Satire is Apparently Now Illegal in Jordan

After a decade lampooning the region’s kings, autocrats and despots, the satirical website AlHudood has been blocked in Jordan, where it was founded in 2013, with Isam  Uraiqat and his team of comedy writers now effectively personae non grata. 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.

The AlHudood 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.

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.”