Shifting Sands

Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa

James M Dorsey

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9789814689786
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Middle East and North Africa are experiencing the most fundamental transition in their post-colonial history. It is a transition that is changing the borders of nation states as well as their political and social structures. Conflicting visions of what those structures should look like have ensured that transition will take years, and these deep-seated differences have ensured that the transition process is volatile, brutal and bloody. The balance of power shifts like quicksand.

Shifting Sands: Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa is a compilation of essays that constitute a first stab at exploring the importance of sports in general and soccer in particular in the political, social and cultural development of the Middle East and North Africa since the beginning of the 20th century. In doing so, the book provides a new, fresh and unique perspective that contributes to understanding the turbulence sweeping the region that is fundamentally changing its geopolitics and political and social structures.

Contents:

• Introduction
• Street, Shrine, Square and Soccer Pitch, Comparative Protest Spaces in Asia and the Middle East
• Reflections on the Revolutions in the Arab World — A Response to Ali A Alawi
• Facing One's Demons: The Egyptian Military and the Brotherhood at a Crossroads
• The War on the Islamic State: A Purely Military Response to Societal Problems
• Hitting Militants Where It Hurts, Development Is the Way to Fight Global Terrorism
• Israeli-Palestinian Peacemaking: A Paradigm Shift
• A Region in Turmoil: Threats to Gulf Energy and Shipping
• Turkey: Caught between A Rock and a Hard Place
• Wahhabism versus Wahhabism: Qatar Challenges Saudi Arabia
• A Decade of Defiance and Dissent, A Wake-up Call for Sports
• Soccer versus Autocracy
• The 2022 World Cup: A Potential Monkey Wrench for Change
• How Qatar Is Its Own Worst Enemy
• Asian Football: A Cesspool of Government Interference, Struggles for Power, Corruption and Greed
• Football: A Sporting Barometer of European Integration Policies

Readership: Scholars as well as related media covering the regions of Middle East and North Africa, social movement, sports, and political and religiously motivated violence.
Keywords:Middle East;North Africa;Political Violence;Sports;Governance;Egypt;Qatar;IslamReview:0

Soccer: A Key Player in Regional Development

Chapter One

Soccer: Moulding the Middle East and North Africa*

Introduction

No study, analysis or history of modern society is complete without a focus on the nexus of sport, society, culture, politics and development. And the power of this nexus is nowhere more evident than in soccer — the world’s most global cultural practice. Through their involvement in soccer, governments, NGOs, players, managers and fans define who they are as well as who they think others are. This is particularly true in the Middle East and North Africa where soccer has played a key role in the struggle against colonialism and for independence, national identity formation, assertion of power and resistance to autocracy. Yet, research into the role of soccer in the development of the Middle East and North Africa since the late 19^th century, and most recently in this decade’s popular uprisings, is at best nascent.¹

“The study of sports, and football in particular, arguably the most popular from of cultural performance in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East, has much to add to our current understanding of the social, political and cultural history of the region,” said historian Shaun Lopez in a journal article lamenting the failure of Middle East scholars to include sports in their research.² That gap in scholarship is all the more stunning given “the seminal importance of football and other sports in the region or the central role athletics plays in the formation of national identity in most Middle Eastern and North African countries.”³

Political scientist Victor D. Cha put Lopez’s assertion into a far broader context; the failure of international relations research to recognise the importance of sports in the relations between nation-states and the way people interact on the international stage. “The study of international relations purports to explain how nation-states and individuals interact around the globe. Yet one major area of such interaction — international sport — remains exceedingly understudied. This in spite of the fact that countries have gone to war over sport, fought for sovereign recognition through sport, and that citizens around the world have it as a daily part of their lives. Indeed it is astounding that phenomenon that matters so much has been so little studied by a field that purports to explain relations between states and humans around the world…. If the operative question is: How does sport ‘fit’ into our understanding of world politics? The bottom line is that the existing literature offers no clear or consistent answers,” Cha wrote in an effort to develop a theory of sports and politics.⁴

This study is a baby step effort to start filling the gap. It builds on the work of scholars who positioned soccer as a pillar of popular culture that makes it a focal point of politics,⁵ a social construct shaped by those involved in the game,⁶ and a reflection of how a society models existential, political and moral issues.⁷

Maintaining a fiction

Sport and politics have intersected globally throughout history. Yet, politicians and sport officials insist on maintaining the fiction that the two are separate despite the fact that nations employ sport to project themselves while fans display deep-seated passion and play sometimes an independent political role and sometimes a partisan one in association with political factions. Sport expresses national identity as well as that of different groups in society. It reflects how a nation, people or group sees itself and how it wants to be seen. Success in sport validates a group’s place in society, a nation’s place in the world and in an era of globalization a country’s ability to wield soft power.⁸

Sport also has the potential of becoming an engine of social and political change. The awarding by world soccer governing body FIFA to Qatar of the right to host the 2022 World Cup has already forced improvement of the material living and working conditions of foreign workers who constitute a majority of the population. Potentially, it could transform the political structure of a country whose politics are dictated by the fact that Qatar’s citizenry accounts for less than 15% of the population. Sport-driven change in the Gulf state would follow in the footsteps of the 1988 Olympics that helped fuel South Korea’s transition from an autocracy to a democracy and environmental change in China as a result of the 2008 games.

By the same token, sport as a venue for protest and a domestic policy tool populates human history. Already in 5^th century Rome, support groups identified as the Blues, Greens, Reds and Whites, in the absence of alternative channels for public expression acclaimed a candidate slated to be installed as Rome’s emperor in games dominated by chariot racing.⁹ Much like modern day militant soccer fans or ultras, they frequently shouted political demands in between races in a bid to influence policy. By allowing them to do so, Roman emperors recognised the sports arena as a platform for the public venting of pent-up frustration and anger as well as a listening post that allowed them to take early note of public sentiments and grievances.

In doing so, they set a trend that has since proven its value. In today’s modern world, soccer pitches are frequently viewed as barometers of the public mood and indicators of political and social trends. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) routinely attends Middle Eastern and North African matches to glean clues as to where a country is headed.¹⁰

Rome serves further as an early example of the impact of fan power. That was most evident in the 532 AD Nika revolt, the most violent in Constantinople’s history, when the then dominant Blues and Greens rioted for a week, destroyed much of the city, sacked the Hagia Sophia and almost succeeded in forcing Byzantine emperor Justinian I to vacate his throne.¹¹

The identification through patronage and micromanagement of modern day Arab autocrats with soccer emulates the Romans’ use of games and sports to solidify their power. Arab autocrats however unlike their Roman predecessors were determined to prevent soccer clubs from becoming arbiters of political power. The Greens and the Blues and their fans in 5^th century AD games were the Roman predecessors of today’s Middle Eastern and North African soccer fans who expressed similarly deep-seated passions.

However, in contrast to the Romans, giving fans and the public a say in the choice of a leader, would have been unthinkable in contemporary autocratic Arabia. It would have given the public a degree of sovereignty and undermined the position of the ruler as the neo-patriarchic, autocratic father in the mould of Palestinian–American scholar Hisham Sharabi’s who characterised autocracies in the Middle East and North Africa as expressions of neo-patriarchy.¹²

A neo-patriarchic autocrat, according to Sharabi, projects himself as a father figure who franchises his authority at different levels of society. The leader is in effect the father of all fathers at the top of the pyramid. Arab society, according to Sharabi, was built around the “dominance of the father (patriarch), the centre around which the national as well as the natural family are organized. Between ruler and ruled, between father and child, there exist only vertical relations: in both settings the paternal will is absolute will, mediated in both the society and the family by a forced consensus based on ritual and coercion.”¹³

In other words, Arab regimes irrespective of whether they were revolutionary or monarchies frequently run as family businesses franchised repression so that society, the oppressed, participated in their repression and denial of rights. Lebanon, a conglomerate of delicately balanced ethnic and religious rivalries, was the exception that confirmed the rule. In the words of Egyptian journalist Khaled Diab quoted by journalist Brian Whitacker in a book exploring the nature of Arab society, Egypt’s problem prior to 2011 was not simply an aging President Hosni Mubarak with little to show for himself after almost 30 years in power, but the fact that “Egypt has a million Mubaraks” including many soccer players who saw the ruler or the power behind the throne as a father figure.¹⁴

Going back more than half a century, Egyptian journalist, writer and activist Salam Moussa recalls that the handlers of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the military officer who in 1952 replaced Egypt’s monarchy with an Arab nationalist regime, would order students at schools he visited to address the leader as ‘baba’ or father. “It was an overt and expensive act of defiance for a boy to use the more traditional “Siadat El Rais (Mr. President)” as a greeting, even if (he) was beaming while shaking the (father’s) nicotine-stained fingers,” Moussa reminisces.¹⁵

Sharabi’s concept of the neo-patriarchic father figure is rooted in the idea of the mother and father of a nation that harks back to the Arab struggle for independence in the early 20^th century. Leaders then as now projected themselves as parents obliged to raise their children.¹⁶ Saad Zaghloul, the leader of Egypt’s nationalist Wafd party, and a founder of crowned Cairo soccer club Al Ahli SC as a bastion of anti-monarchical republicanism was at the time his country’s father. His wife Safiyya was Egypt’s mother in the years that Saad was exiled by the British. Al Ahli was the launch pad for the 1919 revolution sparked by Saad’s exile. It forced Britain 3 years later to grant Egypt independence.

Soccer was for neo-patriarchic autocrats the perfect tool. Their values were values widely projected on to soccer: assertion of male superiority in most aspects of life, control or harnessing of female lust and a belief in a masculine God. The game’s popularity, moreover, made it the perfect soft power tool to wield transnational sporting influence in an era of decolonisation followed by a Cold War in which sporting powers like the United States and the Soviet Union were focussed on the Olympics rather than the World Cup and subsequent globalisation.

Sharabi’s assertion that Arab regimes exploited cultural patrimonial values to replicate authoritarianism throughout society and ensure that the oppressed participated in their repression and denial of rights builds on French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault’s notion that institutions of power make revolt inconceivable by turning the public into active participants in their own subjugation.¹⁷

As a result, neo-patriarchy framed the environment in which militant soccer fans turned the pitch into a battlefield. Arab autocrats like toppled Egyptian and Tunisian presidents Mubarak and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, had no intention of risking a repeat of Justinian I’s experience. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction — Setting the Scene
• About the Author
• Soccer: A Key Player in Regional Development
• Soccer Pitches: A Middle Eastern and North African Battleground
• The Battle for Women’s Rights
• The Qatar World Cup: What Legacy?
• Power, Corruption and Greed
• Index