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Egypt
By Magdy El ShafeeThis dark graphic novel delves into the corruption that was part of everyday life for many Egyptians under former President Hosni Mubarak, and the persistent effect of poverty on the common man. The Egyptian government banned the book when it was first released in 2008: government security forces raided the publishing house, seized all copies and forbid the company from publishing more, claiming that the book ‘offended public morals.’ The author and publisher were arrested, charged and fined. In 2013, the book had finally made its way back onto the shelves of at least one bookseller in Cairo.

UAE and Saudi Arabia
By Benyamin & Joseph KoyippallyBahrain-based author Benyamin’s book, written in Malayalam in 2008, is the fictionalized account of the life of an Indian migrant worker, abused and forced by his employer to work on a goat farm in Saudi Arabia for three years. The novel won the Kerala Sahitya Academy award and made it on the long list for the Man Asian Literary Prize. This year, the Arabic language translation was reportedly banned in both the UAE and Saudi Arabia for unstated reasons. The author was quoted as saying that he didn’t understand the ban, as the novel takes up the universal theme of human suffering.
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Morocco and all around the Middle East
By Mohammed ChoukriMoroccan author Mohammed Choukri grew up illiterate, and only learned to read and write at the age of 20. He penned his autobiography about growing up poor in Tangier, and included graphic descriptions of abject poverty, drug abuse, and being forced to steal and prostitute himself to survive. The book was first published in translation in 1973, but when it was finally published in Arabic, the Interior Minister of Morocco banned it from 1983-2000. As recently as 2005, Choukri’s text was removed from a syllabus at the American University of Cairo for explicit sex scenes, and censors confiscated the book from the Cairo International book fair in 2008.

Egypt and all around the Middle East
By Naguib MahfouzThe controversial novel was first published in serialized form in 1959 by the state newspaper Al-Ahram. When it appeared in book form the next year, it was banned because of controversy over its religious content. (Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck by two religious extremists in 1994, but survived.) The book remained banned in Egypt for almost 50 years (Georgetown Professor Elliott Colla likens trying to find the novel in 1989 to searching for porn) and was reprinted in Egypt in 2008. More recently, in 2011, award-winning Egyptian author Ibrahim Farghali’s book Sons of Gebelawi which draws on Mahfouz’s novel, was censored in Egypt and Kuwait
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Jordan
By Susan AbulhawaThis 2010 novel about a Palestinian family living in a refugee camp post 1948 encompasses several characters: among them, twins separated and raised by an Israeli family and a Palestinian family. While the book is available in Jordan in English, the Arabic translation was banned last year for apparent political reasons. The author conjectured in an interview that the censorship could be related to a line about a meeting between Jordan’s King Abdullah and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, but she isn’t sure.

Kuwait
By Abdullah Al BusaisBanned by the Kuwaiti Ministry of Information this month, Abdullah Al Busais’ novel takes up the topic of Kuwaiti life before and after the Iraqi invasion in 1990 and includes a character who is a member of the Bedoon, or stateless population of Kuwait. The book was reportedly banned for discussing a "sensitive political time period."