Hassnae Bouazza's Thousand Shades of Arabia on #wu13

John de Mol is doing good business in the Arab world. He acts rather dismissively about this, according to Hassnae Bouazza. According to her, the television producer talks publicly mainly about the many restrictions on his formats because of Islam and the sentimentalism of TV in the Middle East in general. That De Mol's success number The Voice of Arabia during the final in 100 million households, you don't hear him talking about that. That the quality of what is on offer is even far above the Dutch level could be a reason, according to the striking publicist.

At Writers Unlimited 2013, Bouazza showed us what the Arab television and film industry has in store for us beyond the images we usually see here: burnt flags, angry jihadis and thickly veiled women.

Instead, she opened her presentation with an extraordinarily revealing video clip of a Lebanese singer with a fair amount of cleavage and sexy dancing cleaning a rancid café. Not exactly what you associate with the images of oppression and fundamentalism we think of in the Islamic part of the world.

Of course religion does prevail in the Middle East. But they are not all religiously insane suicide bombers. In this episode of what we will call Winternachtenengasten, led very expertly by Arabia expert Petra Stienen, an Islamic 'What not to wear' also came along. In it, a young and sexy fundamentalist dressed in EO turtleneck and jeans showed which bits of skin and which body shapes are taboo (fitna) for women. Hilarious television, if it were not serious. According to Bouazza, this is where extremism in Islam shows that it moves with the times.

The fact that such fundamentalism has to adapt to the zeitgeist at all should be seen as a hopeful sign, and Hassnae Bouazza, who in daily life is constantly under fire from hate blogs like GeenStijl, likes to stress that Arab culture is more multiform than the war hitters would have us believe.

Bouazza has written a book about the unexpected sides of Arab culture. We are curious, but we are even more curious about the possibility raised on Twitter of making Petra Stienen the next presenter of Zomergasten. After all, she is very good at it.

Felt the audience.