MPs push to cancel Harley music concert in Bahrain

Manama: Bahrain's parliament, dominated by conservatives, has piled up pressure on the government to ban a three-day music extravaganza next week.

The Harley Davidson Bahrain International Beach Music Festival is scheduled for the Eid holidays and will feature 26 DJs from Bahrain and the Gulf and beach games.

However, MPs said that it was a threat to moral values and that the expected mixing of thousands of young boys and girls was not welcome. The move by the MPs will be assessed by Bahrain's authorities who will decide on whether to maintain it.

The parliament last year sought to cancel a concert by Lebanese raunchy singer Haifa Wehbe on the grounds that her clothes would be too revealing for the local culture and Islamic conventions and that her performance would be sexually provocative. One MP said that she was "a sexual singer who used her body, not her voice, to sing."

Concert oragnisers allayed concerns and Haifa eventually performed wearing exceptionally modest outfits.

In 2004, the parliament succeeded to cancel the production of an Arabic version of Big Brother by the satellite channel MBC in Muharraq, Bahrain's second largest city despite a series of measures to ensure total privacy for the participants.

However, the MPs said that they were shocked by the theme of the show that allowed boys and girls to mix freely, and a female participant was shown giving a peck on the cheek to a male participant to greet him, they staged protests and forced the station to cancel the production.