Cultures in conflict? How islamists cope with football

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. During the last project period we have had regular meetings dominated by the planning and implementation of a field trip to Saudi-Arabia and the planning of a workshop in Istanbul. Between 27 November and 4 December 2023 we carried out a trip to Saudi-Arabia, where phd candidate Kyra Angerer, an associated member of the group, conducted a lengthy fieldwork from August 2023 to May 2024. She organised meetings and set up an agenda for us with key persons in the Saudi footballing and sporting environment, in both Riyadh and in Jeddah. WE also made observations from two football matches, in Riyadh and in Mecca. Charlotte Lysa has carried out studies in the archives of the International Football Federation (FIFA) in Zürich. The activities so far in 2024 have been dominated by preparations for a workshop we are going to organise at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul 28-29 November. We distributed a call for papers in January with a deadline for submitting abstracts set to 1 March. We received so many abstracts (30) that we had to reject quite a few due for capacity reasons. Anyone who got their papers accepted have until 20 October to submit draft articles. We have offered and paid out support of 700 euros to participants in need of financial support. The purpose of the workshop is to discuss all the papers which will then be moulded and go through a review process with the intention of publishing an anthology about football and religion in the Middle East in the autumn of 2025. We are in a positive dialogue with Frontiers publishing, but a final agrement has not yet been made. The team are also working with organsing meetings with relevant people and mileus in Istanbul during our stay there. All members of the research group have regularly appeared in interviews in national and some also in international media, commenting on football in the Middle East. During the last year Utvik and Tuastad have particularly commented on the conflicts in Gaza and in Lebanon on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, sometimes with references to the identities and politics of football in the region.

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.