Retelling other people’s jokes can have serious consequences, as two Moroccan journalists have found to their cost as they face charges of insulting Islam and offending public morality — and a possible prison sentence of up to five years.
The case against the Arabic weekly Nichane has serious implications for press freedom and highlights tensions between hopes for liberalisation and Islamist opinion outraged by what the magazine says was a harmless survey of the nation’s sense of humour.
Editor Driss Ksikes and journalist Sanaa al-Aji appeared in court in Casablanca on Monday to insist they had not intended to insult anyone or anything.
”We made no judgment on religion, politics or the monarchy,” Aji told the judge, according to the Mideast Online news agency. ”All I did is report to readers a phenomenon Moroccans are seeing in jokes and anecdotes.”
Nichane, popular with young readers since its launch last September, was banned by order of the Prime Minister, Driss Jettou, on December 21 when all copies were withdrawn from newsstands. The offending article was entitled ”How Moroccans laugh at religion, sex and politics”.
Nichane says its intention was simply to survey the jokes Moroccans tell in colloquial Arabic every day and that its sample was carefully selected to omit anything too racy. The only complaints were from readers protesting that the jokes were out of date.
Its problems began with a campaign mounted by an Islamist website, which carried posts attacking the magazine’s journalists as ”apostates and atheists”. Some also received death threats.
The Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists called the response by the Moroccan government ”exaggerated, disproportionate and absurd” and called for the dropping of charges against the journalists. The Casablanca state prosecutor said the article represented an attack on Islam and went ”against morals and customs”, according to the state news agency MAP.
The case comes as the North African country of 32-million people struggles to decide what kind of democracy it should become after years of cautious reform since King Mohammed VI succeeded his father, King Hassan, in 1999. — Guardian Unlimited Â