How do authoritarian regimes manage their image in the face of emerging independent media? While outright censorship and coercion are still important, states as different as China, Syria, and Egypt also attempt to co-opt dissent. In order to examine the politics of state-approved political criticism, I conduct case studies of films by two Egyptian comic superstars—Ahmed Eid and Mohamed Saad—from before and after the January 25, 2011 uprising. Through interviews with government censors and commercial filmmakers, and analysis of media debates about political satire, I argue that maintaining control over commercial films enables the state to counter critiques from independent media. The case studies of Egypt reveal continuities in political discourse before and after January 25, in addition to similarities with state-sanctioned media in other countries. Counterintuitively, political satire can sometimes reinforce authoritarian structures, as powerful groups attempt to manage criticism by working with cultural producers.

When low-level officer 'Azzam refuses to allow pariah officer, Ra'oof, to enter the mukhabarat building, Ra'oof explodes at the insubordinate young man. He pushes him to his knees and shaves his head in front of the other men as 'Azzam pleads that he was following dictates from above. Undeterred, he forces 'Azzam to take off his shirt and pants, then commands him to do push-ups, jump up and down, and slide across the floor on his elbows. As another officer pounds on him with a bat, 'Azzam breaks down. He takes hold of a gun, crying out that he has had enough of this humiliation. He shoots into the air, then at Ra'oof's feet. The encounter between Ra'oof and 'Azzam explores the links between violence and masculine dignity. 'Azzam's humiliation - his forced stripping and shaving - is a form of emasculation. This visual portrayal of how a peaceful man turns violent when his dignity is assaulted is one of the many scenes in "Minbar al-Mawta" (Platform of Death) that traces how peaceful protests in Syria transformed into an armed uprising. Political opposition through the lens of gender is not new to Syrian drama, which has a rich history of protests from the 1960s, and since the uprising, television drama has continued along this critical trajectory. In 2011, the number of miniseries dropped to 23, amid increased violence, but rose slightly to 26 in 2012. As drama creators prepared for the 2013 season, however, much filming was now confined to fairly calm areas such as Tartus and Sweida, and outside Syria, in particular, Lebanon, which has given rise to the new phenomenon of the Syrian-Lebanese production. Despite concerns, due to artistic flexibility, innovation, and willingness of some cast and crew to relocate, 34 miniseries were broadcast in 2013. I contend that these miniseries fall into several categories ranging from total detachment to complete immersion in the trauma and instability of war and bloodshed. In this paper, I examine several miniseries in the latter category: "Minbar al-Mawta," "Sukkar Wasat," "Watan Haff," and "al-Ha'irat." Each story offers us a rare glimpse into the multifaceted ways in which intellectuals have employed the politics of gender and dignity to engage in artistic forms of protest during the uprising.

At its final stages, the 1979 revolution of Iran ruled out multiple leftist revolutionary bodies, as well as moderate Islamists, to assume a traditional-fundamentalist Islamic identity. This came as a surprise to observers and the left-out participants alike. The highly modernized appearance of the urban scenery, as well as the prevalent intellectual discourses, made it hard to predict that the revolution would consolidate as exclusively traditional-Islamic in the end. Contrary to this feeling of unpredictability, an examination of popular media of the time reveals extremist tendencies of the masses, not necessarily presented in intellectual discourses and objective structural analyses. Turning to this largely ignored source of data, this paper has employed pre-revolutionary popular cinema to reveal the mass’s preparedness to break into violence in order to confront all manifestations of the prevailing modern social order. In this cinema, I have focused on the representations of traditional patterns of masculinity, i.e. the so-called Lutis and Jahels, and outlined their reactions to the fall of their familiar social world under the modernizing Pahlavi regime. These were arguably the most popular cinematic characters: male superstars rose to fame and were established in the Jaheli roles they performed. That is to say, the audience cherished the heroic traditional men that felt the unsettling wind of change and resisted it. I have performed a meticulous content analysis on more than 100 movies produced from 1958 until the Revolution, trying to rebuild the social world represented in them and the protagonists’ everyday practices. The study reveals that the modern social order is understood to radically contradict traditional masculine values of chivalry and responsibility for one’s neighborhood (as an extended family), and is confronted by the protagonists. More importantly, a transition to more violent forms of confrontation takes place as we move from 1958 to 1978. In the first decade of Jaheli cinema, Jahel condemns manifestations of modern ethos only in words: he tries to “talk” the community out of the emerging morality. In 1969, however, with the production of the seminal movie Qaysar, the confrontations decisively turn into revengeful violence. Given the popularity of Jaheli movies and self-identification of the audience with its male heroes, this radicalization reveals that a large part of the urban population has the potential to see fundamentalist Islam as the realization of its hopes and desires, a conclusion that eliminates the element of surprise attributed to the Revolution’s ultimate character.