Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef gets some last-minute makeup done before appearing on his TV show as an ultra-conservative politician. Photograph: David Degner/David Degner/Getty Images

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jan/12/laughing-in-face-of-danger-satire-in-muslim-world

It’s a sweeping generalisation, of course, but Arabs and Muslims really don’t have much to laugh about these days: mayhem and death, war and repression, dictatorship and terrorism are daily fare across the region. Yet satire and humour, much of it fairly black, are alive and kicking, from Iraqis poking fun at the Islamic State (Isis) to Saudi standup comics, and Palestinians grinning and bearing life under a corrupt government and Israeli occupation.

There are no crude Charlie Hebdo-style cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammad – strictly taboo – but plenty of clever and excoriating images of corrupt and hypocritical leaders – and enemies.

Lebanese band the Great Departed use oudh music and untranslatable cultural references to target Isis – “Daesh” in the pejorative Arabic term – to side-splitting laughter in Beirut nightclubs. Jordan’s al-Hudoud, a bundle of irreverent online fun, recently ran a delightful story about the arrest of Father Christmas and the confiscation of presents he was distributing.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed Caliph of Isis, is the object of plain ridicule. Karl Sharro, the London-based Lebanese satirist, brilliantly “re-created” a session between Baghdadi and his psychiatrist. Having declared the caliphate, the jihadi chief is stumped about what to do next. There’s no handbook. The psychiatrist helpfully advises him to try Google. Baghdadi wonders whether to start wearing a big turban, maybe mauve or even pistachio with a silver pin. But he frets that would make him look silly.

Fahad al-Butairi is the star of the wildly successful YouTube comedy La Yekthar – tolerated by an autocratic Saudi regime that is currently flogging a jailed liberal blogger and does not allow women to drive – an issue that is brilliantly satirised in Butairi’s Bob Marley-inspired “No Woman, No Drive” video. Surprisingly, the show has survived, perhaps because it uses coded messages about social and economic issues and hints at corruption. Royalty and religion are strictly off limits.

Negotiating the red lines laid down by government censors has encouraged extraordinary creativity. The Palestinian comedy team Watan a Watar have enjoyed huge success with their take on an Isis propaganda video featuring a roadblock and a quiz: incorrect answers mean instant execution but these jolly, bumbling jihadis win points to get them to Paradise. It’s gallows humour with a twist.

Yet Isis is, in a sense, an easy target in the grim aftermath of the Arab spring – and the dichotomy between jihadis and dictators fashionable but false. “A lot of this is at the expense of satire against counter-revolutionary regimes we are not laughing at any more,” says Sharro. “Now there is a sense of an existential battle so we are linking arms with the Egyptians and Jordanians and Saudi regimes. And that’s very muddling because a lot of the grievances in the region are created by those same autocrats.”

Ian Black, Middle East editor

Egyptians watch Bassem Youssef TV show in a coffee shop in Cairo in 2013. Photograph: Khalil Hamra/AP
Egypt: ‘If I was on TV, they might shut me down. That’s why I’m on the internet’
In some respects, the state of Egyptian satire can be summarised by the fact that Egypt’s most famous contemporary satirist no longer feels safe to work. And that when he was in work, he came under pressure from every government he lampooned. For a golden period, between 2011 and 2013, Bassem Youssef, a heart surgeon in a past life, was the poster boy of Egypt’s revolution. His political satire show, which he first broadcast on YouTube from his spare bedroom, and which later drew up to 30 million viewers on television, took aim at politicians from across the spectrum.

Among all the bloggers, vloggers and comics that the 2011 uprising spawned, it was Youssef’s show that was the most visible emblem of the enhanced public discourse of the post-revolution period. Within two years, Youssef was the most-watched satirist in the Middle East, and became known internationally as Egypt’s Jon Stewart. Like Stewart, Youssef played humorous video clips of his targets, and then mercilessly ripped them apart for whatever blooper they had uttered. But he also found time for both serious soliloquies and low-brow slapstick. In one memorable programme, he wears an absurdly large academic’s hat, a piss-take of a similar, if smaller, hat that Egypt’s first post-revolution president, Mohamed Morsi, once wore in Pakistan.

But his experiences under the rule of first Morsi, an Islamist, and Egypt’s first post-revolution president, and then the man who ousted him, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, highlight the limits for satirists in Egypt. Under Morsi, prosecutors detained and questioned Youssef on charges of insulting both the president and Islam in general. A devout Muslim, Youssef never criticised Islam – but he did poke fun of Islamists who, he felt, were tarnishing Islam’s image. “Religion, I’m not touching religion,” he said in these pages that year. “I’m actually attacking people who are using religion and give [it] a bad name.”

Youssef’s show survived under Morsi, but with interim president Adly Mansour and then Sisi it was a different story. In September 2013, just as a crackdown on all forms of opposition was getting going, Youssef told viewers: “What we fear is that fascism in the name of religion will be replaced by fascism in the name of patriotism and national security.”

Within weeks, his own channel had pulled the show. While the government has locked up other journalists, in his case there was no direct government order to end his satire. According to Youssef, he was the victim of the environment the government had helped create in which media moguls are only too happy to do the authorities’ work for them. “You can always implement some sort of a mood, without actually giving direct orders,” he later told the Observer. Youssef returned on a different channel months later, but again his show quickly folded. Once more, there was no direct order to do so – even from his new employers. But he felt that the threat posed by either the government or its supporters was too great to justify the continuation of his satire.

In Egypt’s mainstream media, Youssef’s departure has left a void. But his satirical baton is still carried by a younger generation of cartoonists and writers who push social and (sometimes) political boundaries in a few daring websites, magazines – or to their own substantial followings on Facebook. One such writer is 23-year-old Wageeh Sabry, who started producing satirical sketches on Facebook last summer – ironically around the time that Youssef finally wound down his show. At first Sabry was just talking to his friends, posting idiosyncratic yarns or musings that gently push at social mores. But his writing proved a hit and, six months later, he has nearly 100,000 followers on Facebook and a book of his work out this month.

Sabry doesn’t take direct potshots at political figures or events. But the surreal scenes he dreams up are a satire of the Egyptian moment. Recently, he imagined a bizarre conversation with a ghost at an “atheist cafe”, a riff on a recent raid on a cafe the authorities said was run by blasphemers. In another sketch, aliens invade Tahrir Square, and a woman, oblivious to their extraterrestrial nature, robotically chants pro-regime slogans at their commander.

“In the mainstream media, there aren’t satirical journalists who talk about religion, sex, politics. The only one who broke these boundaries was Bassem Youssef,” says Sabry, who is mentored by Youssef. “If I was broadcasting on TV, they might shut down my programme, and I might not be able to express myself. But that’s why I work on the internet.”

Patrick Kingsley and Manu Abdo
Turkey: ‘Erdogan sued, but satire had the last laugh and the prime minister lost’

The Turkish political satire magazine Penguen (Penguin) was founded in 2002 by four Turkish cartoonists, Metin Üstündag, Selçuk Erdem, Bahadır Baruter and Erdil Yaşaroğlu. It has since become one of the country’s most widely read cartoon magazines. Its popularity soared during the Gezi protests in 2013, when Turkish TV channel CNNTurk unwittingly turned the penguin into the mascot of activists; it had aired a penguin documentary instead of reporting from the uprising in Taksim Square.

While political caricatures in Turkey go back to Ottoman times, – Sultan Abdülhamid II, who failed to see the humour in satire and the depictions of his large nose, went on to ban them – they saw their golden age in the 1970s and 80s when Oğuz Aral, often considered the father of several generations of Turkish cartoonists, founded the hugely popular magazine Gırgır (Chuckle). Penguen’s co-founders emerged from Aral’s school of political satire.

The magazine has never shied away from controversy. After a Turkish court sued caricaturist Musa Kart for depicting then prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as a cat entangled in a ball of wool in 2005, Penguen published a series of animals all sporting the heads of Erdoğan – a Turkish government leader known for his lack of a sense of humour and his love of suing unruly cartoonists – and promptly found itself facing a court case for defaming authority. This time satire had the last laugh and Erdoğan lost. But the threats against political satire and cartoon artists in Turkey, a country that currently ranks 154th out of 175 on the RSF Press Freedom index, are not just of a legal nature.

Arsonists attacked the offices of Penguen in 2012 while two cartoonists were still working inside. No one was hurt. The perpetrators were never found. In early 2011, Penguen drew the ire of conservative Turks after it published a cartoon depicting the writing “there is no god, religion is a lie” on the wall of a mosque. The magazine later apologised, but underlined the right to freedom of expression: “We might like or not like a certain caricature, but it is important to protect this freedom. We respect the criticism. We are saddened by the angry reactions, and apologise to those who felt disrespected.”

Author Bahadır Baruter, who faced a prison sentence of up to one year for the caricature, later said the outrage expressed in other newspapers and on social media amounted to a “lynching”, and insisted the cartoon reflected his personal opinion and was “not something he had sought to consult over with anyone” prior to drawing it. “As my friends in the magazine have already stated, a magazine column is a space of free speech.”