Can This Viral Video Star Conquer the Arab World?

One all-powerful Saudi company usually decides who becomes a music star in the Middle East. A blond bombshell named Myriam Klink has other ideas.

Photos by Dalia Khamissy

As Myriam Klink tells it, sometime in the early aughts the brother of an Arab dictator — himself an intelligence chief — smuggled Klink, a young Serbian-Lebanese model, over the Syrian border in his private car. She had a fashion show in Syria and had failed to renew her Lebanese passport; he effectively ran both countries and they travelled in the same elite circles.

More than ten years later, that same intelligence chief is credited with spearheading the brutal crackdown that eventually devolved into the Syrian civil war, while Klink has parlayed a fading modeling career into Internet celebrity by riding the same social media wave that contributed to the Arab uprisings and is now redrawing the media landscape throughout the Middle East.

Klink is a divisive figure in Lebanon in the way that women who are famous for being famous often are. Having dubbed herself the “Queen of Klinkistan,” her Barbie aesthetic, controversial political stances and eccentric lifestyl…