Sports and Society in the Middle East: Cairo Papers in Social Science Vol. 34, No. 2

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Why Study Sports in the Middle East?

Nicholas S. Hopkins

Football is one of the threads that make up Egyptian culture and social life. Mohamed el-Sayed, When Life Began. Al Ahram Weekly, February 12, 2004.

Soccer is a mirror that reflects the fierce struggle between the ancien régime and the revolution, between the old vested interests and those who dream of the future. Alaa al-Aswany, Egypt's Enduring Passion for Soccer, International New York Times, April 16, 2014.

A truism in anthropology is that people will tell you what it is about themselves that is important to know, and here the intense Egyptian interest in sports of all kinds but especially soccer/football shows us the way, as Mohamed el-Sayed proposes and Alaa al-Aswany confirms. No one would deny that football is a major focus of attention everywhere in the Arab world/Middle East. But it has rarely been studied from a social science point of view, as it has, for instance, in Europe or Latin America. And sports other than football have received even less attention. The point of this symposium of the Cairo Papers in Social Science held in Cairo in 2015, in collaboration with the Middle East Center and AUC Forum, was to open up this topic for discussion. If we had an ulterior motive in organizing the symposium, it was the desire to encourage more and better research on the topic. In this introduction we suggest some of the possibilities for such research projects.

In a provocative study the French anthropologist Christian Bromberger (1995b) asks just why football arouses such passions, and what its latent functions are. He analyzes the ways in which the game of football mirrors the fundamental values of contemporary life, stressing the importance of merit on the one hand and chance on the other. He points out that if football fascinates people, it is due first and foremost to its capacity to embody the cardinal values that shape modern societies … its deep structure … represents the uncertain fate of man in the world today (1995a:296). But would generalizations based on Italy and France also apply to the Middle East, and what it would mean if they do or don't?

The present issue of Cairo Papers includes eight articles that treat various social and cultural aspects of the sports scene in the Middle East. It demonstrates the insights to be gained into the Middle East by a focus on sports. Not by our intention, each article gives priority of place to football. Of course football is the most popular sport in the Middle East as in the world at large, but it is far from the only one. We would have welcomed articles on basketball, squash, track and field, and other sports. Maybe in the next round.

Our papers fall into two groups. The first group includes four which offer broad overviews of the sports scene in the Middle East, while the second set focuses on particular local situations involving sports.

Murat Yildiz starts us off with a historical perspective from the center of the Ottoman Empire, the emerging modern culture of Istanbul, showing how schools and clubs organized and taught various sports in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of these schools and clubs recruited along ethnic lines, and so the same distinctions were reflected in the teams and competitions. At the same time, however, this movement sought a certain self-conscious modernity, and stressed health and physical fitness through calisthenics.

Mahfoud Amara reviews the situation of football in the Middle East as a function of the colonial and postcolonial situation. Football originally spread as a consequence of the spread of colonial power in the late nineteenth century, but then evolved independently of colonialism and eventually even in opposition to the colonial regimes. In the last generation or so, Middle Eastern football has become an integral part of world football. The game itself has not changed, but its function in the national and international political systems has been transformed. Football has become more commercialized and globalized, with the top players and teams moving around the world. At the same time there is more awareness of the benefits of exercise for the general population.

James Dorsey examines the political roles of football—as an expression of national identity and of local rivalries. In the twenty-first century, a prominent role has been played by clubs of ultras, a cultural pattern which had spread from Europe, particularly Italy. These clubs featured organized cheering and other forms of support (banners, chants, common dress, even fireworks and flares), partly to establish solidarity among the club members and partly to intimidate the opposing team. With political changes in Egypt, in particular, they took their forms of organization outside the stadium. Inside or out, they had developed a confrontational attitude to the local police. The ultras played key roles in the 2011 revolution. After the suppression of that uprising, they were legally abolished in May 2015, but we do not yet know what the reality of that is. It is safe to say that a complex political field grew up around the ultras and their relations with authority.

Ereny Zarif pursues the ideas of Norbert Elias, according to which football allowed for the simultaneous release and control of extreme emotions, and examines in a macrosociological way the role of sports in society. Sport stands out because of the importance of rules, and the willingness of people, on the whole, to respect the rules. Sport is furthermore balanced between excitement and commercialization with its routine. She draws some of her illustrations from two Egyptian films in which football figures, and stresses how Egyptians are transformed by sport into spectators and passionate team loyalists. In conclusion she wonders whether the world of sports is part of or separate from the rest of life.

The next series of articles examines the relationship between football and such social stress lines as gender and age. Nashaat Hussein analyzes the practices of street football (called sock football because of the ball it uses) in Egypt, discussing its origins, its differences from formal football caused by the irregular street setting, its relationship to a neighborhood culture, and its methods of recruiting players and maintaining order. Lamia Bulbul describes an effort by an NGO in Aswan, Upper Egypt to encourage girls to be more active in sports. Through a judicious use of a survey she describes the different positions of the parents and the young people. Gradually the girls became more at home in playing football, and the people around them, including their parents, became more accepting of this activity. Monia Lachheb surveys the members of the Tunisian national women's football team and analyzes the tensions that arise because women are playing what is generally considered a man's sport. Those who are selected to play on the team may have childhood experiences that led them there (such as a preference for boys’ games). Some of these tensions involve a shift toward a certain masculinity among the players.

The final paper deals with professional football as it was practiced in Cairo prior to the revolution. Dalia Ibraheem describes in ethnographic detail the practices of the extreme supporters clubs known as ultras. They are extreme both in their desire to see their team do well and in their manner of supporting the team through banners, noise makers, rhythmic and unified cheers, activities before the game, processions, and so on. Each of the major football clubs in Egypt had its club of ultras, or sometimes two. These clubs in one form or another were known to pick fights with the police outside the stadium, or harass the visiting team, especially when it was from another country (e.g., Algeria in 2010). Ibraheem's focus here is on the show.

Sports in the Middle East

Blanchard (1995) notes that sport is big business (including gambling), popular culture, and potent politics. He might have pointed out, as others have, that contemporary sports is modern in several senses. The games and activities themselves are fairly recent, mostly dating back to the second half of the nineteenth century. They have several modern features, such as rules, regular schedules, technology, and social organization, and as they are intimately tied to the structure of their surrounding community, they frequently follow a preset calendar, and they involve investment and profits linked to a corporate structure.

Football (and sports in general) is also part of the complex of institutions associated with our contemporary world. The cultural artifact we know as football evolved in Europe in the nineteenth century and diffused from there. The rules of soccer have not changed substantially since their first codification in 1863. Like rugby and squash, the game emerged out of an educational context (English boarding schools in the mid-nineteenth century) devoted to training the future state elite in England. And it has remained a key part of the educational process in different circumstances. Around the turn of the twentieth century, competitive team sports like football had to jostle for space in the school curriculum with the calisthenics that were considered to be basic in preparing young men for a military experience—so much so that calisthenics programs were often run under military auspices in France. Team sports won out. Sports have come to be associated with the state and state sponsorship in many countries, as the near universality of ministries of sport testifies. Of course, with the emergence of the Olympic games and other international competitions, sports has become a key element in national identity and pride; this was first evident in the use of these games by fascist countries like Germany and Italy in the 1930s, but it is now firmly entrenched everywhere.

Most of the energy of a social science of sports has centered on its place in popular culture, notably through the involvement of fans and the ways they cheer for and support a team both on the field and in life in general. The cheering styles often have a folkloric/dramatic aspect, and the organization of fans into clubs of supporters is a reflection of social organization in general. Notorious in recent years has been the spread of football fan clubs with systematic cheering, singing, display of banners, and other practices in the stadiums (Bromberger 1995b; Archetti 1999; see Ibraheem this volume). Games are performances (bread and circuses!), but they are also competitions, and thus share in the cultural understanding of competition and winning. Athletes are performers and as such are part of their society. Spectators too can be actors. Recruiting, training, patterns of teamwork, styles, and publicity are all cultural processes.

The Sporting Life in Egypt

Egypt is active in many team sports in addition to football, notably basketball, volleyball, water polo, handball, and field hockey, and usually presents both men's and women's teams in international competitions. In 1924 and 1928, for instance, the Egyptian team began competing in the Olympics played in Paris and Amsterdam with fair success (they won some and lost some, but were not competitive for a medal) (Lopez 2009). Egyptians have been active in individual sports as well: track and field, swimming, wrestling, tae kwan do, pentathlon, tennis, and squash, among others. Currently their most successful athletes have been in squash, where many of the leading competitors in the world have been Egyptian women and men. According to the World Squash Federation in 2015, five of the top ten male players and four of the top ten female players are Egyptian (Baseera Center 608, March 24, 2015).

Organization

An important dimension of the sporting field is the organizational structure. The various Middle Eastern countries produced clubs and leagues for soccer, often in coordination with colonial Europeans, fairly early (i.e., before 1920 in Egypt and Tunisia). Teams are frequently organized into a league corresponding more or less to some geographical or social division (such as the nation). Teams may be based on clubs, governed by rules set by the state, on factories perhaps organized as clubs, or on schools or universities (or a university club). The club is a form of voluntary association, with often an elected leadership and membership rules including dues to provide the financing. The better clubs may have their own playing grounds and headquarters. There are approximately 123 sporting clubs in Egypt.¹ Well-known clubs in Cairo include the Gezira Club, the Heliopolis Club, and the Maadi Club, most dating back to colonial days. For instance, the Gezira Club was founded in the 1880s and in the beginning did not accept Egyptian members (Oppenheim 1999), while the Maadi Club was founded in 1921 with English and Egyptian members (Rifaat 1994:67). Clubs organize matches among themselves, and may eventually form a league and compete for a championship. The league has its own internal organization and leadership and is also a voluntary association. The next level up is the federation for each sport, and then the association of all sports, in this case the Egyptian Football Association (founded 1921). All this structure can be understood from the point of view of social science, along with its attendant rivalries between clubs and for leadership of the association.

Football and Money

That modern sport has its financial side is no surprise. From the hiring of players and coaches to the building of stadiums and training grounds to the making and selling of souvenirs and memorabilia, the flow of money is a major part of the sports world, whether reported on the sports pages or on the business pages. Of course the salaries earned by the top athletes in popular sports can be astronomical.

Similarly, sports, and especially football, have connections to politics. In Egypt this has been the basis of the identity of royalist Zamalek and republican Ahli, although it should be noted that in 2011 most players supported the regime: the side on which their bread was buttered.² Also groups of supporters have organized politically (as ultras or otherwise) and offer their support to politicians. The social organization of sports with federations for each sport and tournaments and other competitions provided an opening for the insertion of politics. Ambitious men and women could aspire to positions of leadership in this domain, and the rivalry could be intense. Heads of federations were often linked to the political establishment (not least because there was money involved). Often sports federations have written into their internal rulings a prohibition on appealing cases to the civil courts. Thus the sports federations are semi-independent fiefdoms, able to make and enforce their own rules without input from society at large.

Sports news has always been a mainstay of print journalism. (In certain countries the joke was that truth was only found on the sports pages.) In the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, the umbrella of sports has extended further through radio and especially television in its various forms. This is also significant because sports broadcasting is supported by ads, and as the years go by these ads and sponsorships have become more and more lucrative—to the point where sporting schedules are adjusted to broadcasting schedules. The serious money of course is in television. Broadcast income provides key financial support for many teams—and television stations.

Another aspect of sports is political rivalry within the administration of sports as individuals seek advancement. An example of this occurred in 2015. The board of directors of the Egyptian Olympic Committee suspended its president because of accusations of financial misdoing. A position in one of the federations or clubs is a political position, and predictably produces political rivalry. It involves handling money. It can be a