Haifa Wehbe: Lebanese beauty, model, actress and singer. But mostly known for the controversy she creates. She needs no introduction in the Middle East.
With attention and eyes tuned into the Arab world, not surprisingly some are still landing on Haifa’s cleavage in the midst of standard revolutionary images. And Haifa is concerned to salvage her breast reputation and acting career. With the spotlight on Tahrir Square, she has managed to keep at least some attention fixed on her camera-loving self. By drawing attention to her breast size. While people cry for freedom she seems to fight the corner for the freedom to modify your cup size.
Her body is no stranger to gossip and vicious tongues: nosejob, eyelid-lift and colored lenses comprise her plastic repertoire. Add to that several hair extensions.
With the Arab world a-blaze with or rife with Revolution and drama, her own TV drama plans have been disrupted as the daughter to an Egyptian mother and wife to an Egyptian business man, was due to star in her first Egyptian soap opera series Nousseh - which has since been dropped. The show was dumped amid allegations of corruption as the son of the owner of the managing company was linked to the Mubarak Regime.
She is naturally quite embroiled with Egypt- given a maternal link, and home and husband and a patchy acting career set in the Hollywood of Arabia. She’s grabbed headlines and courted controversy almost through the course of her celebrity career: Lawsuits and fatwas or just viscious tongues are hardly alien to her. Many of her darkest moments involve her (recently revolutionizing) mother-land. Her relationship to Egypt includes a near-suing by Egyptians of the Nubian race type, being subjected to serious censure and legal battles waged by scholars and clerics at the Azhar Mosque for her dodgy and hardly Muslim-compatible antics in and around Mosques in Egypt. The twice married celebrity has further provoked disapproval as a pop icon who seems to lack firm family values.
Sometimes her scandals have been in close succession, meaning when things go quiet we wonder if she’s behaving herself or just not been caught.
These slanders and slurs are often left in the realms of media and celebrity gossip columns but more often than is pop-star-standard, leaking out into legal battles and religious opprobrium. She’s not quite what you would take home to your mother, as one distraught mother learnt the hard way when her son expressed the intention to marry her. Luckily for a certain Egyptian businessman Ahmad Abu Hashimeh, this marriage to a certain London resident did not transpire.
Haifa, whether she’s singing, acting or posing has always attracted the public and media gaze. As when she’s performing covers as ‘I will survive’ appropriating Gloria Gaynor’s famous refrain and turning the famous chorus line Arabic, ‘3awzah a3eesh’.
