WANA (Feb 16) – As the month of Ramadan approaches—the most important religious period for Muslims, marked by fasting, worship, and intensified family gatherings, and when television becomes the main source of nighttime entertainment—the market for Ramadan TV series across the Arab world has once again heated up.

 

In recent years, this media competition has moved beyond mere entertainment, turning into a platform for reproducing identity-based, political, and religious narratives—narratives that, especially in fragile societies, can have consequences far beyond the television screen.

 

Within this context, after the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, it is now Iraq that has become the center of a new media controversy. The Ramadan series Hamdiya, scheduled to air on MBC Iraq, has faced a wave of public, media, and parliamentary criticism even before its official premiere. Critics have accused it of “inciting sectarian tensions” and “deliberately distorting Iraq’s contemporary history.”

 

The series tells the story of a Sunni orphan girl from southern Iraq who, following the collapse of her family and harsh social conditions, is forced into displacement and makes her way to Baghdad. In the district of Kadhimiya—one of the most important Shiite religious areas and home to the shrine of Imam Musa al-Kadhim—she meets a character introduced as a “young Iranian man.” The narrative links this encounter to an illicit relationship that results in the birth of a child named Mahdi, a plotline that critics believe is deliberately designed to provoke religious and ethnic sensitivities.

Amid growing protests, Iraq’s parliament has asked the Media and Communications Commission to summon the broadcaster for official explanations over Hamdiya’s content. Social media / WANA News Agency

Amid growing protests, Iraq’s parliament has asked the Media and Communications Commission to summon the broadcaster for official explanations over Hamdiya’s content. Social media / WANA News Agency

 

Iraqi critics stress that Hamdiya is not merely a social drama about poverty or women’s hardships. Rather, through targeted character construction, it seeks to associate moral corruption with the Shiite community and with Iranians. By contrast, the man who supports and shelters the girl is portrayed as being from the city of Tikrit—known as the birthplace of Saddam Hussein and closely associated in Iraq’s collective memory with the Ba’ath Party, a nationalist and authoritarian movement that ruled Iraq until 2003.

 

According to published information, the series is adapted from a novel by Qadouri al-Douri, a writer with a Ba‘athist background who fled Iraq after the fall of Saddam’s regime and moved to Turkey. Opponents argue that the series not only attempts to whitewash the crimes of the Ba‘ath regime, but also reproduces, at a deeper level, a form of sectarian confrontation.

 

The aspect that has most inflamed public anger is the fate of the protagonist’s illegitimate child, who later joins ISIS. Critics believe this narrative dangerously implies that Shiites and their religious environment were the breeding ground for ISIS—an extremist group responsible for one of the bloodiest chapters in Iraq’s recent history.

 

Amid growing protests, the Iraqi Parliament has asked the Media and Communications Commission to summon representatives of the broadcasting network to provide official explanations regarding the content of Hamdiya. This comes after the network’s Baghdad office had previously faced restrictions and temporary closure over the airing of programs deemed offensive.

 

Many observers warn that broadcasting such a series during Ramadan—a period with the highest television viewership in Iraq and the Arab world—could deepen sectarian divides and reopen unhealed wounds from Iraq’s past. Attention is now focused on the decision of regulatory authorities, a decision that could serve as a critical test of media responsibility in one of the Middle East’s most sensitive societies.