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Joking about Jihad: Comedy and Terror in the Arab World

2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/studamerhumor.7.1.0240

2333-9934

Emma Sullivan,

Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies

This beautifully written and well-researched book traces the tentative emergence of comic material addressing religious fundamentalism in the aftermath of the advances made by Islamists following the Arab Spring, the Syrian Civil War, and the rise of the Islamic State (IS). As the authors state, this material and “the [Arab] comedians and comedy writers responsible for creating it, crossed a cultural Rubicon, exposing Arabic-speaking media audiences to the possibility that things hitherto regarded as unspeakable or even sacrosanct could, at least under certain circumstances, be the object of mirth” (3).The authors are scholars of terrorism and political violence, jihadi culture, and anti-jihadic rhetoric, and so the book ranges widely and confidently across many disciplines, covering Islamic studies, humor studies, and Arabic popular cultural studies. They draw on a broad range of research methods including interviews and surveys, and their archive features collections of Arabic films, television series, plays, and novels, as well as extensive collections of visual and textual material from online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pastebin, and various blogs and forums. The interplay among these different research streams provides a palpable sense of rigor and diversity.The authors strike a notably measured tone throughout, initially established by their description of a move away from the project as originally conceived, namely, as a book that would celebrate “the bold humourists … in the Arab world” whose deployment of humor would “cut through the bombastic posturing … of IS, whose overblown self-image and distinctive iconography seemed to be an irresistible target for humorous subversion” (4). Recognizing the risk of falling into the kind of scholarship that idealizes “the social consequences of humour” and cheers on “the thesis of humour as the sword, shield and herald of liberty” (42), the authors instead try hard “to avoid mythologising laughter” (209) and instead insist on its ambivalence. The first chapter deals with what is effectively the institutionalization or, perhaps more accurately, the weaponization of that thesis: the use of humor by counterterrorism practitioners. Here humor is conceived of as a type of potential “precision munition” (50), and the authors trace the global network of governments, NGOS, and think tanks that seek to harness ridicule as the means to systematically “trivialise and belittle” (15) violent extremism. They surmise that much seemingly independent comic material addressing IS may, in fact, be supported by the state (24). This strategy helps puncture the fantasy of “folk humour” (5) as a grassroots defense against IS.Chapter 2 continues with this critical probing of the possibilities of humor, asking whether when we promote comedy “as a means of opposing violent extremism,” we are “talking about the activation of a fundamental instinct” or “the export of a particular value system” (41). They pick up on historian Daniel Wickberg's argument that the increasing valorization of a sense of humor in the nineteenth century went hand in hand with the emergence of political liberalism, to the extent that “Americans (and eventually the British) came to see their sense of humour as emblematic of their freedom and their self-appointed mission to bring it to others” (42).Chapter 3 examines the first tentative attempts by popular Arabic media to ridicule militant Islamists, attempts triggered by domestic jihadi violence. The authors start with Egypt in the 1990s (and examine the 1994 film The Terrorist in detail) and then move on to Saudi Arabia a decade later (using the long running series Tash Ma Tash as their key example). Both states pushed for antiextremist media as a means of combating radicalization, but, as was the case elsewhere in the region, the taboo against critiquing religion was such “that Arab popular cultural production only addressed the topic when it became all but unavoidable not to do so” (82).Chapter 4 asks where the taboos about mixing comedy and religion come from within Islam itself and suggests that “today's fundamentalist scholars seem broadly to concur with their ancient predecessors in seeking to endorse only the more limited and polite manifestations of Islamic laughter” (100). The authors maintain that while this humor “may appear stifling or narrow-minded to outsiders,” it is “reflective of a broader ideal of a society governed by the intimate bonds of family and friendship. It is thus instinctively hostile to abstraction and technologies of cultural reproduction, or to the impersonal institutions that require abstraction in order to effectively promote themselves” (111).Chapter 5 brings us to the Arab Spring and the “Arab Winter” that followed when “gains by Islamists of all kinds” and “the rise of the so-called Islamic State” led to a dramatic increase in comedy dealing with extremism (113). “Even the name that most Arabs use for [IS]—Daesh—rapidly became a joke” (114). The authors pick out three case studies: the Iraqi TV series Dawlat al-Khurafa, hastily assembled in the aftermath of the fall of Mosul; Dayaaltaseh, a group that creates Facebook videos founded by two young Syrian men who, already in exile in Turkey, had to flee again on account of threats to their safety, and the Jordanian comedian Hassan Sabaileh and his play Irhab Ala al-Bab (Terrorism at the Door), a form of “popular theatre” that seeks to create a participatory forum for discussing radicalization.The next chapter looks at jihadis’ own brand of humor, offering plenty of evidence of the black humor of people in close proximity to the possibility of death (151). The authors’ analysis has many intriguing dimensions; for example, they explore the issue of ethnic stereotyping within jihadi communities, reflected in jokes that represent Chechens as “particularly cold blooded” (159) and Egyptians as light hearted and witty (159). The authors suggest that it is possible to discern deeper concerns as well in this joking: anxiety that the jihadis “have trivialised the institution of Islamic martyrdom, that they have overstepped the boundaries of what sharia can permit, that they are less united than they like to claim and, perhaps, that they are more frightened than they care to admit” (169).Chapter 7 uses a survey to probe what so-called ordinary Arabs think about satirizing Islamist extremism. One notable but perhaps unsurprising conclusion is that those self-identifying as secular were more likely to laugh at jihadi jokes, while the Sunni respondents “were, as a group, distinctly less likely to say that they enjoyed jokes about groups such as Al Qaeda or IS” (179). The disquiet about satirizing religion demonstrated by this response and apparent throughout the book ensures that as “the immediate threat from IS has receded, the relevance of this topic has diminished, at least for now” (208), even though the satirical infrastructure remains. The book ends with a sideways glance to the West and at America's growing political divide in particular, suggesting that while “the idea of humour as a way of opening up a space for raucous dialogue is taking a firmer hold in the Arab world, … it seems increasingly like a naïve fantasy in the West” (209).