Beneath the Black Niqab Is Outspoken Saudi Poet
ABU DHABI March 31, 2010— -- Watching the world through eyeslits in her black niqab, Hissa Hilal of Saudi Arabia is a rising TV star on a million-dollar reality show.
The program, known as "Million's Poet," is an American Idol-style contest in Arabic poetry. Instead of singing, contestants are judged based on how well they recite poems. A panel of judges, along with thousands of viewers voting by text message, determine who walks away with the $1.3 million prize.
Hilal, 43, is the first woman to reach the finals. She fell in love with poetry as a child, started composing verses at age 12, and after watching season after season of "Million's Poet," finally had the nerve to audition.
"I thought if I don't come this year, then I'll never come. And this is my chance to reach millions of people," Hilal told ABC News.
Unable to audition in Saudi Arabia, among the throngs of men who turned up to compete, she flew to the United Arab Emirtes where the show is taped. Funded by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Heritage and Culture, it has been part of a greater effort to invest oil money in reviving local culture through modern formats.
Hilal said it took all of her courage to come forward for "Million's Poet," given the Saudi norms that has traditionally kept women out of the public eye and objected to seeing them on television.
Once on stage Hilal was shockingly bold, using her poetry to slam Islamic extremists and the fatwas, or clerical rulings, that curb women's rights.
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"I have seen evil in the eyes of fatwas, at a time when the permitted is being twisted into the forbidden," she said in her poem.
She described hard-line clerics as "vicious in voice, barbaric, angry and blind, wearing death as a robe cinched with a belt," an apparent reference to suicide bombers' explosives belts, according to a translation in Gulf News.
More broadly, Hilal also criticized clerics for spreading their intensely conservative version of Islam across the Arab world.
The statement won her millions of fans among the television audience, but also set off a backlash.
