The Jinn and the Computer

Abstract

One of the fundamental problems facing middle-class Egyptian parents is the problem of how to ensure that their children are simultaneously modern and Egyptian. Arabic children’s magazines offer a window into the processes by which consumption links childhood and modernity in the social imaginations of children and their parents as they construct social futures. Arabic children’s magazines offer Egyptian children and their families models of the modern Arab child as someone who is familiar with the history of Islamic heroes, is computer-literate and knowledgeable about technology, and is familiar with worldwide popular children’s fads. Above all, these magazines construct children as consumers. Buying the magazine offers, through both advertising and articles, a world of other things to imagine buying, from technological gadgets to trips to theme parks. Through such media, Egyptian children may enter into an imagined community of other children like themselves playing and consuming, both elsewhere in the Middle East and in the wider worlds of America, Europe and Japan. In the process, children develop tools for generating hybrid identities as simultaneously Muslim and modern, Arab and cosmopolitan, child and consumer.