When a freighter ran aground in the Suez Canal, I started to look in the Egyptian papers for cartoons and on social media for memes. Egyptians are famous for their raucous sense of humor. But there are serious risks to being a satirist. Joking about the ship veered too close to commenting on the failures of the country’s autocratic president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. The former general took control of Egypt in a coup in the summer of 2013, and he and his supporters have cracked down on independent voices ever since.
The rest of the Middle East and the world was exploding in laughter about the little digger and the big boat, while Egypt’s talented satirists were essentially muzzled. Last week, a cartoon that verged on criticism of the Suez incident that had appeared in print but attracted pro-government trolls was expunged from an Egyptian newspaper’s website.
It should have come as no surprise that laughing at the absurdity of the Suez incident was out of bounds. A few months ago, authorities showed up at the door of another Egyptian cartoonist before daybreak. The reason was a melancholic remembrance of protesters who had died in the revolution a decade ago. The animator, Ashraf Hamdi, who runs a site called Egyptoon, posted a short video online and has been in prison since his arrest that morning in January, on the tenth anniversary of the Arab Spring.
The most outrageous cartoons about the canal appeared in the neighboring Kingdom of Jordan. Cartoonist Emad Hajjaj drew the Ever Given’s haul as a grotesque caricature of Sisi’s face trapped in the canal. Hajjaj showed how deep the military president’s authoritarianism goes; it was Sisi’s regime, as the freighter was labeled, that had clogged the waterway. Another recent cartoon by Hajjaj depicted a hulk of a man constrained, belted in place, and forming the likeness of a dictator’s hat.
But when Jordan had a crisis of its own, with a hidden power struggle in the royal court coming into view, punch lines were nowhere to be found. The dichotomy reveals the fault lines of Middle East media, in a time of extreme repression and censorship.
In Jordan, insults to the king or the royal family are a criminal offense. But there is still plenty to laugh about.
On Friday, as authorities in the Kingdom of Jordan arrested dozens for partaking in what some outlets would describe as a coup attempt against King Abdullah II, a staunch U.S. ally, it was the international media that drove the news cycle, not Jordanian outlets. The Washington Post broke the story that the king’s half brother Prince Hamzeh bin Hussein had been arrested. On Saturday, the BBC posted a video of Hamzeh, in his last moments before his satellite internet cut, describing how freedoms had contracted in Jordan. “It has reached a point where no one is able to speak or express an opinion on anything without being bullied, arrested, harassed, and threatened,” he said in the video.
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Hamzeh captured the slow and steady decline of human rights in the country. “People outside Jordan don’t realize the slide toward authoritarianism here and the diminishment of basic freedoms,” said Adam Coogle, a Human Rights Watch official in Jordan.
Political cartoons are indicative of how censorship works more broadly in the media, which is why Jordanians learned about the royal court’s struggles from foreign sources. And those drawing from within Jordan about it have done so with utmost subtlety. The Jordanian cartoonist Naser Jafari drew two figures from behind, “we” and “the government,” as they both watch the news unfold in the Post, BBC, CNN, and Al-Arabiya, the Saudi-owned network that rapidly aired the video of Hamzeh under house arrest; the government and the citizen also gaze at social media, WhatsApp, and YouTube. Jafari’s cartoon suggests that the country’s leadership and its citizens are essentially in the same place, with one exception—the man who represents the government wears a suit while the citizen has a ragged shirt, with a patch at the elbow. It’s a quiet critique of power.
In Jordan, insults to the king or the royal family are a criminal offense. The government went even further in 2016 by banning any coverage of the monarchy with the exception of the court’s statements. “Jordanian journalists are so hamstrung, so circumscribed. Most of them are being careful about what they say,” a Western diplomat based in Amman told me.
The primary message in the country’s media has been that of solidarity. Emad Hajjaj drew a flower shaped like the Jordanian flag thrashed in the wind but staying upright. “May God Protect Jordan,” he tweeted along with the image. Hajjaj has never shied away from strong opinions; he was arrested for several days in August for a cartoon mocking the Emiratis for recognition of Israel in exchange for fighter jets. But this weekend, the cartoonist urged steadfastness amid “fierce winds.” For now, those winds have subsided. By Monday afternoon, Prince Hamzeh affirmed his allegiance to his half brother King Abdullah in a joint letter. On Tuesday, the Jordanian attorney general issued a broad gag order to silence all coverage and social media posts about the royal drama.
But there is still plenty to laugh about. Al-Hudood, the Middle East’s answer to The Onion, offered up a headline that couldn’t appear on a Jordanian newspaper’s opinion page: “Jordanian Regime Saves the Jordanian Regime From the Jordanian Regime’s Threat to Its Stability.” The story comes from someone writing under a pen name—Al-Hudood’s Game of Thrones Correspondent. It gave them just enough cover to say out loud what many were already thinking, but could never put in print.
April 07, 2021 at 05:00PM
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