, yet you can see them uncovered everywhere. Credit cards are forbidden, yet your father and uncles use them here and abroad, and so on…” “I don't need to comment on the abilities of the two actors who have managed to create their own artistic world and win over a widespread audience. Neither do I need to praise the episode's scriptwriter, Yahya Al-Amir, who has a balanced view and deep insight into what goes on in local and Arab intellectual circles.” “But I hope the program makers can take my opinions in the right spirit, and so too the people who were angered by the episode, as we are in the month of mercy and tolerance and forgiveness,” Al-'Issa said. “There's no doubt that the theme of the episode was important, that theme being the development of education in a country whose education system suffers from sizeable problems, the backwardness of the curriculum being one of them, if not the most important,” Al-'Issa said. The episode of the MBC-aired Tash Ma Tash, described by Al-Watan as “its most daring yet”, led to widespread debate in the public and press and death threats to Al-Amir which he shrugged off as “unpleasant but not scary”, saying that he was “used to them”. Al-Amir instead told Al-Watan that there had been “hugely positive feedback” after the show ran and that he had received numerous messages of thanks, congratulations and support. Al-Madina newspaper, reflecting the Saudi public's increasing disenchantment with a series regarded as having run short of ideas in recent years, hailed the “return of the ‘Tash' of old, with constructive ideas and the acting duo creatively playing off one another to bring characters to life in a comic fashion”. __
