In a country that has not enjoyed complete freedom of speech; political satire in Jordan has been a way to criticize and make claims on the political authorities. Be it expressed in press as in weekly satirical newspapers, cartoons, prose, or as in recent times, on online social media platforms, satire in Jordan represents a unique genre that has reflected a local mode and attitude towards local and global issues. While it is not meant entirely to entertain, political satire in Jordan has been used as a way to poke fun at elected governments and their failure to tend to local issues. Like satirists worldwide, the Jordanian satirists aim to use pun and indirect references to tackle taboos, defy the restrictive laws that inhibit the freedom of speech, and convey public grievances.
Jordanian early satirists
While some might argue that the early accounts of political satire in Jordan can be traced in the works of Jordan's most well-known poet Mustafa Wahbi al-Tal nicknamed ‘Arar’, as he was cynical of the social life during the formative years of Transjordan, satirical writings in Jordan were only made available to the public in the 1960s. According to rare accounts on the history of the Jordanian political satire as found in the diaries of a Jordanian journalist named Faisal Mohammad Awkal, the writings of Fakhri Kawar were the first satirical accounts published in the old newspaper of Amman in the Evening in Arabic (عمان المساء). Qawar's writings included short essays that mainly leveled light criticism at the government. The newspaper, which inspired the later satirical journalism, came to clash with the Jordanian authorities in 1964, after publishing the diaries of Wasfi al-Tal on the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, followed by the diaries of Ahmad Shukeiri resulting in its final shutdown in 1975. Later in early 1980s, Qawar published the first satirical works including Farhan Farah Sae’ed's Diaries (which was adapted as a script for a soap-opera that had the same name mid-1980s), published in 1982, and “I am the Patriarch,” published in 1981.
Development of satire in 1980s
Political satire in Jordan started to develop in the 1980s in the writings of Mohammad Tomaliah, who introduced new elements to the genre in his column in Ad-Dustour, entitled “Eyewitness”. He employed a narrative style borrowed from prose using simplistic realism, cynical discrepancies, and a wide array of unusual similes.
Moreover, Tomaliah used brief sentences that drew clear images of reality and candid portrayals, allowing Jordanian specificities to stand out. He was unconventional and his articles were free of flowery language and clichés. According to critics, Tomaliah was a literary figure and not only a columnist.
In one of his articles, 'The Third Bullet", Tomaliah talks about his life saying:
"I personally have not lived yet, and my life is not yet worthy to write about: All my experiences are trivial although I consider growing up in the southern villages and moving during my adolescence years to live in "Al-Hussein Camp" an experience that gave me a special status: on one hand I am a Jordanian of a Palestinian descent, while on the other, I am Palestinian from a Jordanian origin. Therefore, I frame my political stance within this experience, more specifically within the "Catholic" relationship that govern the two peoples. Also, I do tend to think that my education in Baghdad and my father's death and burial in the beloved 'occupied' capital (in reference to Baghdad) made me an Iraqi: Sunni and Shia at the time time, and a Christian like a cross".
For more than 28 years (until his death in 2008), Tomaliah published hundreds of articles, and several books, which mainly talked and described the miseries of the destitute and the marginalized groups, including the people in his neighborhood in east Amman. Talking about the marginalized groups, Tomaliah breached the norms of the Jordanian journalism, which was formal and conservative when tackling social issues. Tomaliah did what many Jordanian writers would not have done at the time; namely criticizing the society, its norms, its traditions and even himself. It is widely argued among Jordanian critics that Tomaliah's satirical writings and the way they were received encouraged more Jordanian daily newspapers to assign a space for this genre.