Satire a Casualty as Arab Nations Clamp Down on Free Speech

LONDON— Isam Uraiqat spent years testing the line in the Middle East between satire and insult.

Now the founder of the region’s best-known satirical news site seems to have found it.

After a decade lampooning the region’s kings, autocrats and despots, the website AlHudood has been blocked in Jordan, where it was founded in 2013, with Uraiqat and his team of writers now effectively personae non gratae. Their offense? Mocking the lavish wedding of the kingdom’s crown prince.

Comedians and satirists were on the leading edge of the Arab Spring, the wave of protests that brought down or weakened dictators from 2010 to 2012. Bassem Youssef, known as Egypt’s Jon Stewart, ridiculed powerful politicians from across the political spectrum, drawing millions of viewers until his show was canceled in 2014. In the early years of Syria’s civil war, an anonymous collective of puppeteers poked fun at Bashar al-Assad and his regime.

But while parts of the Middle East are in the midst of a modernization push that is bringing raves to the Saudi desert and Israelis to World Cup games in Qatar, the region is still wrestling with how seriously to take itself. Police crackdowns and a flurry of new laws restricting free speech are growing.

“The space for comedy and political satire in the Middle East has shrunk,” said Céline Assaf Boustani, president of Human Rights Foundation, a New York-based human rights organization. Many comedians, including Youssef, now reside in exile in the West.

The United Arab Emirates, a favorite target of AlHudood, or “the Limit,” blocked the satirical website two years ago. Egyptian authorities detained three TikTok influencers earlier this year after they posted a parody video about visiting an inmate in the country’s feared prisons. Algeria’s satirical website, El Manchar, cited government pressure when it shut down in 2020. In July, the U.A.E. arrested an influencer living in the country after he posted a biting parody of an Emirati on an exorbitant spending spree.

In Jordan, widely regarded as one of the region’s more progressive countries, the government is clamping down on its online critics, including AlHudood. The country’s parliament last month approved a cybercrime bill that expands the government’s powers to prosecute people accused of undermining national unity. In a statement ahead of the vote, a State Department spokesman warned that the draft law could “further shrink the civic space that journalists, bloggers, and other members of civil society operate in.”

AlHudood is often compared with the Onion, the American satirical news site. But while Uraiqat says he sees everyone as fair game, satire in the Middle East is a different proposition.

A joke can be easily misconstrued by intelligence services as part of a psyop, shorthand for psychological operations, concocted by the U.S. or the Israelis, he says, or by the Saudis, Qataris or Iranians, for that matter.

“People always ask us, who do you work for? Who is funding you?” Uraiqat said one recent afternoon in London, where he runs the satirical website while living in exile from his home in Jordan. “We are equal opportunity offenders.”

The website is irreverent and ruthless in challenging feared Middle East rulers and daily political life in the region.

It has published sardonic stories about a joint Saudi-Turkish “counter-journalism agreement,” a British-French team of crocodiles patrolling the English Channel looking for migrant boats, and an Israeli offer to help the Syrian government bomb Syrian cities.

But it was AlHudood’s coverage earlier this summer of a royal wedding that seemed to be the final straw in Jordan. It published a series of stories pillorying Jordan’s royal family for spending so much on the wedding when millions in the country struggle with poverty.

Uraiqat suspects that the post that got him in trouble was one about the royal wedding that urged citizens to “be happy, dog,” a pointed insult in the Middle East. Uraiqat suspects that the government thought the reference was to the crown prince who was getting married, not the average citizen. The Jordanian government declined to comment on its reasons for imposing the ban.

Most of AlHudood’s 17-member staff operate in anonymity, and it recently shut down its offices in the region to limit the threat of reprisals.

It is a different mood from when AlHudood first began. “There was an atmosphere of freedom,” said an editor in Jordan, who joined the outlet in 2013.

The demonstrations and vibrant online debates accompanying the Arab Spring raised hopes that change was in the air. “There was no one telling me, ‘Oh, you can’t publish that, the people above won’t approve it’,” he said, referring to the government censors to whom much of the region’s media answers.

Now he starts his mornings by tinkering with a VPN to log into editorial meetings. He says the state keeps a close eye on him. When people ask where he works, he says he is a freelance writer. “It’s very hard now,” he said.

Still, Uraiqat and his team aren’t backing down. “The plan is to do what we’re good at, poking at them to poke holes in the narratives of autocracy and repression,” he said, adding that AlHudood plans to launch two new podcasts, a fresh social media campaign and a new TV series.

He first drew the ire of Jordanian officials in 2014 when AlHudood ran a story saying that Jordanian officials had arrested Santa Claus.

The story was picked up by at least two news sites in the Middle East, who reported that Santa Clause was arrested for promoting Christianity, “inciting sectarian strife” and doing unlicensed charitable work. Jordanian officials issued a statement to say they hadn’t arrested Santa Claus, according to news reports at the time.

In 2017 AlHudood stirred outrage across the Middle East by publishing a story saying that Muslims’ prayers in Qatar wouldn’t be accepted by Allah until its leaders apologized to Saudi Arabia over a foreign policy spat.

One recent morning, Uraiqat got on a video call with his writing team to scout new targets. They tossed around spoof headlines about Morocco postponing a meeting with Israel because it wasn’t building settlers’ homes fast enough on Palestinian land, or OPEC inviting a small gas station to join if the U.A.E. leaves the petroleum cartel.  

“OPEC? It’s not something funny we can make a joke of,” wondered one writer in the editorial meeting.

“We can try it, why not?” replied Uraiqat.

Write to Humza Jilani at [email protected] and Dion Nissenbaum at [email protected]