Discourses of defense: Self and other positioning in public responses to accusations of corruption in Jordan

The apologia of Awadallah

Public apologia coming from public figures is described as the quintessentially speech act in political life where public figures seek to manage successfully a ‘spoiled’ personal and political identity (Tileagă, 2012: 67). This type of personal apologia in Jordanian public discourse is illustrated by the apologia made by a controversial public figure in Jordan, Basem Awadallah, who is a former Royal Court Chief and a former Minister of Planning. Awadallah has been long accused of selling the state assets and embezzling public funds while in office. The latest major accusation against him, to which he responded in a public statement, was that he sought to invest hundreds of millions of the country’s Social Security Corporation (SSC) funds outside the country. Awadallah denied the accusation through the following public statement:

Dear brothers and sisters,

I have been careful throughout my public service to listen to criticism more than to praise. I have been careful to respect all critical points of view and rectify mistakes, if existent, and there is none among us who does not make mistakes. Our constitution, which we all respect and abide by, stresses justice and equality among all citizens and that each citizen has the right to express their opinion. Every official has to heed and respect all views, even if they were critical, negative and harsh. This was my approach throughout the years in which I was honored to serve in the public sector.

Since I left public service on September 30, 2008, and until now, and despite the passage of nearly 10 years, no single week passes without me receiving a torrent of unjust accusations, some of which have taken a personal slant. I do not know the reasons, except for what some tell me, that the best way to gain popularity in Jordan [now] is to level accusations against Bassem Awadallah.

I have never been incapable of responding [to such accusations], but I have always believed that it is better to follow the [Islamic] jurisprudent rule ‘Evidence should be provided by the accuser and oath should be made by the one who denies [the accusation]’. But after I heard, in the last few days, the accusation that I had asked for the investment of hundreds of millions of Social Security Corporation funds abroad, which has been unfortunately spread by ministers and current and former members of parliament, I have been obliged to respond to these false and baseless accusations.

In fact, I have never been a prime minister, a minister of investment, or a minister of labor (who presides over the SSC). I have never interfered in any affairs of the SSC or in any of its investment plans; this has never been one of my responsibilities, and I challenge anyone to prove otherwise.

I call on every person leveling such false accusations to prove it, and to those who keep repeating and publishing these accusations, without verification of their accuracy, I say: [doing] injustice [to others] is darkness, and eventually only truth will prevail. We have all to realize that protecting our homeland, its security, its stability, and its progress, and enabling it to confront the difficult circumstances and challenges it is going through, cannot be accomplished by [empty] slogans and false delusions, but by diligent and sincere work and by seeking truth, justice, and unity, [moving] away from injustice, division, and disunity. I pray to Allah to save our beloved Jordan and our precious King, and help us avert all acts of sedition, both covert and overt.

As C. R. Ryan (2018) points out, talk about corruption pervades Jordanian political discourse and corruption has been the main focus and main complaint in Jordanian public life. This statement illustrates a response to accusations of corruption made against Awadallah, a public figure whose name has long been associated with corruption in Jordan, although this link has been viewed by some as part of identity politics in Jordan (Ryan, 2011). Awadallah begins his apologia by constructing and evaluating his own identity as a politician for whom public service is an ‘honor’ bestowed upon him, thereby positioning himself as a loyal and disinterested public servant. He further positions himself as a committed, constitution- and law-abiding professional politician who is aware of and recognizes others’ constitutional rights to voice their opinions and their right to criticize and evaluate the performance of a public servant. This construction of his professional identity, or his ‘role-based work identity’ (Caza and Creary, 2016) and the image of who he is as a professional (Slay and Smith, 2011) is exploited by way of countering discourses and positionings of misfeasance that have been projected onto him by the public and rejecting the projected discourse of corruption by referring to his commitment and expertise. This shows how deliberate self positioning takes place when someone intends to portray a particular identity usually in pursuit of a strategy or goal (Harré and Van Langenhove, 1991: 400–401; Van Langenhove and Harré, 1999: 24–25).

But rather than merely invoking his professional identity, Awadallah further brings the potential plurality of identities into his professional identity conversation (Caza and Creary, 2016). He further deploys both his religious identity and his national identity in order to position himself as someone who is guided by religious teachings and morality, and by patriotic concern for the progress and unity of his country. Thus, Awadallah attempts to ‘position religious faith as an inherent part of national identity’ (James, 2014: 25). This tripartite constellation of identities (professional, religious, political) is invoked by Awadallah as a legitimizing discursive resource in responding to the current accusation and by extension to previous accusations of corruption.

In terms of religious identity, Awadallah strategically employs texts from Islamic discourse and references to Islamic scripture, specifically hadith, that is, the body of collected reports of the Prophet Muhammad’s words and actions, which serve in this context as a means of both apologia and legitimation (Billings and Scott, 1994). First, Awadallah asserts that ‘there is none among us who does not make mistakes’, which intertextually echoes the Muslim prophetic tradition ‘All of the children of Adam [i.e. humans] make mistakes and the best of those who err are those who repent’. Allusion to this text serves to provide an implicit and preemptive legitimizing justification for any mistakes Awadallah may have made throughout his public service. Thus, he attributes any mistakes he may have made during his service to being a human rather than a civil servant or politician. Next, to justify not responding to earlier accusations of corruption, Awadallah calls upon a well-known prophetic tradition that is an established rule in Islamic jurisprudence, that is, البينة على المدعي واليمين على من أنكر, which in effect says that the onus of proof lies with the accuser and denial by the accused shall be supported by oath.

Another manifestation of invoking religious identity, and hence, lending authority and legitimation to his response, is the use of the expression الظلم ظلمات aḏ̣-ḏ̣ulm ḏ̣ulumāt ‘injustice is darkness’. This is part of a hadith warning against doing injustice, or ḏ̣ulm, to others as this injustice will turn into ḏ̣ulumāt or ‘darkness (pl.)’ on the Day of Judgment for the one who commits it, thus metaphorically, equating doing injustice to others with ‘darkness’, which is made rhetorically effective by the two words ḏ̣ulm and ḏ̣ulumāt having the same trilateral root ḏ̣-l-m ‘dark’. Awadallah thus implicitly positions himself as someone who has been wronged, and reminds others, through this intertextual reference to an Islamic hadith, of the divine punishment awaiting those who do injustice to others. These quotations of and references to sacred texts is consistent with research showing that, within the Arabic-speaking community in general, reference to the religious scriptures of hadith as well as the Quran is a common practice and a rhetorical strategy for argumentation across all topics, both secular and sacred, which serves as a means of supporting one’s position and invoking authority (Boutz et al., 2017).

The third religious reference deployed by Awadallah by way of projecting a religious identity in his response to accusations of corruption is his use of the well-known Islamic religious invocation أسأل الله أن يجنبنا جميعا الفتن، ما ظهر منها وما بطن ‘I pray to Allah to help us all avert [acts of] sedition, whether overt or covert’. This is a formulaic religious invocation in Islamic speech that is characteristically used by orators in Friday sermons. The Arabic term fitan, the plural of fitnah ‘sedition’, has religious connotations as it evokes times of civil strife and civil war in Islamic history, but Awadallah recontextualizes the term in his own (secular) statement to suggest that such ‘unjust’ accusations may lead eventually to strife and conflict, which he calls on God to prevent from happening.

Through all these religious references, Awadallah exploits sacred texts as ‘a source of incontestable wisdom’ and as ‘the wisdom of an unassailable authority’ (Boutz et al., 2017: 5, 19) that, according to Brown (2009), have historically served as a bridge of authority from past to present, linking later individuals and groups to the legacy of the Prophet. This exploitation of hadith by essentially a secular public figure further supports the view that religious texts are one component of cultural ‘tool kit’ of symbols, rituals and traditions from which social actors can draw to form strategies of action (Swidler, 1986). From a positioning theory perspective, Awadallah exploits ‘cultural moral orders’ in his response to accusations of corruption. Cultural moral orders refer to ‘the civilizational or cultural aspects of the society in which people live’ and ‘include moral opinions that go back to religious or secular codes’, such as ‘the Bible, Koran, or Talmud’, that ‘are all powerful reservoirs of values of what is right or wrong’ (Van Langenhove, 2017).

In terms of exploiting national identity to counter the accusations leveled against him, Awadallah positions himself as a patriotic citizen whose main concern is protecting Jordan’s ‘security, stability and development’ and ‘confronting the challenges facing the country’. This is conveyed in the form of hortatory discourse aimed at the evocation of emotional response in his audience (Bailey, 1983) prefaced by وعلينا جميعاً أن ندرك ‘We all have to realize . . . ’ which positions him as an expert who gives advice to others, thus implicitly positioning accusers as people of ‘empty slogans and false delusions’ while implicitly positioning himself as a man of ‘real work’. Awadallah deploys hortatory discourse built on truisms to conclude his response:

Protecting our homeland, its security, its stability, and its progress, and enabling it to confront the difficult circumstances and challenges it is going through, cannot be accomplished by [empty] slogans and false delusions, but by diligent and sincere action and by seeking truth, justice, and unity, [moving] away from injustice, division, and disunity.

This can be described as a ‘strategic use of consensual discourse’ that aims to ‘invoke consensual norms’ (Murphy, 1990: 24), and through such hortatory rhetoric, Awadallah shifts to the ‘role’ of a ‘guardian’ and a ‘defender’ of these norms and values.

Awadallah thus presents three identities in this part of his public response, which shows the polyvalence or multiplicity of identity and that each individual has the capability of combining several identities (Davies and Harré, 1990; Versluys, 2007). This shows that ‘the positions created for oneself and the other are not part of a linear non-contradictory autobiography’ (Davies and Harré, 1990: 49), and when the micro-level of conversations is considered, identities can shift in the course of one conversation according to the different story lines that are taken up (Davies and Harré, 1990).

Awadallah further resorts to ‘banal’ national discourse involving certain ideological habits of thought and mundane discourses that are reproduced on a regular basis, which is what Billig (1995) calls ‘banal nationalism’(see Culcasi, 2016). This is accomplished in his use of the formulaic prayer أسأل الله أن يحفظ أردننا الحبيب، ومليكنا المفدى ‘I pray to God to save our beloved Jordan and our worthy-of-sacrifice [i.e. precious] King’. In this invocation, Awadallah gives the abstract entity of Jordan as a ‘nation’ a human form through the use of ‘personification’, or ‘anthropomorphization’ (urdunnuna al-ḥabīb ‘our beloved Jordan’), which is one of the linguistic forms involved in the discursive construction of nations and national identity (De Cillia et al., 1999). He further expresses emotional attachment to Jordan, which functions as a basis for defining his national identity (De Cillia et al., 1999).

Awadallah equally prays for the King, referring to him as malīkuna al-mufadda مليكنا المفدى which literally translates into ‘our King who is worthy of sacrificing oneself for’. This is one of the honorific and glorifying formulas used in referring to monarchs in present-day Arabic political discourse. The use of this honorific serves to solemnize the value of the monarch and position the speaker/writer as a loyal servant who confers sublimity upon the ruler. Prayer for the King is further characterized by the use of the augmentative form for ‘king’ in Arabic, namely مليك malīk, rather than the unmarked ملك malik. The use of the augmentative here serves to glorify the King, which is part of the discourse of glorifying rulers and their deeds in Arab-Islamic tradition. The use of malīk further conveys connotations of ‘love’ and ‘affection’ toward the King, which reinforces the emotional attachment message conveyed by Awadallah in his prayer for Jordan as a nation. The use of mufadda ‘worthy of sacrifice’ as an attribute to the ‘King’ combines both metaphor and hyperbole, thus exploiting ‘figurative frames’ that are important in shaping public discourse (Burgers et al., 2016).

This discourse of banal nationalism is exploited by Awadallah to undermine and trivialize the accusations leveled against him, by positioning himself as someone who has allegiance to the country and the monarch, and therefore does not act in a way that is detrimental to national interests. At the same time, he implicitly positions his detractors as lacking such firm allegiance to the monarch and the nation. This suggests that a major way of responding to accusations of wrongdoing by public officials in Jordan is portraying these accusations as an attack against the whole political system, particularly the monarchy.

In constructing his position as ‘innocent’ in regard to the particular storyline of ‘accusations of corruption’, Awadallah resorts to victim discourse, or ‘victim playing’ (Berrocal, 2017), whereby he positions himself as a ‘victim’ of ‘relentless unjust accusations’. This is conveyed in the part of his statement reproduced here:

Since I left public service on September 30, 2008, and until now, and despite the passage of nearly 10 years, no single week passes without me receiving a torrent of unjust accusations, some of which have taken a personal slant. I do not know the reasons, except for what some tell me, that the best way to gain popularity in Jordan [now] is to level accusations against Bassem Awadallah.

Awadallah’s construction of victimhood in this part involves a positive self-positioning and a negative other positioning (Berrocal, 2017: 89; Harré and Van Langenhove, 1991, 1999). Awadallah initiates this victim image by constructing hyperbolic temporal frame ‘no week passes without . . . ’ so as to portray himself as a victim of persistent and relentless public accusations, which serves as a complaint speech act that reinforces his victim image. These relentless accusations are metaphorically presented as sayl ‘torrent’ to emphasize the magnitude and ceaseless nature of the charges. Awadallah thus employs an image-based rhetoric of ‘victimhood’, perceived to be more effective than concept-based rhetoric involving abstract and pallid content (Emrich et al., 2001). An indirect denial of these accusations is presented in the form of a rather sarcastic explanation that is attributed to others, namely that publicizing these accusations against him have become the best way to gain popularity in Jordan today. It is noted that in this ‘explanation’ Awadallah used a third-person reference form, that is, ‘Bassem Awadallah’, to refer to himself. As Land and Kitzinger (2007: 494) showed, ‘the use of third-person reference forms in self-reference is designed to display that the speaker is talking about themselves as if from the perspective of another’, which is supported by ‘except for what some tell me’. This serves as a deliberate positioning of those spreading the accusations against Awadallah as if behind his back, which renders them as ‘gossiping’, which constitutes a case of other positioning in their absence (Harré and Van Langenhove, 1991: 403; Van Langenhove and Harré, 1999: 27).

Furthermore, through this third-person reference, Awadallah aims to convey, from the point of view of others, that he is ‘well-known’. Through referring to himself by his (first and last) name, Awadallah ‘proposes that the viewpoint of the other(s) is based on knowledge of him in particular’ (Land and Kitzinger, 2007: 497). Awadallah’s selection of his name for self-reference contributes to his overall public efforts of defending himself by positioning himself as a ‘wronged’ public figure and indexing his political identity within the Jordanian public context.

The apologia of the Queen’s office

According to Hearit (2006: 166), institutional apologiae ‘emanate from governments, religious groups, or educational organizations’. Furthermore, ‘an institutional apologia is a secular remediation ritual that places the institution’s name and reputation on the public record as acknowledgement and accounting of the wrongdoing’ (Courtright and Hearit, 2002: 356). Apologetic discourse of institutions in the data was found in three cases in which institutions in Jordan accused of wrongdoing have attempted to repair their damaged images. One of these cases is the public apologia made by the Office of the Queen of Jordan in response to accusations of overspending on the Queen’s wardrobe:

A clarification from Her Majesty Queen Rania’s Office

2 January 2019

Following the principle of transparency and providing correct information, we would like to throw light on an issue that is raised every now and then through the social media and the mass media.

At the beginning of every year, some foreign blogs publish estimates of wardrobe spending by royal families around the world. We have also been accustomed to seeing inaccurate posts on social media platforms regarding the cost of what Her Majesty wears in her daily activities.

Last year, there was much reference to the estimates by the blog UFO No More of her Majesty’s wardrobe spending in 2017. Since those estimates were far from reality and far from the truth, we requested those in charge of the blog not to include Her Majesty in the blog’s annual estimates.

Over the years, there has been much talk about Her Majesty’s spending on clothing to the extent that it has become a subject of controversy and debate, which, unfortunately, has come at the expense of much of what Her Majesty has achieved in various areas. Perhaps it would have been better for our Office to clarify this issue in a direct and frank manner throughout these years.

Therefore, in recognition of Her Majesty’s interest in making the facts accessible to all in order to build their thoughts and opinions on them, whether positive or negative, we have decided to clarify some details on this subject.

With Her Majesty’s efforts to represent Jordan properly, she continuously seeks to maintain a balance between these efforts and moderate spending. In fact, the great majority of Her Majesty’s clothing is either loaned by fashion houses, presented as gifts, or purchased at preferential low prices. The estimates published by the blog, however, rely only on the ‘market value’ of the clothes, thus creating a false and counterfactual impression.

Some may find the concept of ‘loaning’ strange, but it is an internationally common and recognized practice among fashion houses as a way of highlighting their designs. Some may also find it unacceptable that a figure of Her Majesty’s status would accept this concept of ‘loaning’, but we do not publicize or promote fashion houses on any of Her Majesty’s social networking platforms, unless the [fashion] designs are Jordanian.

The focus on the clothes and spending of the wives of leaders in many countries and accusing them of extravagance, whether true or not, is not new and has been exploited as a political tool throughout history. Today, we see some in Jordan adopting this approach to portray Her Majesty as detached from reality, which is farthest from the truth. Those may therefore reject and question this clarification altogether in an effort to build a false public opinion.

Her Majesty is aware of the criticism being directed [at her] and has already stressed that criticism is an integral part of public service, that she supports and respects responsible criticism, and always takes criticism seriously and is responsive to it. However, today we find people [in Jordan] who do not find criticism enough but would go even further and fabricate information and resort to unfortunate mockery and ridicule in a way that contravenes the values of our Jordanian society.

We realize that this clarification may be out of the ordinary, but in the absence of facts, rumors and false information spread and wrong impressions accumulate, so we present these details to you and leave you the choice to handle them.

May each year be prosperous for Jordan

Her Majesty Queen Rania Office

This institutional apologia responding to royal wardrobe overspending accusations is primarily predicated on questioning the truth or accuracy of the accusation, and the motives and integrity of the accusers, implicitly calling into question the veracity of their discourses on royal overspending and positioning them as deceptive. Thus, the response is marked by employment of evaluative language aimed at contesting the validity of the accusations by means of attacking the credibility of the accusers (Hearit, 1996). The validity of the accusations is thus challenged by deploying descriptions such as ‘not accurate’, ‘far from reality and far from the truth’, ‘creating a false and counterfactual impression’, ‘farthest from the truth’, ‘build a false public opinion’, ‘fabricate information’, ‘rumors and false information’ and ‘wrong impressions’. At the same time, the Queen’s Office is positioned as adhering to truthfulness and adopting a discourse of veracity, which can be seen from the very beginning of the apologia where the accused present their discourse as emanating from the ‘principle of transparency’, providing ‘correct information’, clarifying matters ‘in a direct and frank manner’, and ‘making facts accessible to all’. This credibility is further corroborated by reference to and calling on a ‘common and recognized’ practice of ‘loaning clothes’ and ‘offering preferential prices’ by international fashion houses, thus attempting to lend credibility and authority to and justify the royal narrative on how high-end royal wardrobe is acquired.

A second major strategy in this apologia is questioning the motives of the accusers and recasting the charge by attributing it to a problem with the accuser’s motives (Hearit, 1996). Questioning the accuser’s motives is clearly communicated by treating the overspending accusations as a ‘political tool’ exploited against the royal family. To undermine its validity, the overspending accusation is situated within a continuing ‘historically known’ behavior, whereby such charges against female consorts of world leaders have always been used an instrument of political ‘expediency’. The Royal Office thus invokes the conduct of past accusers and detractors of royal wives to undermine the current accusers’ entitlement to accuse the Queen of overspending. This invocation of past conduct toward royal wives does not directly deny the truth of the accusations against the Queen but questions the accuser’s motives behind them.

Invoking ‘past transgressions’ and ‘past actions’ of royal family detractors in this way serves to undermine the present accusers’ entitlement to level the overspending accusation. This is similar to the practice speakers use to navigate the problem raised by complaints about their conduct when they ‘tacitly or overtly admit to having committed the transgression attributed to them while opposing the complaint at the same time’ (Pino, 2018: 195). Along the same lines as proposed by Pino (2018) regarding complaints, invoking royal family accusers’ past behavior of harboring a hidden agenda undermines the validity of their accusations by ‘highlighting an incongruence between their moral stance’, as embodied in the accusation, and ‘their moral status, as evidenced in their past behaviors’ (p. 195, original emphasis), namely, using such accusations for ulterior political motives.

This royal apologetic discourse thus employs a kategoria, or counter-charge that, first, challenges accusers’ (the blog and those who use its information) right to accuse by calling their ethics into question, and, second, challenges the validity of the charges by redefining them as a case of political machination. An explicit counter-accusation is thus directed against the accusers (‘adopting this approach’) with their political motive (‘to portray Her Majesty as out of touch with reality’), which is highly contested (‘farthest from the truth’). The counter-accusation that the accusers seek to portray the Queen as ‘out of touch with reality’ implicitly refers and responds to an implicit accusation, namely that the Queen’s wardrobe overspending is highly incommensurate with the economic ‘reality’ of Jordan, with its limited financial resources, debts, and chronic budget deficit. Hence, this unstated accusation implicitly positions the Queen as ‘withdrawn and retired’ from the country’s economic reality and holding herself aloof from the problems and agonies of the Jordanian society. Further accusations are leveled against the accusers by anticipating their ‘rejection’ and ‘questioning’ of the royal clarification, with the ulterior motive of attempting to ‘build a false public opinion’. This counter-attack ‘reverses the traditionally defensive posture’ of the royal apologia, whereby the Queen’s Office ‘assumes an offensive persona, making the accused the accuser’ (Hearit, 1996: 196, 236).

By linking the current accusation against Queen Rania to and situating it within the history of accusatory discourses leveled against royal family (female) consorts, the statement covertly seeks to trivialize the accusation of wardrobe extravagance by treating the accusations as habitual, recurrent and expected. This in turn serves to treat them as a continuation of a ‘mendacious’ accusatory discourse. Furthermore, invoking the history of accusations against royalties serves to invite the idea that these accusations should be treated and viewed as part of ‘cultural stereotypes’ about royal consorts, that is, that the ideas about queens as overspending, extravagant, or leading a life of luxury seem to be ‘part of the general moral order of our society’ (Van Langenhove and Harré, 2010: 470). Thus, the apologia implies that this information about the Queen’s wardrobe can be rejected as something based on known cultural stereotyping of the community of royal consorts. This, therefore, becomes part of the ‘many different cultural stereotypes about all kinds of people’ and these ‘stereotypes appear as positions and as characters in storylines in all sorts of discourses’ (Van Langenhove and Harré, 2010: 471).

In its efforts to counter the wardrobe overspending accusations, the royal apologia covertly reproduces orientalist discourse on Muslim women. The apologia invokes the Queen’s ‘efforts to represent Jordan properly’, and attempts to ‘maintain a balance between these efforts and moderate spending’. The Queen is an unveiled Muslim, that is, does not wear the traditional Islamic head cover, or hijab, that is taken to be symbolic of a Muslim woman’s identity. Combining this with her western wardrobe, she ‘performs a monarchical persona in acceptable western terms’ (Yessayan, 2015: 438). There is a strong suggestion here, therefore, that a ‘proper’ representation of Jordan in the world requires, and consequently explains and justifies, obtaining modern, high-end western wardrobe and style designed by international fashion houses. The apologia indirectly links the Queen’s (expensive) western clothing style with being modern and liberated, thus implicitly positioning the Queen as doing service to the nation by projecting a ‘proper’ image of Jordan, so ‘proper’ here is implicitly defined in terms of ‘feminine corporeal modernity’ whereby ‘the publicly displayed female body’ represents ‘a key part of the process of western modernity’ (Fluri, 2009: 242). Accordingly, an orientalist image is reproduced here confirming ‘western associations of a Muslim woman’s unveiling with modernity’ (Yessayan, 2015: 435, my emphasis). There is, thus, an implicit positioning of Muslim women wearing non-Western clothes, such as hijab, as ‘conservative’ and ‘backward’ and, therefore, not projecting a ‘proper’ representation of Jordan as a nation. Hence, there is a ‘logic of western supremacy’ (Yessayan, 2015: 438) embedded in this apologia on the Queen’s wardrobe. Furthermore, following Haddad (2016), this image positions the Queen as ‘an archetype of a western-imagined, modernized feminine, non-Christian other’ (p. 145).

Finally, as part of countering the accusations, the apologia describes the Queen as cognizant, respectful, supportive and responsive to ‘responsible’ criticism. This description serves to position the Queen, and the monarchy as a whole, as a proponent of discourses and practices of tolerance (Brown, 2006) and as ‘a governing system that is civilized and operates by western modes of liberal governmentality’ (Yessayan, 2015: 437). In contrast with this liberal, yet responsible, political identity, the other is positioned as transgressing ‘responsible criticism’ and practicing ‘fabrication’, ‘mockery’ and ‘ridicule’. This negative other positioning is accomplished by portraying the other’s behavior as a transgression of the ‘cultural moral order’ of Jordanian society, that is, its ‘reservoirs of values of what is right or wrong’ (Van Langenhove, 2017). The royal apologia thus plays the ‘role’ of a ‘gatekeeper’ of these values. This serves to implicitly position the accusers as ‘outsiders’ who do not observe societal values of avoiding fabrication, mockery and ridicule, which constitutes a case of ‘forced other positioning’ (Van Langenhove and Harré, 1999). The use of a hybrid discourse of western liberality and local values, and shifting between the global and the local, functions to create varying cognitive positioning and shifting positions of the apologia’s audiences. This hybridity further helps create a hybrid identity that appeals to both local and global audiences, which maximizes the persuasive effect of the apologia of defending the Queen, both internally and externally.