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.”

His mosque cartoon again became the subject of heated debate – and threats of violence – after the attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last Wednesday. Ibrahim Yörük, a writer for the newly founded Islamic daily Vahdet, tweeted, using the hashtag #CharlieHebdo: “Look, one does not make fun out of insulting the people’s beliefs @penguendergi, you’d better pay attention to this …” He attached a picture of the controversial caricature, with red arrows pointing to the writings on the mosque wall. Yörük was later dismissed from his newspaper.

Constanze Letsch

Ali Farzat in Damascus in 2010. A year later he had his hands broken for a cartoon lampooning Bashar al-Assad. Photograph: RIM HADDAD/AFP/Getty Images

Syria: ‘Ali Farzat was dragged from his car and had his hands broken’



Satire is a popular, and dangerous, political weapon in Syria, where its practitioners choose targets at their peril. Before the uprising that has ravaged the country over the past three years, political enemies of the Syrian regime were considered fair game for cartoonists, television sketches and social media campaigns. While not completely out of bounds, any mocking of senior officials, though, was restricted to a gentle ribbing. After the insurrection, state tolerance for dissent plummeted. Ali Farzat, an internationally renowned cartoonist who in better times had poked fun at Bashar al-Assad, found himself very much out of favour when he drew an image of the Syrian leader sweating and carrying a suitcase after Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was ousted in mid-2011. Farzat was dragged into a car and savagely beaten, and his hands were broken. He said his attackers told him “this is a warning”, and he now lives in exile. Around the same time, a singer of anti-regime songs, Ibrahim Qashoush, was found dead with his vocal chords removed.

Now Syrian satirists tend to restrict themselves to safer targets. It is the terror group Isis, which controls part of Syria’s north and much of its east, that has become the focus of pointed satirical attacks from both the opposition and regime. State-run television has begun regularly deriding the group through comedic sketches and cartoons.

Martin Chulov

Pakistan: ‘Only satire that has the sense to limit its targets is tolerated’

When I sent my collected satirical columns, The Diary of a Social Butterfly – narrated by a ditzy, wealthy socialite in Lahore – to a publisher in India, she snapped it up. Later she told me: “I expected something like this to come out of India. Not from Pakistan.”

Those who know Pakistan only from the grim headlines it regularly generates cannot imagine there is much scope there for humour. But in fact Pakistanis have a long tradition of laughing at themselves. Urdu literature is replete with first-rate satirists – Akbar Allah Abadi, Ibne Insha, Mushtaq Yusufi. Bhaands, traditional performers who entertain with fast and furious monologues of cutting political commentary, are widely loved. Mimics are stars and the country’s finest impersonators have their own television shows.

There are three separate satirical programmes on Geo, the country’s biggest and most watched independent television channel, where politicians come in for a regular drubbing. It broadcasts Hum Sub Umeed Say Hain (We Are All Expecting), known for its biting political comment, as is Dunya’s satirical programme Hasb-e-Haal. The Friday Times, a weekly from Lahore, has published a series of fictitious satirical diaries over the years: Dear Diary by Benazir Bhutto; Ittefaqnama by Nawaz Sharif (the current prime minister); Mush and Bush, a telephone conversation between General Musharraf and President Bush; Howzzat by Im the Dim (Imran Khan) – all written by the publisher, Jugnu Mohsin. Subversive cartoonists, such as Sabir Nazar, Feica, Zahoor and Javaid Iqbal, whose work is published in leading national newspapers, are household names. So satire is alive and kicking in Pakistan. But only satire that has the sense to limit itself to permissible targets is tolerated.

Politicians are fair game, as are celebrities from the worlds of entertainment and sport. The chattering classes, too, are readily ridiculed. And that’s it. The two most powerful actors in the country – religious extremists and the military – are strictly off limits. You take them on at the risk of your life. Religion, generally, is a no-go area. Pakistan has strict blasphemy laws.

Blaspheming against Muhammad is punishable by death. Four years ago, Salman Taseer, governor of Pakistan’s most populous province, was gunned down by his own security guard for proposing a review of the law. Leaders of mainstream religious parties are occasionally mocked on TV, but gently, almost affectionately.

Few dare to laugh at the army and its feared intelligence wing – the ISI, Inter Services Intelligence. One group that did was the band Beghairat Brigade (Dishonourable Brigade). They released a song on (the now banned) YouTube, called Alu Anday (Potatoes and Eggs) taking a swipe at the military as well as sectarian killers. Its latest single, Dhinak Dhinak, again mocking the army was released in 2013 and promptly blocked on Vimeo. Mohammed Hanif, the award winning novelist, also parodied General Zia and his inner circle in his novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes. But writers of English, because of their comparatively small readership, can sometimes get away with more than Urdu writers. Hence even though The Friday Times published Mush and Bush during General Musharraf’s regime, it escaped censure.

The one place that satirists can safely let rip against the military and jihadists alike is cyberspace. One of the country’s foremost wits is an anonymous character on Twitter called Majorly Profound. Ridiculing the military’s propensity for fiddling with the constitution and its vast business interests, he recently wrote: “I demand a constitutional amendment in Pakistan to take back cornflakes manufacturing from armed forces and place it under civilian control.”

Moni Mohsin

Moni Mohsin’s satirical novel, Duty Free, is published by Vintage

Mana Neyestani spent two months in prison for one of his cartoons and now lives in Paris. Photograph: PIERRE DUFFOUR/AFP/Getty Images

Iran: ‘Despite restrictions – and floggings – satire is present in everyday life’



Satire in Iran starts with two familiar words: Gol Agha. That was the title of a weekly publication founded in 1990 by one of Iran’s most celebrated satirists, Kioumars Saberi Foumani, who also went by the pen name Gol Agha. It was the first such publication in post-revolutionary Iran, maintaining its dominance for more than two decades after its debut, adding monthly and annual editions as well as producing a new generation of satirists and cartoonists.

Throughout the reformist years under Mohammad Khatami in the late 90s and early 2000s, when journalism in the country flourished, Gol Agha had a freer hand in critiquing politicians and other senior figures. In late 2002, Foumani closed down the weekly publication for reasons unknown, although it resumed after his death in 2004 in other forms. At the height of the hardline Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s mandate (2005-13), Gol Agha’s various publications began to disappear, although it serves as a small publishing house today.

Iranian satirists and cartoonists face strict red lines in their work, such as longstanding bans on depicting clerics, ridiculing religions or satirising anything to do with the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Many defy those bans online, publishing anonymously if they reside inside the country.

The first opportunity Iranian cartoonists had to freely depict an Iranian president came when Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005. He was not a cleric and his eight acrimonious years provided plenty of material. But restrictions were widespread. In 2012, the case of one Iranian cartoonist, Mahmoud Shokraye, drew international condemnation when a local court sentenced him to 25 lashes for insulting an MP. Cartoonists from Iran and across the world stepped forward in his support, drawing their own version of the parliamentarian. In the face of the protest, MP Ahmad Lotfi Ashtiani ultimately withdrew his complaint.

A number of satirists and cartoonists have been forced to flee Iran in the past decades, including Mana Neyestani. He fell victim to the state’s aggression in 2006 when he spent two months in jail for a cartoon deemed insulting to the country’s Azeri ethnic minority. Neyestani is now based in Paris and has published a graphic novel, An Iranian Metamorphosis, which tells the Kafkaesque story of his time in jail.

Neyestani had visited the offices of Charlie Hebdo prior to last week’s shootings and had some of his own cartoons published by the French magazine. He had known some of its cartoonists and told the news website IranWire last week that he was “heartbroken”. Neyestani said he wouldn’t choose to ridicule religion in his own work but defended Charlie Hebdo’s right to do so. “When we talk about free expression, it also means the freedom to ridicule and offend,” he told IranWire. “What is not a joke is the lives of human beings. Even if a cartoonist commits the biggest insult in the world, nobody has the right to take his life away with a bullet.”

Despite restrictions, satire is present in everyday life in Iran. State censorship and strict rules imposed on satirical publications or TV and radio programmes mean that mobile phones are perhaps the most popular medium for reading jokes. Tech-savvy Iranians use texts and instant messaging services on a daily basis to share satirical takes on everything from politics to football.

Saeed Kamali Dehghan

Lebanon: ‘There is more tolerance for satire than elsewhere in the Arab world’



Lebanon has perhaps more space and tolerance for satire in its political discourse than any other country in the Arab world. Each television channel has at least one show that regularly mocks politicians – always those alligned with rival channels’ owners. Cartoonists too often produce sardonic images that shine a light on a feckless political class as well as Lebanese culture and society. Bas Mat Watan, which translates as the Smile of the Nation, is one popular TV show that lampoons Lebanese life.

The Christian-owned channel LBC has sometimes been perceived by its targets as having gone too far. In 2006, a skit upset Hezbollah and shortly afterwards, Shia Lebanese attacked Christians in east Beirut in what was thought to be payback.

Another Lebanese television show, Douma Kratiye, mocks the country’s claims to be a functioning democracy. Politicians, warlords, wealthy influence brokers and security chiefs are all derided with the aid of Spitting Image-style rubber puppets, much to the enjoyment of citizens who revel in using satire as a means to expose the powerful, when they can’t be held to account in other ways. The feudal lords who run much of Lebanon are all widely known by the caricatures that have appeared for decades in national papers.

Even in a relatively free discourse, though, direct criticism is often frowned upon, and mocking of religious figures, or along theological lines, is largely off limits.

Martin Chulov

Actors during the filming of the television series State of Myths, which ridicules Isis. Photograph: Thaier Al-Sudani / Reuters/Reuters

Iraq: ‘Now the country faces the threat from Isis, satire is back with venom’



In the years following the fall of Saddam Hussein, political satire was resurgent in Iraq. New money brought new channels and cable TV. A long-dormant tradition of holding rulers to account through sketches and performances suddenly had a multitude of fresh platforms.

The American occupation was castigated. So too were the cultural attitudes of US soldiers and diaspora Iraqis who had returned to take a stake in whatever became of Iraq. State newspapers, which had been mouthpieces for regime views, were discarded in favour of lively, cheeky new titles that spared the new Iraqi rulers few blushes.

As the new ruling class squandered, and the Americans floundered, some of the more penetrating, brusque satire ever seen in the Middle East featured proudly in news stands, or on primetime.

That didn’t last long though. Iraq’s new political establishment – in particular, former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki – brooked little dissent. Those who derided him were threatened with jail, or lawsuits, and the biting tone of the cartoonists and commentators soon died down. Now, though, with al-Maliki gone and Iraq facing its latest existential crisis – a threat from Isis – satirical venom is back. Isis has been lampooned on state television, which spent a reported $750,000 on a series mocking the terror group. Another channel serialised a cartoon broadcast across the region that ribs Isis jihadists as they try to avoid anything that wasn’t available in the seventh century – an era they consider to have been a utopia and whose way of life their followers are now trying to impose by the sword.

There is little self-censorship in satirical depictions of Isis, but some artists and producers have refused to have their names associated with the pieces, for fear of reprisals.

On social media, there is a large and growing appetite to resort to dark, irreverent humour, with Facebook groups set up as forums to criticise the government. There are signs, too, that the new government of prime minister Haidar al-Abadi is trying to draw a line between him and his predecessor; state TV is running mildly critical segments on his cabinet’s performance and even touching on the role of the regional neighbours in Iraqi affairs.

Criticising Islam remains strictly a no-go zone, though. There are few protections for those who subject prophets, or revered religious figures, to ridicule and few – if anyone – willing to try it. Iraq’s political satirists are testing other boundaries – political, societal and sometimes cultural. For now, they have more room to move than at most points since the fall of Saddam.

Martin Chulov

• This article was amended on 13 January 2015. The original said that Hum Sub Umeed Say Hain (We Are All Expecting) is broadcast by Pakistan’s Dunya channel. This has been corrected.