World Cup
Instead of imitating the former colonial powers, the occasion may decolonize biased thinking about Arab and Muslim cultures.
Qatar will soon make history. On Sunday, it will be the smallest country to host the world’s biggest sporting event. To appreciate the contrast, think of the vast countries that have hosted the previous two editions of the FIFA World Cup: Russia and Brazil.
While the “soft power” and “smart power” in Qatar’s diplomatic stock have been credited by many for this moment, the World Cup deserves to be viewed through more than just the prism of foreign relations. As postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak have argued (PDF), the Euro-American mind’s eye has long dictated what is “good” while deciphering how the Eastern “other” is represented.
The World Cup gives to reset those narratives.
After all, there is something magical about the World Cup being located in Qatar. Since winning the bid to host the 22nd edition of the World Cup, Doha has bet on the global spectacle, leveraging revenues from its hydrocarbon industry to improve the country’s infrastructure, especially roads, shipping and technology.
Qataris have increasingly become passionate users of data technology. Doha continues to modernize at an immediate pace, from a pearl village to a wise city and home to varied expat communities. It is supplied with technology, offering Qataris greater virtual accessibility and connectivity, whether in e-governance, effective banking or healthcare.
However, while football pitches are meant to motivate unity and sportsmanship abroad, there is no escape from structures of otherness in global gatherings such as football’s biggest carnival. In this case, it can be seen in the systematic, relentless and racially biased crusade in the West. opposed to Qatar in the years leading up to this World Cup.
How else has Qatar been vilified like no host before?No other small nation with extreme weather conditions, like Switzerland in 1954. Nor superpowers like the United States, where Los Angeles’ dominance hosted the Cup final of the year after witnessing some of the country’s worst race riots in decades. Neither Mussolini’s fascist regime nor Argentina’s brutal military junta. Nor Brazil, where favela citizens were evicted as the country tried to hide its poverty from enthusiasts traveling for the 2014 World Cup. Not Russia, which hosted the 2018 event amid rising homophobia.
These countries were thought of as valid hosts – whatever they did – because, in a way, football is already thought of as its own. Instead, Qatar viewed with disdain the moment it won its candidacy, treated as an outsider attacking an elite. party.
In fact, like other Arab, Asian, African, South American and Central American nations, football came to Qatar through colonialism, when the country was a British protectorate between 1916 and 1971. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), the forerunner of Britain’s Petroleum (BP), began oil exploration and production in the 1930s. Football followed in the 1940s. Doha Stadium, the first football stadium with a grass box in the Gulf region. The league festival began in the 1960s, several years before independence.
Ironically, postcolonial studies have had little to say about football, even though many former colony slums have produced major stars, from Pele in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to Raheem Sterling in Kingston, Jamaica. Many Arab players, from Algeria’s Rabah to Egypt’s Mohamed Salah, have made similar trips at wealthy European clubs.
The soccer World Cup will have to be not just an exercise in the new bureaucracy of cultural mime through the former colonial powers. Even as Western soccer struggles to combat racism, Brazilian player Richarlison recently threw a banana at a friendly in Paris, Qatar. The World Cup edition can help decolonize biased thinking about Arab and Muslim societies by employing their diverse cultures to enrich the global football experience.
For example, Qatar’s non-alcoholic stadiums for the World Cup can serve as an example. They will allow more people to attend matches without worrying about violence, racism and alcohol-fueled foul language that are not unusual in European football stadiums. As Qatar welcomes enthusiasts from all over the world, it can provide another way to enjoy the game, one that doesn’t mind the generic delight of being a football fan while ignoring Qatar’s local values.
Qataris are used to living with foreigners and the World Cup is still an opportunity to show their affinity for multiculturalism to counter the Western stereotype of the “fanatical Muslim,” as noted recently in the Islamophobic and racist French cartoons depicting Qatar’s national team.
By presenting an alternative narrative about how the Muslim world and football have been perceived in the West, this World Cup could help decolonize the language of the game. “European football” is not white. “African” or “Arab” football are not symptoms of color or ethnicity. However, those labels are used too much as codes for dominant ethnicities and races in the way the game is covered.
This is where postcolonialism can serve as an antidote, striking – to paraphrase Harvard University professor and critical theorist Homi K Bhabha – the ex-colonized among other worlds and perspectives.
The Arab global is teeming with literary minds who have addressed stereotypical representations and unequal encounters in their paintings, and this may serve as inspiration as the region seeks to welcome the global on its terms. Sudanese Tayeb Salih’s 1966 book, Season of Migration to the North, captures the essence of the intermission highlighted through Bhabha.
The brilliant Saudi novelist Abdulrahman Munif coined a special term: al-teeh (loss, confusion). His classic five-story novel, Cities of Salt (Mudun al-Milh, published in 1984), is one of the examples of postcolonial literary studies. It tells a story of political, economic, environmental and cultural devastation when the neo-colonizers (US capitalism and petrodollars) and the neo-colonized (the Gulf) meet.
These writings are poignant reminders that the FIFA World Cup is an opportunity for much more than showcasing westernized lives.
During colonial times, Arabs fomented anti-colonial resistance, among other things, by dressing in local clothing and making sure to preserve their classical culture. Today, they wear the Arabic “thobe” (ankle tunic) made from local Japanese fabric. This reflects the combination of the global and the local: in a way, Qatar and the Arab world can draw inspiration from the region that hosts major sporting events.
The FIFA World Cup will have to be a shared space for a new modernity that is neither white nor colonial. A modernity that speaks of Arab, Asian, African, indigenous and Latino values of tolerance, human rights and intelligent governance, and demanding situations that stereotypes are imposed on the countries of the South.
A modernity that seeks a more just, equitable and, in fact, decolonized world, and that questions and resists neo-colonizing hierarchies. A modernity that demands rights to cultural self-determination and affirms shared futures and reports on mutual respect.
Through the Qatar World Cup, “the beautiful game” can oppose colonizing tendencies and cultural narcissism in our multicultural world.
The perspectives expressed in this article are those of and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial position.