Shezomedia Is Done Getting Lost in Translation

For nine years, our Jordan-based media company has told stories from across the Arab world in Arabic. Now, we’re bringing the region’s dissident voices and debates to English-speaking audiences.

Osama Issa and Shezomedia team members.

Nine years ago, I started Shezomedia to create a space where people in Jordan and across the Arab world could question the ideas and assumptions limiting our lives.

I grew up in a conservative family where there were rules about what you could say, what you could question, and how you were expected to live. As the eldest of six siblings, I was supposed to help carry those expectations forward. Instead, I became increasingly interested in interrogating them.

In 2017, that instinct inspired a YouTube show called Schizophrenia. We used satire to talk about the contradictions and double standards I saw around me. We discussed religion, women’s rights, refugees, extremism, sex education, and individual freedom, often touching subjects people preferred to avoid.

To my surprise, people tuned in.

The show eventually grew into Shezomedia. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of people have followed our Arabic platforms, and millions have interacted with our work.

But building it came at a steep cost.

I left Jordan for the Netherlands in 2019 after receiving death threats. When I returned months later, I changed how we approached our journalism. Rather than confronting ideas head-on, I started thinking more about what happens when people are simply given room to speak for themselves.

That approach has guided much of our work since.

When Mahsa Amini was killed in Iran after being detained by the morality police, we covered the reaction her death sparked across the region. We have reported on what life is like for women and girls under Taliban rule in Afghanistan and spoken to young people about their views on the conflicts devastating the region. Those conversations often complicate what appears in the media. Young Arabs are sometimes portrayed as broadly supportive of Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis because they see them as “resistance” movements. What we hear on the ground is far less straightforward. Dig deeper, and you find young people questioning these groups and the idea that they speak for them.

These are the stories I rarely come across in the version of the Middle East presented abroad.

Much of the international coverage of this region focuses on war and authoritarianism, and those stories deserve attention. I have covered many of them myself.

But I also live here.

I see young people starting businesses and questioning ideas their parents took for granted. Women are making choices that would have caused enormous controversy in their families a generation ago. Filmmakers, journalists, artists, and activists are testing what can be said and what is possible.

I have witnessed some of those changes happen inside my own family.

Ideas that once seemed too taboo to discuss eventually became ordinary conversations. My own thinking changed too. That experience has stayed with me because it showed me how much can happen when people encounter an idea they had never seriously considered before.

For years, these conversations have happened largely in Arabic. I recently found myself troubled that so few of them traveled any further.

People outside the region want to understand what is happening here. Researchers, journalists, diplomats, nonprofits, and ordinary readers all look for insight into the Middle East. Yet many of the people actually having these conversations are separated from that audience by language.

That is why we are launching Shezomedia English alongside our friends at Middle East Uncovered.

I want people interested in the region to hear directly from those living there. Debates happening in Amman or Baghdad can reach someone who otherwise might never know they’re happening.

Our team encounters these stories every day. We hear young people talk about what they want from their futures—arguments about politics, religion, gender, work, and personal freedom. Some are heated and others surprisingly ordinary. Together, they tell you much more about where our societies may be heading than another distant description of the region ever could.

Publishing in English feels like a natural continuation of why my team and I started Shezomedia in the first place. I have spent much of my life questioning assumptions about how people in this region are supposed to think and live. Now I want to question some of the assumptions people outside the region carry about us too.

I am not interested in telling English-speaking audiences that everything they understand about the Middle East is wrong. I just want them to see a more honest, nuanced version.

For nine years, we have been having these challenging and rewarding conversations in Arabic. Now, we want more people to hear those voices and see the region through their eyes.

To support Shezomedia English, consider following them on Instagram. Read more about Osama’s founding story here:

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