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Football in the Middle East with Abdullah Al-Arian
147 Plays2 years ago
Abdullah Al-Arian joins host Yara Hawari for a timely discussion about football in Palestine and the wider Arab region, exploring the sport's historical and current roles in anti-colonial movements and grassroots organizing.
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Transcript
Sports as Political Tools
00:00:00
Speaker
When we look at, for instance, what Israel has done through sport is that it's not just using it to deflect attention away from ethnic cleansing, apartheid or occupation. I think what the Israeli state has explicitly tried to do is use it to end its own isolation and using its participation, even to further specific political goals.
Rethinking Palestine Podcast Introduction
00:00:23
Speaker
This is Rethinking Palestine, a podcast from Ashabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. We are a virtual think tank that aims to foster public debate on Palestinian human rights and self-determination. We draw upon the vast knowledge and experience of the Palestinian people, whether in Palestine or in exile, to put forward strong and diverse Palestinian policy voices. In this podcast, we will be bringing these voices to you so that you can listen to Palestinians sharing their analysis wherever you are in the world.
Football's Dual Role in Palestine
00:00:59
Speaker
Football or soccer is by far the most popular sport in the world and its matches and competitions bring people together and push people apart in ways unrivalled by other sports.
Qatar's Controversial World Cup Bid
00:01:11
Speaker
In this episode, we're taking a look at football in Palestine and the wider region, a timely topic because World Cup in Qatar has officially begun this last month following years of controversy. Indeed, when FIFA announced in 2010 that Qatar would host the 2022 Cup,
00:01:27
Speaker
There were accusations of corruption and vote buying. Since then, it has also faced intense scrutiny from human rights groups around its treatment of migrant workers, with some even calling it akin to modern day slave labor. The issue of this year's World Cup has placed football at the center of many political discussions. And this might be contrary to the popular discourse that sport is separate to politics. Yet across the region, we have seen football politicized in different ways for decades.
Guest Introduction: Abdullah Al-Aryan
00:01:56
Speaker
To discuss all of this and more, I'm joined by Abdullah Al-Aryan, an associate professor of history at Georgetown University in Qatar. He's the author of Answering the Cool, Popular Islamic Activism in Saadat's Egypt, and the editor of football in the Middle East, State, Society, and the Beautiful Game. He's also editor of the Critical Currents in Islam page on the Jadaliyeh design. Abdullah, thank you for joining me on this episode of Rethinking Palestine. Thank you for inviting me.
00:02:25
Speaker
So I want to start off with a question on the World Cup in Qatar. I mentioned some of the controversies that have arisen, and I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about them.
00:02:36
Speaker
So just by way of kind of background or context, you know, back in 2009, Qatar put this kind of very improbable, unlikely bid to FIFA among many other countries that were vying to be able to host the World Cup all the way in 2022. They made a lot of promises as far as preparing the country, paving the way, installing all of the infrastructure needed to host the games.
00:03:00
Speaker
And there were a lot of doubts, of course, and so when the actual bid was successful in 2010, in December, when FIFA announced that it indeed had chosen Qatar, there was kind of a mixed set of reactions. On the one hand, you had Qatari officials, people who were kind of part of the Qatar camp in terms of lobbying on behalf of the bid, people like Zain al-Din Zidane and others.
00:03:21
Speaker
who are all basically saying, you know, this is a massive achievement, not just for Qatar, but for the region. This is proof that the game belongs to everyone in the world. This is a World Cup for everyone, as the chairman of the bid put it in his own words.
Labor Rights and Qatar's World Cup
00:03:35
Speaker
So there was a sense of euphoria, at least among people within the region, especially who were kind of very excited at the prospect of having kind of the entire footballing world, you know, hosted in the region.
00:03:48
Speaker
And on the other hand, of course, you also had a wide range of reactions who were very incredulous, were in disbelief, were shocked and might even say disgusted by the outcome.
00:03:59
Speaker
of the bid, especially given some of the kind of open questions, right? So things having to do with the climate, right? So this is a summer tournament. It's always been played in the summer months. And all of a sudden you're talking about a place where temperatures reach something up to 50 degrees in July and August. Then there's a question of, it's the smallest country ever to be chosen. So where are you going to put all of these matches?
00:04:24
Speaker
We're talking about a tournament that's been hosted in places like Russia, Brazil, the United States, these massive kind of, you know, near half continents, essentially, where the matches are spread out hundreds of miles apart. Then there were questions about the actual infrastructure itself, right? There were no stadiums that were built, at least that could house, you know, matches with 60,000, 70,000 fans.
00:04:48
Speaker
And not to mention, you know, an airport, the hotels for all of the tourists coming in, the fans coming in for the matches. So there were so many different questions. And then, of course, we start getting into questions about the process itself. And people were wondering, you know, why the FIFA delegates would make this selection.
Qatar's Labor Reforms and Criticism
00:05:09
Speaker
Investigations revealed a lot of corruption within FIFA. There were accusations about bribery, about whether there was boat trading and
00:05:16
Speaker
all kinds of backdoor deals that were being made around this bid in particular. Some FIFA officials eventually would be not just investigated, but even charged with actual crimes in US courts. Nothing was ever definitively or kind of substantively proven specifically about Qatar's role, but there was certainly a lot of question marks that kind of cast a shadow over the entire process going forward, given those kinds of corruption allegations.
00:05:43
Speaker
Then we get into the kind of logistics behind how are we actually going to install all of these facilities, knowing what we know about the migrant labor governance system in the Gulf, the Kefala system, which has been in place really going back to colonial times when the British ruled over this region. There were very strict laws governing the sponsorship of workers, mostly coming from South Asia and Southeast Asia, some from East Africa as well.
00:06:11
Speaker
What was that going to look like with a country that was up against the clock that had a 12 year window to build a massive amount of infrastructure from the metro system to the airport to the seven stadiums that would eventually be built the dozens of hotels and all of that.
00:06:26
Speaker
would clearly put a strain on workers whose rights were not really being protected or even seen as kind of a priority in light of all of these things. So all of these questions, I think, you know, there were even kind of other things that we might consider a little bit more shallow or superficial having to do with the cultural differences, right? What does this mean for fans for whom
00:06:48
Speaker
You know, consuming alcohol is such a central part of the fan flowing experience in a country that more or less regulates or has kind of an outright ban on public drinking, for instance. So these were all the kinds of questions that were being asked at the time. I think in the initial stages.
00:07:04
Speaker
the officials behind the World Cup tended to take a very conservative approach, not really responding, kind of being a bit dismissive of a lot of the concerns, allowing the narrative to kind of be shaped largely in Western media outlets. The Guardian within days of the bid having been one, issued a column saying something along the lines of, you know, let
00:07:26
Speaker
the Qatar World Cup not be built on brutality. We've since seen many many other kinds of expressions like this. Over the years there's even been the role that Qatar's rivals in the region, especially the United Arab Emirates but also Saudi Arabia, leading up to the blockade of 2017 that they played a role in trying to kind of air out some of these
00:07:46
Speaker
you know some of these questions in the western press and so that's kind of helped keep on some of the criticism. There's been the role of human rights organizations like Amnesty International Human Rights Watch, more recently the International Labour Organization which was granted access and has opened an office in Qatar for the last several years. So all of these kind of different actors have played a role in terms of trying to
00:08:10
Speaker
get around some of these major questions. And of course, more recently Qatar has begun to at least address them more substantially. So we've seen things for instance like a complete reform of the Kefala system, allowing workers to change jobs without having the permission of their current employers.
00:08:32
Speaker
instituting a new minimum wage, having other kinds of external reviews in terms of having other, I've met with union leaders here, I've met with members from various other international labor organizations and institutions that have kind of been present in Qatar for the last several years who have noted the progress, but with caution, right? I think everyone has taken the attitude of the actual signals have been better
00:08:58
Speaker
But the implementation leaves a lot to be desired and we've seen still instances of evictions of wage theft of retaliatory deportations this is clearly still very much a work in progress in terms of the actual reform of the labor system and something that I think.
00:09:14
Speaker
you know, has to continue well beyond the World Cup. So even after the attention of the world shifts elsewhere, after these games, there has to be kind of a sustained effort. And for that reason, I think, you know, anytime we talk about change, whether on this issue or on many different issues across our region, it's never sufficient to just
00:09:32
Speaker
you know, distill them down to a pressure campaign coming from the outside, right? So this should not just be simply a matter of, you know, hysteria in the Western press or a temporary mobilization by kind of parachute activists from international human rights groups. This has to be something that has
00:09:51
Speaker
sustained through partners from within, from local actors, movements here. And I think there's been a failure to recognize who those actors are, that this is not simply just a question of the state waving a magic wand and then
00:10:03
Speaker
solving all of these problems, but rather kind of working with a number of different actors that all have a role to play. And I think that's been what's missing in this conversation as far as the role of the broader forces that govern the flow of capital and labor beyond this region and the extent to which that is kind of plugged into a system that is deeply faulty, exploitative, problematic on so many levels, rather than just kind of treating this situation in total isolation as kind of a case of exception.
00:10:31
Speaker
So I think that's something else that sort of has fallen short in the way that we've looked at these questions.
00:10:39
Speaker
Dalla, that last point you mentioned was incredibly important because we see this time and time again that there's a hysteria around all these issues and it's very, very shallow.
Colonial Legacy of Football
00:10:49
Speaker
And as you mentioned, there is a broader system of capital and labor that works to exploit people around the world and Qatar is simply tapped into that one of the many areas where these problems persist.
00:11:02
Speaker
But I want to turn to your latest book, Football in the Middle East, published by Hearst. In the introduction, you state that the story of football in the Middle East is inseparable from the broader experiences of the region and the destinies of its people. What did you mean by this? And perhaps you can give us some concrete examples.
00:11:21
Speaker
So this book was an edited volume that brought together over a dozen scholars that had a couple of meetings, discussed their various areas of interest and research, and went off and pursued a number of different projects. And so we collected these in 12 chapters that give a good overview, I would say, of a number of the more pressing or interesting and, in some cases, also historic issues governing the question of football in this region.
00:11:50
Speaker
And so one of the things that I wanted to make sure that we included, maybe this comes from my background as a historian, but I wanted to give that kind of deeper context. This is not just a question of something that just popped up because the World Cup happened to fall into Qatar's lap, you know, in the last decade or so, some would say undeserved. And again, going back to your first question, I mean, one of the things that we heard quite often is, well, you know, how can we give the World Cup to a region that has no football in history?
00:12:17
Speaker
And I think that among the many different questions, I think is the one that is kind of the least founded in terms of when we actually look at the story of football in the region, that it's so interwoven with so many other aspects of the region's history, not the least of which is the colonial experience itself, because of course this is how football is introduced. So to ignore the history that football has is to almost erase the entire colonial experience altogether, because it kind of signals this idea
00:12:45
Speaker
that this game, which of course was invented in Europe,
00:12:49
Speaker
which has expanded globally, which of course has roots in the settler colonies that Europe established, especially in South America, the other part of the world that we tend to associate with the game.
Football and National Identity
00:13:00
Speaker
But then it kind of erases that entire relationship that the Middle East has had with colonial powers. And so if we actually look back at the origins of the game's introduction, it really comes along as a product of colonial education and the idea of kind of instilling
00:13:16
Speaker
structure, discipline, physical fitness as a means of creating these modern citizens, especially among the elites, the modern Western-oriented elites within different Arab societies. And so this was very much part and parcel of what
00:13:33
Speaker
colonial rule did. We know a lot of course about colonial education in terms of the kind of various school subjects. We tend to focus less on physical education, but certainly football as a sport was meant to be kind of a force of modernization among other things. But I'm always quick to point out in these discussions is the fact that just because this was imposed in such a way does not mean that it doesn't eventually take on the life of its own. And I think this is always true of popular culture.
00:13:58
Speaker
that it adapts it shifts it it kind of manifests in various forms and we see that not necessarily just among the elites but among kind of the broader societies in the middle east that when the game kind of reaches them you know they they kind of redefine it in ways that are much more suitable to their own identities to their own environment to their own societies and over time it becomes actually a force that then
00:14:22
Speaker
allows for the kind of building of solidarity networks of organization in the anti colonial nationalist struggles and so we see this in places like Egypt, where the creation of the Egyptian League coincided with the establishment of
00:14:37
Speaker
a class of Egyptian elites that was waging its fight for independence. We see it, for instance, in a place like Algeria in the late 1950s, where the FLN, which was fighting the Algerian revolution against France, established as a team in exile, made up of mostly Algerian players coming out of the French lube,
00:14:55
Speaker
who decided to basically leave, give up these really lucrative and successful careers to fight for the independence of their home country. And so they established this FLN traveling team that went around the world playing friendly matches against other national sides to raise awareness about the revolution in Algeria. In fact, it outraged the French so much that they lobbied FIFA to punish any national team that played against the FLN at the time.
00:15:20
Speaker
And so we see the way that football kind of becomes interwoven within the anti-colonial struggles, the development of national identities once all of these countries become independent. So for instance, even in a place like Qatar, the National League existed almost a decade before Qatar was even independent. So it has even deeper roots than the country's independence. And again, it's seen as a means of organizing yourself politically in a way
00:15:46
Speaker
by having the experience in terms of organizing clubs, leagues, competitions, all of the kind of political, social, economic aspects that go into organizing a sport within a national context play a very significant role then going forward. Fast forward then to just the last kind of decade or so, we see that it also played a role in the uprising of 2010, 2011 and beyond. And so in a place like Egypt, I'm sure many of us heard the stories about the ultras, right? The fan groups,
00:16:15
Speaker
for various clubs, whether Ali or Zamalek and Cairo, who stood firm in the face of Hosni Mubarak's security forces who attempted to crack down on the anti-authoritarian protests that were happening at the time. So there's a sense that there are spaces within societies, especially within this kind of authoritarian context in which
00:16:35
Speaker
It's not really safe to organize in an explicitly political fashion, and so people rely quite often on other social bonds and cultural bonds that they have, including things like being fans of football clubs and being able to use those bonds of solidarity as a means of not just discussing politics openly, but then also mobilizing when the opportunities demand it or call for it.
Football in Modern Protests
00:16:58
Speaker
We saw it most recently, and there's a chapter in the book actually specifically about Algeria in the 2019 hadak movement in which
00:17:05
Speaker
They used, you know, the themes, the anthems, the songs, the chants, as well as the kind of the art displays from their football matches in the protest against Bottefliche's attempt to run for a fifth consecutive term. And so once again, we see that these things tend to go kind of hand in hand. And I think, you know, for most of us listening, we sort of take for granted the idea that football has power to mobilize, but I think we've certainly seen its impact very much in the region over the last several decades.
00:17:36
Speaker
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00:17:51
Speaker
I think that's such a significant contribution of this book that you will lay out both the colonial origins of the sport in the Middle East, but also how it's been used as a space to mobilize against oppression.
Discrimination in Lebanese Football
00:18:05
Speaker
When I was reading it, I saw something that was both interesting and absurd at the same time in Lebanon.
00:18:11
Speaker
You write that the provision was passed in the late 1990s for goalkeeper to be added to the list of nearly 40 professions from which Palestinian refugees have been barred from. And the discrimination doesn't stop there. The Lebanese Football Association has quotas on the number of Palestinian players, higher registration fees and other kinds of restrictions.
00:18:34
Speaker
And I think this really demonstrates, par excellence, how football can be used as this political tool of furthering repression and discrimination. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
00:18:46
Speaker
So this actually comes out of a chapter by Daniel Reichert, who was a professor at the American University of Beirut at the time. So he did some kind of on the ground research about the situation of Palestinian footballers in Lebanon. And he writes about what he calls the triple periphery, right? The idea that Palestinians there, on the one hand, are extremely limited from playing in the Lebanese League. They're also excluded from being able to play for their national side because, of course, Palestinian refugees are not allowed to go back to Palestine.
00:19:15
Speaker
They're denied that right of return so they can't actually compete with the national team. And then, of course, because they're refugees, they also can't really go anywhere else, right, that their mobility is completely limited from being able to say, you know, go play in leagues in Africa or Asia or Europe.
00:19:30
Speaker
And so that kind of triple periphery, as he calls it, I think in many ways, is a emblem of exactly what it means to be a Palestinian refugee in the Lebanese experience. I think this is a useful kind of sobering take, given what I just said in my last answer about the power of football to mobilize and to change, that we also have to recognize that in many instances, popular culture, or in this case, sport or football in particular,
00:19:57
Speaker
can also just kind of hold a mirror up to the realities that exist within a society. And so what happens in the Lebanese case is very much a reflection of what the Palestinian experience is like in Lebanon writ large. Across the broader society, we know that Palestinians, many hundreds of thousands of them who were forced out of their homeland ethnically cleansed in 1948,
00:20:18
Speaker
who ended up in Lebanon have been subject to some of the worst conditions of any refugee population anywhere, really. Forced to live in camps, denied citizenship, but even denied very basic rights for their survival in the Lebanese context. Embroiled, of course, in the civil war beginning in the mid-1970s, and so seeing their rights diminished even further as a result of the kind of very tenuous sectarian balance that exists already within the Lebanese state. And so then the situation of
00:20:47
Speaker
Football becomes really interesting as a way to kind of see further the extent to which that discrimination exists and so, whereas initially they were allowed to compete within the Lebanese League. Later on, they were considered to be foreign players right so if every team has a quota of how many players are allowed to have.
00:21:04
Speaker
that are not of Lebanese origin than Palestinians, despite the fact that in almost every case they're born and raised within Lebanon. So we're not talking about foreign players who are imported from other countries, but rather Palestinians who live within Lebanon, and yet they're still put into this category. Later that was altered slightly to allow for at least one Palestinian player to be counted within the local players, but yet any additional players after that would then be considered to be foreign players.
00:21:32
Speaker
The goalkeeper provision is really an interesting one because, on the one hand, again, as you mentioned, you know, there's already so many professions that Palestinians in Lebanon are not allowed to have right so they're not allowed to work in medicine or in law and a number of other.
00:21:47
Speaker
especially white-collar professions, there's laws explicitly banning them from such jobs. And at the same time, all of a sudden, you had this flurry of Palestinian goalkeepers throughout the 1990s, and all of a sudden, the Lebanese national team was concerned that there weren't enough Lebanese competing for the goalkeeper position of the national team, and so they decided to simply banish Palestinians from being able to play that role in the leagues in order to encourage more Lebanese to take on that position.
00:22:17
Speaker
But again, it just ends up being kind of incredibly discriminatory and very much a sign of what we've kind of come to see from the Lebanese state in terms of its discrimination against Palestinians.
BDS Movement and Sports Boycotts
00:22:28
Speaker
So staying on the topic of Palestinians and football, there's also a chapter in this book about how the BDS movement has used football to mobilize against Israeli apartheid. Could you tell us a bit more about this chapter?
00:22:40
Speaker
Yeah, so again, this is another colleague who's written a chapter in the book specifically on the question of BDS and football. And that's Aubrey Bloomfield, who's looked at this question extensively. And again, I think there's a lot that we can take away from past experiences. So there's always questions about boycott. There's always questions about what is the role of politics in sport.
00:23:02
Speaker
That's something that isn't really new. And I think to a certain extent, the sports boycott of apartheid South Africa provides a really interesting model. In another chapter, I go back to the 1950s and 60s when Gamal Abdel Nasser decides to spearhead the establishment of the Confederation of African Football. You know, there's only four countries that are invited to compete at the first African Cup. One of those is South Africa. But once they insist on fielding an all white team and preventing any black players from competing
00:23:31
Speaker
With the South African football team immediately half makes a decision to banish the team and in fact it's never reinstated for several decades until the fall of apartheid and so half basically went on and existed for many decades without South Africa's participation because.
00:23:48
Speaker
It was very explicit in its endorsement and use of apartheid. And I think there's kind of a model there that a number of activist movements and organizations, and of course, all of Palestinian civil society, which has endorsed the BDS movement going back well over a decade, have all kind of come together and basically endorsed the same kind of position vis-a-vis the Israeli state in its competitions or its participation in international competitions.
00:24:13
Speaker
And again, there's several elements to this question, one of which I think is interesting is people who've been looking more recently at the question of sports washing. This has become kind of a recent buzzword, the idea that states are using their footballing interest or their sports interest as a means of deflecting attention from their most abusive policies. So I think from what I can tell, at least, it seems like sports washing is actually
00:24:38
Speaker
You kind of short changing the conversation a bit because if we're talking purely about the idea of using sports as a deflection or distraction. I don't think that actually quite captures what many of these states are doing Saudi Arabia included, but also when we look at for instance what Israel has done.
00:24:53
Speaker
through sport is that it's not just using it to deflect attention away from ethnic cleansing, apartheid or occupation. I think what the Israeli state has explicitly tried to do is use it to end its own isolation and using its participation even to further specific political goals. And so one of the examples is when Israel planned to play the Argentinian national football team in the lead up to the 2018 World Cup. And so this was supposed to be kind of a warm up friendly match for Argentina.
00:25:22
Speaker
It was scheduled to be played, I believe, in Haifa or somewhere else, and then at the last minute. And again, this was just weeks after the Trump administration had moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, thereby kind of cementing the US acceptance of Israel's illegal annexation of the city. And so the Israeli Football Association moved the match,
00:25:43
Speaker
to Jerusalem to be played there almost as a means of yet again affirming kind of its sovereignty over the city and due to a massive pressure from campaign from activists from within Argentina from within Spain where of course Argentina star Leo Messi plays
00:26:00
Speaker
and from around the Arab region and even from within Palestine. Eventually, the Argentinian national team pulled out of playing in that match. In fact, the same thing happened once again this year in 2022. Another friendly match was canceled as a result of Israel's actions toward Palestinians. So I think it's crucial to see the extent to which this isn't simply about deflecting the actions, but in fact, sport has been used quite aggressively, in fact, as a means of cementing certain claims.
00:26:27
Speaker
The same can be said, for instance, about Puma, the sportswear company that, of course, has been sponsoring clubs in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. And of course, there's a massive boycott campaign of Puma because this only serves to legitimize the illegal annexation and appropriation of Palestinian land.
00:26:47
Speaker
And so I think the BDS movement in this regard has kind of found a way to position itself at least as a means of trying to kind of shine a light on some of these abusive practices rather than allow the state to kind of deflect attention or even worse yet to affirm its sovereignty over territorial claims or to shrug off any human rights abuses through the kind of normalization that comes with playing against outside opponents or even bringing in kind of a major
00:27:15
Speaker
a sportswear brand like Puma into the settlements.
Football: Oppression and Resistance
00:27:20
Speaker
Thank you so much Abdullah. You've made me think about football in a completely different way and I think you've given our listeners a really important insight into how football has been used in the Middle East, not only by oppressive regimes but also those who tried to mobilize against his regimes. Thank you so much for joining me on Rethinking Palestine and we hope to have you back very soon.
00:27:44
Speaker
A pleasure, thank you for having me.