In a series following our print article on conflicting approaches to free speech after the terrorist attacks in Paris on January 7th, our correspondents offer more in-depth analysis of the threats to freedom of expression around the world. Our second article looks at the Middle East. (The first was on Thailand.)

The Middle East is by almost any reckoning the world's worst region for freedom of expression. Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom lobby, puts war-torn Syria 177th out of 180 countries on its latest annual ranking, in 2014. Iran is 173rd, Sudan 172nd, Yemen 167th, Saudi Arabia 164th. The highest any of the region's countries make it is 91st, with Kuwait, which has a democracy of sorts. According to the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank, as of 2012, 14 of 20 Middle Eastern countries criminalise blasphemy and 12 of 20 make apostasy—leaving Islam—an offence.

Restrictions bite not only on what is said in the media or public forums. Some countries, including Iran and Syria, have large numbers of security agents who listen in to private conversations on the street or in the market, and use reports from informers who shop their neighbours for badmouthing the regime. Taxi drivers can earn handsome supplements by filing reports on their customers. Only at the dentist, runs a popular Arabic joke, is it safe to open your mouth.

Freedom of expression is particularly curtailed where it concerns politics, sexual matters or Islam, the region's main religion. Even secular or less devout leaders refuse to grant religious freedom, in part to keep hardline clergy and their followers happy, and in part to extend their totalitarian rule into their subjects' private lives. One example is Saudi Arabia, where the ruling family imposes harsh penalties based on sharia law because it rules in tandem with the puritanical Wahhabi clerics. Being openly gay is not tolerated anywhere except in central areas of Beirut, Lebanon's capital, and charges for "debauchery" are not uncommon. The region offers almost no space for legal protest; some countries set ridiculous requirements for protests to have official permission before going ahead—which is only granted when the protests are pro-government. Vague national-security laws and emergency laws allow prosecution for almost anything that rulers do not like.

Mocking Jordan's monarch is a criminal offence punishable by prosecution in a military court, but when King Abdullah of Jordan (pictured above with the French president, François Hollande) attended the demonstration on January 11th in Paris to express support for free speech in the wake of the Paris attack, some found ridicule hard to suppress. How could he march in defence of freedom of expression abroad, they asked, when he is such a serial abuser of that freedom at home? Last June he expanded the remit of an anti-terrorism law to include public criticism of the king or his allies. His spooks trawl social media for dissenting Jordanians to arrest. On December 18th the deputy leader of Jordan's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood was tried before military judges for a colourful posting on his Facebook page denouncing Jordan's allies in the Emirates. Salafi preachers who decline to opine in favour of coalition attacks on Islamic State are sent back to jail. "Everyone in Jordan is assumed to be a terrorist until proven innocent," says an embittered Islamist.

A few days after the king marched in Paris, his security forces beat back protestors heading for the French embassy in Amman. In recent years the king has closed hundreds of news sites for lacking a licence, and ordered those that still operate to appoint editors more likely to toe the government line. An irate taxi driver criticising the king stops himself as he passes a police post in the capital, and then punches the air with his fist to illustrate what might befall him should he speak out.

Egypt's constitution says freedom of belief is absolute, but only guarantees freedom to practise their religions to Muslims, Christians and Jews. That leaves atheists unprotected, and the government, which appears to see homogeneity as desirable and likely to make ruling easier, has recently been cracking down on them. In June it announced a campaign to confront the spread of unbelief. Since a farcical survey in December which found that Egypt had a suspiciously specific 866 atheists, and that this was more than any other country in the Middle East (no mention of the fact that Egypt is also the region's most populous country), the persecution has worsened. On January 10th a court in Idku sentenced Karim Ashraf Mohamad al-Banna, a student, to three years in prison for saying on Facebook that he was an atheist, which, the court decided, counted as "insulting Islam".

Although cases for apostasy and depicting the Prophet Muhammad make the news, many of the region's Muslims agree that such offences should be penalised. Mr Banna was reportedly harassed by his neighbours for his views, before the state got involved.