Psychiatrist: Let’s start from the beginning; has anything changed in your life recently?
Caliph Ibrahim: Has anything changed in my life? Are you kidding me? We have announced the caliphate!
Psychiatrist: The what? The caliphate? Are you serious?
Caliph Ibrahim: Do I look like someone who jokes? Don’t you follow the news?
This exchange is from a blog published in July by the well-known satirist Karl Sharro. His blog, Karl reMarks, is extraordinarily popular among the Lebanese and is one of the very few initiatives of its kind. Although it has heavily ridiculed the idea of the Islamic State (ISIS) and its leader, Sharro says he has never really had any trouble over it. Nor has he received threats for other pieces he’s published.
“I’m in a lucky position that I am in London, I’m not in the Middle East,” he told NOW. “I enjoy some protection. I was never in serious trouble or anything like that. Occasionally I get people posting angry comments, or get angry comments on Facebook or Twitter. But nothing really serious,” he said. “I think that it’s not that my work is not controversial, but writing is more difficult to get offended by than a cartoon.”
Middle Eastern artists and writers have been pushing boundaries and facing censorship for a long time. And in the Middle East, Lebanon and Syria stand out as countries where journalists, writers and artists have been assassinated, threatened, prosecuted and persecuted for stating clear, direct opinions for decades. Lebanese journalists and writers Samir Kassir and Gebran Tueni were assassinated for their political views. Many others, including satire writers and cartoonists, face threats and censorship.
“In the Middle East we are not facing just one obstacle when it comes to freedom of expression,” Ayman Mhanna, the director of Samir Kassir Eyes Foundation. “First of all, it’s a combination of non-democratic regimes, a very conservative patriarchal society where it’s very hard to challenge authority, and the extremely-present religious aspect defining people’s lives. When you have these three factors combined, showing any form of dissent — satire or any real challenge to authority — is problematic,” he said.
“In Lebanon, before the war, we did amazing things,” said Stavros Jabra, one of Lebanon’s most acclaimed cartoonists. “Then during the war we had to calm down a bit. Then after the civil war it became much worse. Much, much worse.”
Jabra told NOW he has been threatened many times after publishing his work. Now he takes 10 minutes every time he draws a cartoon to think about the consequences. “Everybody is afraid to tackle religion — cartoonists in the Middle East in general, and especially in Lebanon, where religion is the most sensitive topic,” he said in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. “You can draw terrorists with hoodies and guns, but you can’t draw political and religious leaders. We don’t fear the leaders, but their entourage. People don’t like you drawing religious leaders. You can’t attack religious leaders. If you do, they send you messages, they threaten you,” he said.
Many Lebanese cartoonists find ways to point to social problems without resorting to the use of characters. Armad Homsi, another acclaimed Lebanese cartoonist, has made this his label. “I don’t need characters in my work, because I don’t use bubbles, I don’t use speech,” he said. He also says that he rarely draws anything about religion, and instead sticks to the news. “Religion is a hot topic, especially in Lebanon. Here, everything is based on religion. But religion is not in the news every day; it’s everywhere, we live in it, everybody knows that.”
But when art is subtle, the threats are also subtle. “Now, with social media – Facebook, Twitter — people are free to express their opinions about the drawings. You have many people saying whatever they want. But it’s that moment when they reach for the phone to call you — when they bother to do that, you know that they’re bothering for a reason,” Homsi said.
Mhanna said that so far, in Lebanon and Syria, even the most courageous journalists have not outwardly attacked or challenged religion. In Lebanon, you can only make fun of the “official enemy;” namely, Israel. “Those who dared have been tried and silenced. It shows that you have a direct alliance between government authorities and religious authorities,” says Mhanna. In 1999, musician Marcel Khalifeh went to court for using the lyrics of a Mahmoud Darwish poem with a verse from the Koran in it, thus insulting Islam. The Dar al-Fatwa pressed charges, though the artist was later acquitted.
Mhanna also explained that it’s not just the alliance between the state and religious authorities that is dangerous in the Middle East, but also the censorship exercised by non-state actors who pressure state institutions and the media into censorship and self-censorship.
“But this is where it stops,” Mhanna said. “The reaction was never as violent as the one we saw in Charlie Hebdo.”
