This study seeks to include, but move beyond what we call the "political barometer paradigm" that has dominated studies on football in the Middle East with a focus on the role of football as a provider of one of few arenas where youth gather, taboos are broken and protests erupt. What has not been sufficiently illuminated through the political barometer paradigm has been the depth of genuine cultural processes during football matches, how symbols have been invented and reinvented, interpreted and reinterpreted - how football may be an arena for the symbolic construction of cultural belonging.
Islamism, the belief that Islam should guide social and political as well as personal life, became a dominant ideological, social and moral force in the Middle East in the aftermath of the Arab defeat to Israel in 1967. Islamism has for nearly fifty years constituted not only the strongest political opposition movement in the Middle East, but also the strongest cultural movement. Yet Islamists have problems coping with popular quests for fun and entertainment. One example of this is football, the world's largest sport and tremendously popular throughout the Middle East, which has largely been regarded as morally corrupt by Islamist clerics. This lack of adaptation to both local and global football cultures alienate many Middle Easterners, especially young people. To overcome the crisis in the Islamist movement after the Arab spring in 2011, Islamists have to come to terms with the cultural challenges to their ideological hegemony in the area. This is thus a pioneering study of what is ultimately about the future of Islamism as the dominant cultural and political movement in the Middle East. In this study we compare how three Islamist currents, Neo-Shiism in Iran and Lebanon, Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia and Wasatism in Egypt, respond to football through three analytical fields: Theological discourse on football, local organization of football and spectator culture.
The past year has been characterized by follow-up work from a workshop we conducted at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul on November 28-29, 2024, with a total of 23 participants. Researchers were invited first based on submitted abstracts (after the Call for papers announced in spring 2024) and then papers that each had to submit a couple of weeks before. Many of the invited researchers are native to the Middle East region. We set up opponents for each submitted contribution and discussed all in plenary. We set March 15, 2025 as deadlin for the submission of draft articles. The year has therefore been characterized by work on the anthology from this workshop. We had offers from several publishers for publication, but ultimately landed on an agreement with the journal Soccer & Society . We have ended up with 11 papers that were sent for peer review during spring and early summer of 2025. We currently have some accepted aticles while some are in the second round of peer review. We expect to have all contributions ready for publication by the end of the year, with publication in Soccer & Society. during the spring of 2026. The contributions cover the MENA region well, with examples from Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Oman.
Project member Dag Tuastad has conducted three different fieldwork: 1) In Qatar 24.01-03.02 2) Israel 28.02-19.03 and 3) Egypt 20.04-15.05.
All members of the research group have been regularly in the national media with comments on relevant issues related to football in the Middle East . This year, as last year, the war in Gaza in particular has meant that Tuastad in particular has been interviewed in the national media weekly and occasionally daily.
PhD student Kyra Angerer, who is associated with the project (funded by USN), submitted her PhD thesis on women's football in Saudi Arabia in September, while Charlotte Lysa will have her book " Women , football and social change in Saudi Arabia" published on Bloomsbury Publ . 30 October this year. Idun Fjeld, who received one of our master's scholarships and participated in the workshop in Istanbul, completed her master's degree in social anthropology (UIB) with a master's thesis on women's football in Oman in the early summer. Charlotte Lysa was her co-supervisor.
This study seeks to go beyond what we call the "political barometer paradigm" that has dominated studies on football in the Middle East, much due to its role as an one of few arenas where youth gather, taboos are broken and protests erupt. What was not illuminated through the political barometer paradigm was the depth of genuine cultural processes during football matches, how symbols were invented and reinvented, interpreted and reinterpreted - how football was an arena for the symbolic construction of cultural belonging. Islamism, the belief that Islam should guide social and political as well as personal life, became a dominant ideological, social andmoral force in the Middle East in the aftermath of the Arab defeat to Israel in 1967.
Islamism has for nearly fifty years constituted not only the strongest political opposition movement in the Middle East, but also the strongest cultural movement. Yet Islamists have problems coping with popular quests for fun and entertainment. One example of this is football, the world's largest sport and tremendously popular throughout the Middle East, which has largely been regarded as morally corrupt by Islamist clerics. This lack of adaptation to both local and global football cultures alienate many Middle Easterners, especially young people. To overcome the crisis in the Islamist movement after the Arab spring, Islamists have to come to terms with the cultural challenges to their ideological hegemony in the area. The relations between Islamism and football has previously not been systematically studied. This is thus a pioneering study of what is ultimately about the future of Islamism as the dominant cultural and political movement in the Middle East. In this study we compare how three Islamist currents, Neo-Shiism in Iran and Lebanon, Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia and Wasatism in Egypt, respond to football through three analytical fields: Theological discourse on football, local organization of football and spectator culture.
