Soccer: Moulding the Middle East and North Africa
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Soccer: Moulding the Middle East and North Africa Voetbal: de verwevenheid van sport en politiek in het Midden Oosten en Noord Afrika (met een samenvatting in het Nederlands) Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit Utrecht op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof.dr. G.J. van der Zwaan, ingevolge het besluit van het college voor promoties in het openbaar te verdedigen op dinsdag 22 maart 2016 des middags te 2.30 uur door James Michael Dorsey geboren 12 augustus 1951 te Lynn, Mass, Verenigde Staten van Amerika 2 Promotor: Prof. dr. P. Verweel 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements p. 5 Setting the Scene p. 7 Soccer: Moulding the Middle East and North Africa p. 9 Post-Mubarak Egypt: A Paradigm Shift p. 31 Constructing National Identity: The Muscular Jew vs the Palestinian Underdog p. 48 The New Turk p. 64 Soccer threads itself through Algerian history p. 76 Soccer vs Jihad: a Draw p. 96 Conclusion p. 115 Nederlandse samenvatting p. 119 Bibliography p. 123 End Notes p. 155 4 Acknowledgements Mexico’s national soccer team didn’t know what to expect when it toured the Middle East and North Africa for the first time in advance of the 1986 World Cup. It was a journey into the unknown for the team, as it was for me. I was not a soccer fan then and am not today. But I was asked to accompany the team by United Press International and Mario Vázquez Raña, the Mexican press baron and then-vice president of his country’s Olympic Committee, who was at the time acquiring the financially troubled global news agency. The tour was my introduction to the inextricable intertwining of politics and soccer in the Middle East and North Africa and its key role in the development of the region since the late nineteenth century, even if it took me more than two decades to connect the dots between the tour’s various vignettes: an Arc de Triomphe- like entrance to the stadium in the Libyan city of Benghazi dominated by a quote from Moammar Qaddafi, “Sports and weapons belong to the people”; police fighting players and fans on the pitch in Cairo; a stadium bereft of spectators in Sharjah; and an arena in Damascus controlled by the military. The penny dropped with the arrival of an email. “You’ve got a book,” the sender, Steven Solomon, a successful author, journalist and avid soccer player and fan, said. He was referring to an article I had written positioning politics as an impediment to Middle Eastern and North African soccer performance.1 Steven together with Teresita (Tess) Cruz-Del Rosario, an accomplished sociologist and anthropologist with the practical experience of having played an important role in the 1986 toppling of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, is this thesis’s midwife. If Steven was the person who made things jell in my mind, Tess convinced me that if I was going to have one foot in academia alongside my career in journalism, it would be worth my while to obtain the necessary credentials. Steven and Tess’s contribution would have come to naught without the support and facilitation of sports professor Paul Verweel. Like Tess, a scholar and an activist, Paul was not only my mentor but also together with constitutional law professor Henk Kummeling, the dean of Utrecht University’s Faculty of Law, Economy, Management and Organization key to my acceptance as a candidate although I had no other academic credentials. Paul, Tess and Steven were always there with solid advice throughout the process. When I wrote the article, I would have declared “nuts” anyone who would have predicted that years later I would be doing a PhD, writing three soccer-related books and still looking at the Middle East and North Africa through the prism of soccer. Yet, all three launched me on a path I had been struggling to find: an original and different way of viewing, analysing and understanding ever more tumultuous and dramatic events in a region I have been covering for more than forty years. Connecting dots, I first saw travelling with the Mexicans some three decades ago made me realize that no study, analysis or history of modern society is complete without a focus on the nexus of sport, society, culture, politics and development. Soccer figures prominently in the Middle East and North Africa’s life. If this thesis would not have seen the day of light without Steven and Tess, Professor Harald Lange of the Institute of Sport Science of the University of Würzburg, who by inviting me to co-direct with him the Institute of Fan Culture exposed me to a broader world of fandom in ways I may not have had access to without him. Paul and Henk who by fighting for my acceptance as a doctoral candidate added a key dimension to an academic and think tank career that I had discarded almost half a century earlier in favour of journalism. 5 I am equally indebted to Singapore in more ways than I can recount. An invitation to become a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute of the National University of Singapore followed by an appointment at Nanyang Technological University’s renowned S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) offered me a platform and an unrivalled intellectual environment. There are no words for my gratitude to two of Singapore’s top diplomats, RSIS Dean and ambassador at large Barry Desker, and Bilahari Kausikan, one of the Foreign Ministry’s greatest, beloved guiding lights, whose support was invaluable. Ever the diplomat in everything but professional designation, RSIS Deputy Executive Chairman Ong Keng Yong and Dean Joseph Chinyong Liow’s door, like those of Barry and Bilahari, was always open even when my research and investigative reporting landed me in hot water. There are too many other MEI and RSIS colleagues to mention, amongst them Peter Sluglett, Ali Alawi, Mushahid Ali and Leonard Sebastian. Their friendship, insights and comments in multiple conversations sparked and stimulated my thinking. This is equally true for two great lights of the study of sports, The names of those across the Middle East and North Africa and beyond who spared time and shared their knowledge and experience, as well as offering me a platform to speak and debate, are far too numerous to list here. Many, for obvious reasons, would prefer to remain anonymous. Nevertheless, their contribution is central to the writing of this thesis. That is no truer than for the one person, I do want to name: Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein. I have benefitted immensely from Prince Ali’s wisdom and knowledge and learnt from his strategic depth and deliberate and considered approach to problem solving. But most importantly, I have been honoured and enriched by his friendship. The long and short of this all is: thank you. Without all of you, this thesis would have never been written. 6 Setting the scene The soccer pitch is often a reflection of society and an indicator of things to come and no more so than in the Middle East and North Africa where the sport has consistently played an important political and social role for more than a century. Most recently, militant soccer fans played a key role in the build-up to the toppling of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, the subsequent years of transition, and the protests against the regime of Egyptian general- turned-president Abdel Fatah Al Sisi, as well as in the protests in 2013 against then Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Unprecedented criticism of ruling families in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan occurred in the arena as do ongoing protests against Algeria’s military autocrats. For years, many in Middle Eastern and North African autocratic regimes viewed the weekly match as their sole release valve, so much so that so that Egypt witnessed a sharp increase in its divorce rate because husbands’ spending on stadium tickets was disrupting household budgets. Conversely, women across the region often see the stadium as an important venue to assert their rights in defiance of conservative clergymen and a traditionally- minded society. Qatar has led other Gulf states in spending massively on becoming a global sports hub as part of its effort to increase its diplomatic and economic influence, punch internationally above its weight, and amass the kind of soft power that embeds it in the international community, and enhances its security, branding and access. In doing so, Qatar has challenged the traditional wisdom that a state’s ability to project power is at least partly dictated by its size. Qatar’s embattled 2022 World Cup has laid down multiple gauntlets for Middle Eastern and North African nations. Qatar is fighting to retain its hosting rights as US and Swiss investigations into corruption in the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the body that governs association soccer, which include credible assertions that it won its World Cup bid through a combination of massive vote buying and backroom political and commercial deals. Qatar’s woes serve notice to the region’s largely corrupt autocratic regimes of the risk of murky, international deal making and abuse of human rights as governments try to project themselves on the international stage. Widespread criticism by human rights and trade union activists as well as FIFA, its corporate sponsors and soccer players and fans of Qatar’s labour regime that puts the Gulf state’s majority migrant labour population at the mercy of employers has already put the United Arab Emirates in the firing line with Dubai’s hosting of the 2020 World Expo and Abu Dhabi’s high-profile museum projects and hosting of campuses of top Western universities.