One of the most rewarding aspect of researching and writing the book was my growing realization of the central role of gender in social and political life, in the Arab world and elsewhere. Reality television animated the discussion of gender by featuring unmarried young men and women dancing, singing, eating, and (in some shows) living together under one roof.

That’s Marwan Kraidy in part two of an interview by Henry Jenkins.

That’s something I noticed while in Morocco. Morocco is a comparatively moderate, Arabic-speaking, north African country. And yet, the rigidity of gender lines compared to the United States amazed me. Men were highly visible in public spaces. Cafés are almost exclusively male. We were two of a handful of women on the beach in Casablanca. Most of the Moroccan women we saw were accompanied by a man, though there were also plenty of women wearing t-shirts and jeans and walking around solo. I didn’t get the sense that women were repressed, mind you, just that they lacked visibility compared to men there and to women here.

Kraidy and Jenkins don’t just discuss gender in the interview (also see part 1), however. Kraidy also talks about reality television and the Arab world and how it relates to Arab struggles around national identity versus pan-Arab identity, and resisting Western cultural influence.

PC: Developing Web applications in Arabic requires special care. What are the most important concerns and what components do you provide to address those concerns?

KA: Besides the search issue presented above, some of Arab countries use Hijri calendar instead of Gregorian calendar. So I developed classes to convert dates between those two calendars, as well as an Arabic version from date and strtotime PHP functions. … Another issue that is handled in this project is related to rendering Arabic text correctly in some libraries like GD, PDF, SWF and even VRML.

This interested me simply because it raises awarness of cultural, linguistic, and character set challenges that monolingual developers, or Western character set developers don’t often think about. [Via PHP Developer]