Football in Arabic literature in diaspora: Global influences and local manifestations

Introduction

The 2014 FIFA World Cup encounter between Germany and Algeria has evoked bittersweet memories for millions of Arab football fans across the globe. In a way, the game was a re-play of a 1982 FIFA World Cup match which Algeria won 2–1. However, a dubious and unsporting deal between West Germany and Austria eliminated Algeria from the Mundial, disappointing and frustrating Arab fans who felt that there was a European conspiracy to deny an Arab nation a place in the next round. Many in the Arab world were further incensed by the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in the same month, and the September massacre of over 2000 Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila Refugee Camps by Phalangist militias, trained and armed by Israeli armed forces. As the two teams met again in The 2014 FIFA World Cup knockout stage and Germany edged Algeria 2–1 in a 120-minute thriller in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, the socio-political situation in the Middle East was as tense as it was in 1982. Much to the admiration of Arab football fans worldwide, Algerian players donated their entire World Cup prize money to the people of Gaza (Withnall, 2014) who had been then under Israeli fire since 8 July 2014, an assault that lasted for 51 days and resulted in the deaths of more than 2500 Palestinians and large-scale destruction.

The mixture of pride and rage that the above events elicited demonstrates the contradictory ways in which football is received among Arabs. On the one hand, just like in many other nations, football is the most popular game in most Arab countries. On the other hand, there is a feeling among many Arabs that football distracts people from more urgent political, religious, cultural and social issues. The controversy that football has triggered in the Arab world has been heatedly debated on various, social, political and cultural levels. This discussion has been recently fuelled by unprecedented investments by member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in European football, the emergence of international football stars of Arab descent, the role football has increasingly played in recent socioeconomic and political transformations in the Arab world, including the Arab Spring, and FIFA’s controversial decision to stage the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. The debate is carried out on TV programs dedicated to the discussion of football nationally, regionally and internationally (on such stations as Bein Sports and its predecessor Al Jazeera Sports), social media forums, popular culture productions of songs, films and TV dramas and literary works. Overall, the world’s most popular game arouses feelings of ambivalence among Arab people in their homelands and in diaspora.

This paper sheds light on the representation of football in the novels of Arab writers in diaspora. Specifically, this paper investigates how football is depicted in Rabih Alameddine’s I, the Divine (2001), Laila Lalami’s Secret Son (2009) and Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley (2010). The authors explore the game’s socioeconomic, political and cultural dimensions in a bid to reflect its multifaceted nature and the way it is received among Arabs in the Middle East and in diaspora. They use football to supplement and clarify the themes they explore, and present a portentous image of the game in a way that reflects the ambivalence, and even the suspicion, with which it is often viewed in Arab countries and in diaspora. More specifically, in the three novels, the relationship between the individual and the nation is explored, analyzed and reviewed. In this way, football emerges as a site which clarifies the contradictions and tensions that shape up the lives of the Arab characters within the specific settings that these novels depict.

Fiction as a site for reflecting reality

In a way, the three novels under study explore the state of affairs in three different Arab countries at a specific moment in their histories. In other words, Aboulela, Lalami and Alameddine employ football in a strategic way to depict how their characters perceive their identities, comprehend the positions they occupy in their nations and respond to the socioeconomic and political circumstances under which they live. In this sense, the three authors draw on a growing body of fictional and autobiographical representations of football that have come to the foreground in recent years. Just like autobiographies, literary texts help highlight, albeit in a fictional way, socioeconomic, political, cultural and historical details about the societies in which they are set. As Peter Stead notices in his article on football and literature, a number of Nobel Prize laureates in literature, including Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, have written about football and are worthy contenders for what Argentine journalist Jorge Omar Perez dubs ‘Nobel Prize in football writing’ (2013: 251). Stead rightly points out that some authors depict a football match in the middle of a non-football novel to please some of the readers, especially football fans, while ‘[o]ther writers have more fully deployed matches, imaginary or otherwise, to establish their role in shaping either individual personalities or communities’ (p. 250). Hence, exploring how football is depicted in a literary text entails an examination of the ways in which the concerned characters are entangled in discourses about football, and hence, their positions can be viewed as a microcosm of the larger society in which they live.

Just like in other parts of the world, in the Middle East football has become increasingly popular as well as entrenched in the region’s cultural and historical developments. A recent volume in Soccer & Society edited by sport historian Alon Raab has explored how football in the Middle East has intersected with various socioeconomic, political, cultural and historical processes such as ‘colonialism, the rise of nationalism, women’s liberation, urbanism, industrialization, state-building, globalization and political revolt’ since the game’s introduction in the region in the latter part of the 19th century (2012: 620). The volume also ‘includes literary works reflecting the place the game has held in the lives of many writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers, who growing up playing the game later often gave it artistic voice’ (p. 631). Specifically, the volume includes excerpts from Mohamed El-Bisatie’s novel Drumbeat, Mohamed Mansi Qandil’s Moon Over Samarkand and Khaled al-Berry’s autobiographical account Life is More Beautiful Than Paradise: A Jihadist’s Own Story. These works show that literary representations help better understand how football influences and is influenced by local and global circumstances through highlighting the mores and values of the society in which the literary text is set. In this sense, a literary text offers a picture about some aspects of football in imaginative and creative ways.

Arab writers in diaspora

The authors of the novels that appear in Soccer & Society write in Arabic and live in the Arab world. In contrast, the authors whose works will be discussed in this paper write in English and live, or have lived for long periods, in the US or in Britain. Hence, this paper explores Anglophone Arab writers’ portrayals of football in their novels. These novelists who occupy an ‘inbetween’ position between Arab and Anglophone worlds draw on their cultural heritage as Arabs and their lived experiences as American or British citizens. In other words, Arab writers in diaspora straddle two cultures and show an acute awareness of the conditions that govern the lives of Arabs in the Middle East and in diaspora in an increasingly globalized and shifting world. In this sense, the works of Aboulela, Lalami and Alameddine bridge the gaps between the East and the West and present to the western reader a realistic picture of the circumstances under which Arab characters live, whether in the Middle East or in diaspora.

Indeed, discourses on football in these novels are entangled with local and global socioeconomic and political forces. In other words, the novelists take into account multidimensional endogenous and exogenous powers that shape up football locally, regionally and internationally. Thanks to their existence between cultures, Arab writers in diaspora are aware of internal and external dynamics of football in the Arab world. These authors explore from the position of being insiders/outsiders the local and international state of affairs that shape up contemporary discourses on football in their countries of origin. Arab authors in diaspora have responded to an increasing interest in the Arab (and Muslim) culture(s) after 9/11 and the Arab Spring by vividly depicting various aspects of their homeland culture(s). Through representing the dynamics that govern the lives of Arabs in the Middle East and in diaspora, these writers seek, as literary scholar Nouri Gana puts it, ‘to educate Euro-Americans about Arabs and Muslims’ by highlighting discrepancies between ‘the quotidian experiences of everyday Arabs and Muslims and […] the free-floating and intransigent mainstream discourses of Arabness and Islam’ (2013: 19). In this way, Arab writers in diaspora help subvert misconceptions about Arab (and Muslim) culture(s) and act as bridges that facilitate communications between two seemingly discrepant worlds. Hence, it is apposite to argue that the vision of an Arab writer in diaspora is ‘composite or multidirectional’ (Gana, 2013: 20). Seen from this perspective, Arab authors in diaspora employ football as ‘a universal currency, a lingua franca – the common ground of culture’ (Miller, 2013: 274). They draw on football’s worldwide popularity to depict the experiences of Arab characters and explore the relationship between the individual and the nation.

Plotlines of Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley, Lalami’s Secret Son and Alameddine’s I, the Divine

Leila Aboulela is a British Arab novelist who was born in Khartoum and received her education in Britain. She published three novels and a collection of short stories. Aboulela’s most recent book, Lyrics Alley (2010), is a historical novel set in 1950s Sudan and which explores the aspirations and dreams of various Sudanese characters as the nation marches into independence from the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. The novelist uses football as a tool to convey a pessimistic image about post-colonial Sudan. The disaster that befalls a promising football player foreshadows the nation’s socioeconomic and political troubles in the post-colonial era. The main character, Nur Abuzeid, is a talented football player and the captain of prestigious Victoria College football team. An unlucky accident on the beach of Alexandria renders him crippled and changes the course of his life. In a way, the novelist draws attention to the parallelism between Nur’s helplessness after the accident and Sudan’s uncertain future after imminent independence. Towards the end of the novel, Nur’s memories drift back to school days when life was full of hopes and expectations: ‘Tuf Tuf passes him the ball and he flies with it, on and on, knowing he can score, knowing he will score. Ramzy tackles him; he is well built, but Nur is lean and light’ (p. 119). Nur’s helplessness is epitomized by his inability to score a goal from Tuf Tuf’s pinpoint pass. Just like Nur’s dreams which remain unfulfilled, Sudan’s future is full of obstacles and problems that need to be carefully negotiated.

The pessimistic view that Lyrics Alley presents is parallel to that of Laila Lalami’s Secret Son. Lalami grew up in Morocco and immigrated to the US where she obtained her PhD in linguistics. In addition to Secret Son, Lalami published two novels: Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005) and The Moor’s Account (2014). In Secret Son, Lalami highlights contemporary Morocco’s impoverishment, corruption and internal political conflicts by presenting episodes that involve unemployed and disgruntled youths playing football on rugged pitches. Youssef El Mekki dwells in a Casablanca slum with his mother. On weekends, he either plays football with fellow youths from the slum on a pitch rehabilitated by an Islamist party or he watches football matches on TV in a café also run by the same party. Lalami’s novel presents football as a site of contestation between the state and the Islamist opposition as each party recognizes the importance of football as a tool to attract youths. Eventually, Youssef becomes a victim of this clash between the government and the Islamist opposition. In one of the novel’s earliest episodes, Youssef’s friends, Amin and Maati, ‘who could usually be found at the street corner’, were arguing about the Widad and the Raja and the odds of either football team at the national championship (p. 8). While the author’s choice of these two teams has socio-political and historical implications since the former was founded for wealthy Moroccans barred from French swimming pools during the colonial period, while the latter was founded during the struggle for independence and has always been considered as ‘the people’s team’, the unemployed two youths seem oblivious to the poverty in which they live as they nonchalantly discuss football.

In this way, Lalami employs football to comment on the deteriorating socioeconomic and political conditions in her homeland; simultaneously, she highlights the state’s traditional position of opportunistically using football as ‘an infallible tool to contain the crowd, to sell dreams and occupy the youth’ (Amara, 2012: 80). Lalami uses football to show how Youssef and his ilk are marginalized and pushed to the peripheries of the nation the way Rabih Alameddine employs football to demonstrate how women in Lebanon are excluded from the nation and forced to live on the margins. Alameddine is a Lebanese American with Druze ancestry who published four novels and a collection of short stories. In I, the Divine, football is associated with traumatic experiences of Lebanon’s calamitous civil war and the nation’s chronic dilemma of sectarianism, prejudice and chauvinism. The novel narrates the story of Sarah Nour el-Din, a girl who ‘developed impassable control with a soccer ball and was blessed with something intangible, soccer vision’ (p. 36). However, her parents and teachers disallow her from playing football, a game that fosters ‘the expression and appreciation of different forms of masculinity’ (Giulianotti, 1999: 156). Sarah represses her passion for football and, hence, her identity is greatly influenced by her childhood memories of marginalization and exclusion. In this way, the novelist employs football to dramatize how the dreams of a woman who ‘was way ahead of her time’ (p. 248) are blown away by sexism and male-chauvinism. As she grows up, Sarah remains traumatized and is unable to write her memoir or communicate with others.

Methodology

This paper examines the representation of football in the works of three Arab writers in diaspora. The novels selected are all written in English. I excluded from this examination other Arab writers in diaspora whose novels are not originally written in English, such as Amara Lakhous’ Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2006) which was originally written in Italian. In analyzing each novel, the researcher will provide textual evidence on how each of the three works comments on the relationship between the individual and the nation through the representation of football as a site over which socioeconomic, political, cultural and historical conditions converge. Thus, this paper is analytical and critical and employs an interdisciplinary approach to explore the way(s) in which the three authors depict football as a cultural site that can be analyzed and investigated to illustrate facts about specific communities. Quotations from the three novels will be cited, contextualized and explained and references to literary, sociological, political and historical issues will be made wherever appropriate. Overall, this paper demonstrates that analyzing a literary text that depicts football-linked scenes is quite helpful in illustrating various aspects about the sociology of football.

Football and/in the Arab world

In this context, it is unsurprising that Arab writers in diaspora draw on a global game like football to express their opinions about a host of issues that have a direct bearing on Arab and Muslim culture(s). Sport historians Richard Giulianotti and Roland Robertson describe football ‘as one representation – indeed, manifestation – of globalization’ (2004: 547). Giulianotti and Robertson maintain that football’s contemporary globalization is marked by increasing tensions between different forces that are ‘associate[d] with the elemental reference points of individuals, national societies, international system, and humankind’ (p. 561). Although football ‘has exhibited similarities with the way it has developed and become part of the social fabric in other lands,’ in the Middle East, Alon Raab asserts, ‘it has also achieved its own character and flavour, a result of the region’s unique history and multiplicity of religions, cultures and peoples’ (2012: 620). Islam, Raab maintains, has and continues to influence ‘the development and character of the game’ (p. 623). While many religious leaders and believers have viewed football ‘as a dangerous western import that encourages political reforms, destruction of family life and abandonment of the faith,’ other prominent clerics ‘see no contradiction between the game and the Islamic faith and practices’ and have used the game ‘to spread the faith and help adherents in their spiritual and moral development’ (p. 623).

Arab authors in diaspora are aware of the endogenous and exogenous forces that shape up football and turn it into a ‘spectacle [that] hides the reality of a system of actors competing over commercial stakes’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 17). In this context, it is appropriate to highlight that there has been a growing Arab involvement in international football over the past few years. First, GCC member states have recently embarked on ‘gargantuan’ investments in European football (Nnamdi, 2013: 1840). In fact, Arab patrons made an investment, albeit smaller in volume, in 1997 when Egyptian tycoon Mohamed Al Fayed purchased English side Fulham Football Club (FC). Al Fayed’s success story was the first in a series of Arab investments in European football in the first few years of the new millennium. Soon after, other Arab investors followed in Al Fayed’s footsteps, pumping millions of dollars into the burgeoning industry of football (Table 1).

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Table 1.

Summary of Arab investments in football.

Arab investment entity	Football club	Cost	Year of deal
Abu Dhabi United Group for Development and Investment	Manchester City FC	£150m	2008
	Melbourne Hearts	£6.7m	2014
	New York City FC	US$100m	2014
Mohamed Al Fayed	Fulham FC	£6.25m	1997
Saudi Arabia’s Ali Al Faraj	Portsmouth FC	Undisclosed	2009
Kuwait’s Al-Hasawi family	Nottingham Forest	Undisclosed	2012
Egypt’s Assem Allam	Hull City	Undisclosed	2010
Sheikh Abdullah Bin Nasser Al Thani	Malaga FC	€25m	2010
Dubai’s Royal Emirates Group	Getafe	€90m	2011
Qatar Investment Authority	Paris Saint-Germain	US$130m	2011

Specifically, 11 years after Al Fayed’s successful acquisition of Fulham FC, Abu Dhabi United Group for Development and Investment completed the takeover of Premier League side Manchester City in a £150m deal (Amara, 2012: 100). Since then, the Arab owners have invested millions of dollars on player transfer deals and property and residential development and refurbishment plans in the vicinity of the Etihad Stadium. The Abu Dhabi owners of Manchester City have more recently expanded their ‘football empire’ by purchasing clubs in Australia and North America. In a £6.7m deal, Manchester City’s owners bought Australian side Melbourne Hearts and renamed it Melbourne City Football Club. In addition, in the summer of 2014, Manchester City’s owners agreed a US$100m joint venture with the New York Yankees baseball team to set up New York City Football Club, Major League Soccer’s 20th franchise (Critchlow, 2014).

Other English clubs that were acquired by Arab investors with varying degrees of success include: Portsmouth Football Club, Nottingham Forest and Hull City. In Spanish La Liga, in 2010 Sheikh Abdullah Bin Nasser Al-Thani bought Malaga Football Club for €25m and Royal Emirates Group acquired Getafe with a promise to invest €90m for the development of the club and to pay for its debts (Amara, 2012: 100). In French Ligue 1, Qatar Investment Authority bought a controlling 70% stake in Paris Saint-Germain and since then has spent millions of dollars on the purchase of new superstars. In addition, GCC-based companies like Emirates Airlines, Qatar Airways and Etihad Airways have signed shirt sponsorship deals with renowned football clubs. Moreover, Emirates Airlines signed a sponsorship deal with Arsenal for the rebranding rights of Arsenal’s new £357m stadium (p. 100). Similarly, the City of Manchester Stadium was re-named the Etihad Stadium in 2011 after Manchester City Club signed a 10-year partnership agreement with Etihad Airways.

Another reason for the recent increased debate on football in Arab circles is the emergence of international football superstars of Arab descent, including Zinedine Zidane, Samir Nasri, Karim Benzema and Sami Khedira to name a few. Some of these players were involved in controversial incidents on and off the pitch. A case in point is Zidane’s famous headbutt to Italian midfielder Marco Materazzi in the dying minutes of the final match of the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany between Italy and France. The incident, beamed live worldwide to millions of viewers, has been interpreted along racial and religious lines (Amara, 2013: 650–651). In addition, Arab countries have recently hosted a number of football mega-events. Two versions of the FIFA Club World Cup were hosted by United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 2009 and 2010 and two other versions were/will be staged in Morocco in 2013 and 2014. More importantly, FIFA’s controversial decision to stage the 22nd World Cup in 2022 in Qatar has been received skeptically and aroused accusations of corruptions and bribery among the ranks of the world’s football regulating body. As James M. Dorsey puts it:

Instead of being feted as the first Arab state to host one of the world’s most significant sporting events, Qatar confronted an avalanche of criticism, much of it justified but much of it also reflective of envy of its financial muscle and derogatory about its young history as an independent, small desert state with little soccer history. (2014: 1741)

On its part, Qatar has refuted these accusations, threatened to take legal action against parties involved in what it calls a campaign to smear the nation’s reputation, and vowed at the same time to spend US$100bn on improving its economic infrastructure (Nnamdi, 2013: 1852). On 13 November 2014, and after an 18-month investigation, FIFA’s chairman of the adjudicatory chamber Hans-Joachim Eckert cleared Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup, ruling out any breaches of the rules. However, hours after Eckert released his conclusions, the author of the investigative report, FIFA’s ethics committee chief Michael Garcia, released a statement lambasting the decision to close the probe. As a result, FIFA has reported that the head of FIFA’s auditing committee will now examine the full report and decide whether to turn any evidence over to FIFA’s executive committee.

Finally, in recent years, football has been implicated in socioeconomic and political transformations in many Arab countries. The ‘Football for Peace’ initiative is a case in point and it manifests itself in the form of a recently proposed plan to host a joint Mundial in the state of Israel and in a (future) independent Palestinian state. In addition, Danyle Reiche illustrates in his article on sports in Lebanon that ‘[t]he tensions in the sports sector do not only reflect sectarianism in the country, but also play a role in deepening sectarian divisions’ (2011: 262). After the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, clashes erupted between different groups of spectators, and hence, the government banned fans from attending matches (p. 271). In addition, football has caused a political spat between Egypt and Algeria following a 2010 FIFA World Cup qualifier between the two Arab teams. Egypt recalled its ambassador to Algeria and the latter retaliated by ‘slap[ping] Egyptian-owned Orascom Telecom’s Algerian operation with a tax bill of more than half a billion dollars’ (Dorsey, 2011: 5). The Egyptian regime and state apparatuses exploited this incident to fan the flames of nationalism ‘to position themselves as popular Egyptian nationalists’ (p. 5). However, it was not long before Egyptian football fans played a key role in toppling Mubarak’s regime during the Arab Spring.

Specifically, media reports have highlighted the role played by the fans of Al-Ahli Club during the demonstrations against the Egyptian regime that erupted on 25 January 2011. Al-Ahli fans have developed maneuvering strategies in their nearly weekly clashes with repressive Egyptian police since 2009. In other words, ‘[t]he years of confronting the police had made the ultras the optimal guards of the revolution’ (Tuastad, 2014: 378). During the revolution, Al-Ahli’s fans (Al-Ahlawi ultras) manned the frontline at the Tahrir Square to protect demonstrators (p. 377). Even before the Arab Spring, football stadia have always been ‘physical spaces for the youth to express, sometimes with violence, their frustrations and their dissatisfaction with Arab states’ policies and development’ (Amara, 2012: 33). It is not surprising then that when demonstrations against dictators in the Arab countries erupted, fans and athletes were at the forefront of the revolutions that swept a number of Arab states. As Raab succinctly puts it, the involvement of football fans in the peaceful and militant protests is a result of the fact that ‘for many years the football stadium along with the mosque were the only public places where political opposition – frustration over daily life and anger at the ruling regimes – were expressed’ (pp. 624–625).

The individual, nation and football

While all the novels discussed in this paper were published before the Arab Spring, they hint at how football plays a crucial role in Arab countries’ state of affairs, including recent revolts and peaceful protests that swept a number of Arab states since December 2010. The novels offer untraditional and innovative perspectives on the entanglement of football with cultural and historical processes in the Arab world. Specifically, these novels explore the relationship between the individual and the nation through the prism of football. In Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley, Nur is proud of the fact that he is receiving his education at Victoria College in Alexandria, a colonialist school with a mission to educate Arab elites according to western standards. In this sense, as Alexandra Rezzo aptly puts it, Nur is engaged in a ‘cannibalistic […] process which involves devouring the enemy’s positive aspects in order to metabolise its virtues’ (Rizzo, 2012: 176). Nur relishes the fact that he is the captain of his school’s football team (Aboulela, 2010: 20). Even his father is proud of the fact that Nur is both a good student and a good footballer: ‘He was brilliant in his studies, outstanding in sports, especially football. An all-rounder, the English headmaster said’ (p. 42). According to Heather J. Sharkey, British ruling classes had ‘faith in athleticism as moral exercise’ and hence, they ‘viewed physical education as a boon for schools in the wider empire’ (2003: 45). At the same time, ‘sports forged an esprit de corps that unified early nationalists as a team against the British’ (p. 45). In this way, sports in colonial Sudan, represented in Aboulela’s book by football, is Janus-faced: on the one hand, it has colonialist connections that made some people reject it and resist it as being imposed on the local community by colonizers; on the other hand, football has served as a forum that unifies indigenous people from different backgrounds and gives them the opportunity to discuss matters of common interest.

This ambivalence explains the implications of the conversation between Nur and his older brother, Nassir, who urges him to play football with a group of English soldiers on Alexandria beach. At first, Nur refuses to play with them because they are English soldiers, i.e. colonizers. Nassir, however, sees nothing wrong in this: ‘“So what?” Nassir said. “You’re the captain of the football team at Victoria”’ (p. 79). Nassir insinuates that Nur is qualified enough to match the English soldiers physically, culturally and morally since he is a student and a footballer at Victoria College, an imperial school in which sport is ‘a hybrid of martial training and play’ (Sharkey, 2003: 47). In fact, the way Nur plays football shows that his training at Victoria College is quite rewarding because Nur’s ‘footwork was enough for the soldiers to welcome him’ (Aboulela, 2010: 80). In a novel which is set at the backdrop of Sudan’s imminent independence and in which ‘the nation is defined, delineated and configured in infinite ways’ by characters with heterogeneous backgrounds (Awad, 2014: 70), the promise that a character represents can be read as a national allegory whereby ‘the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society’ (Jameson, 1986: 69). In this sense, Nur’s nimble movements and promising football career represent Sudan’s bright future as an independent state.

The enthusiasm about the match shown by Nassir and Soraya, Nur’s fiancée, can be viewed as that of the nascent nation’s eagerness for achievements and progress. Aware of the hopes Nassir and Soraya pin on him, Nur ‘put[s] all his energy into the game’ (p. 80). When a group of Egyptians come to play, Nur joins the English soldiers’ team against the Egyptians. Metaphorically, as a Sudanese citizen, Nur aligns himself with the English against the Egyptians who opposed Sudan’s independence from the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. In this sense, the football match acquires political, nationalist and revolutionary implications: ‘The newcomers, young Egyptians, challenged Nur and the soldiers. This was how a friendly languorous kicking of the ball turned into a serious match’ (p. 81, emphasis added). The innuendoes of the words ‘challenged’ and ‘serious’ give the impression that this is not merely a football match, but rather a battlefield in which the Sudanese are aligned with the English against the Egyptians.

When the match finishes, Nur takes a dip in the sea, but unfortunately, he breaks a vertebra. Because of this accident, Nur’s hopes of pursuing his education in Britain and his dreams of becoming a famous footballer who represents his country internationally evaporate. One is tempted to argue that Nur’s plunge into despair and desolation foreshadows the transformation of his nation’s hopes and expectations into chronic socioeconomic, political and cultural hardships. In other words, in the post-colonial era, as Sivanandan reminds us, ‘the dreams of what independence would bring seem misguided in retrospect’ as the newly-independent states have failed ‘to attain hoped-for social and economic freedoms for their peoples’ (2004: 42). In this way, Nur’s story of failing to become a football star reflects that of Sudan’s failure to meet the expectations of its citizens. Aboulela uses football, a game that Nur has pinned many hopes on, to show that Sudan’s future is not as brilliant as people have been led to believe. Seen from this angle, the novelist makes a link between the individual and the nation via football ‘where the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself’ (Jameson, 1986: 86).

As the above discussion demonstrates, football is intricately linked with national issues and reflects the nation’s (lack of) power and strength. In this context, hosting sport mega-events, like the FIFA World Cup, ‘constitutes a political mega-project, characterized by the comprehensive mobilization and deployment of national resources and rationalized as a vehicle for big national goals’ (Cornelissen, 2013: 412, italics in original). In other words, organizing a mega-event ‘becomes in this way a totalizing endeavor, a state-driven project that incorporates various machinations of statecraft, and which is a central component of the country’s foreign as well as domestic policies’ (p. 414, italics in original). In this sense, football is a tool employed by the state to indoctrinate people and divert their attention from its failure to uplift their standards of living. In this context, one should remember that Morocco tried and failed to win the FIFA World Cup bids in 1994, 1998, 2006 and 2010. As Gareth Stanton (2004) succinctly puts it, football ‘played an important part in the very definition of what it was to be Moroccan in the modern world’ (p. 151). For instance, Widad of Casablanca, which was founded in 1937 as a swimming club, was actively sponsored by the Moroccan royal family since it was envisioned as ‘a substitute for out-and-out nationalist activity and many of those behind the club were of nationalist persuasion’ (p. 160). Stanton concludes that in Morocco ‘football itself was invented for […] building a modern state and providing a unifying force which identifies a people with its rulers’ (p. 163).

Notwithstanding Stanton’s optimism, in Secret Son Laila Lalami employs football to comment on deteriorating socioeconomic, political and cultural conditions in her native homeland. Youssef who dwells with his mother in a slum in Casablanca is, like many youths in the slum and the nation at large, fond of football. For him, football is part of his national identity. For instance, when he sees a girl who studies with him at college hanging out with an old Arab Gulf man in a hotel, Youssef is dumbfounded and the way he expresses his rage is quite telling: ‘Youssef’s national pride was stung; this was a rare emotion, usually reserved for that day, every four years, when Morocco’s football team was defeated at the World Cup’ (p. 144). For Youssef, football is a venue through which he celebrates his national identity. Unfortunately, Youssef and other youths living in the slum are marginalized and neglected by successive governments. An Islamist party sets up its headquarters in the slum and looks after the needs of the people. In this sense, the novelist conflates ‘political Islam with internal and external corruption [… which] is largely governmental, but it includes economic systems, imperial politics, and rampant nepotism’ (Salaita, 2011: 117). The Islamist party turns ‘a dirt lot’ into a football field for the young men of Hay An Najat (Lalami, 2009: 32). Youssef and his friends play on this pitch every weekend, but one Saturday ‘they found a group of boys already playing, using a torn ball stuffed with fabric’ (p. 32, emphasis added). The boys challenge the request of Youssef’s muscular friend, Maati, to leave the pitch, and eventually, the two parties agree to play a match (p. 32).

Through her representation of football, the novelist highlights a number of socioeconomic, political and cultural issues in contemporary Morocco. Apparently, football has become a site of contestation between conflicting political powers in Morocco. In the absence of state-run recreational projects in slums, the Islamist party makes a foothold in these neglected and marginalized areas by setting up a football pitch. In this sense, the novelists underline the fact that football is a cultural commodity that can be employed by contesting political bodies to gain legitimacy among the masses. Despite the ‘sharp disagreements’ between Muslim jurists on the appropriateness of sports to Muslim societies as Shavit and Winter illustrate in their illuminating study on sports in contemporary Islamic law (2011: 279), the Islamist party cashes on the popularity of football among Moroccan youths to increase its base and recruit adherents and aficionados. The party has also set up a café where young men can watch football matches on weekends (Lalami, 2009: 57–58). The café becomes a space where unemployed and disgruntled youths vent out their sorrows. At the same time, it becomes a space where the Islamist party asserts its role in shouldering the burdens of the nation.

The above episodes demonstrate how the government has left poor people to face their destiny. In the first place, the boys who are playing on the pitch live in utter penury because they are using a torn ball stuffed with fabric. Moreover, one of these boys is ‘skinny’ and plays barefoot (p. 33). In other words, Lalami uses football to describe the hard socioeconomic conditions under which people live in slums. Naturally, these horrible conditions lead people to fight and vilify each other. Maati’s attempt to force the boys to leave the pitch can be read within a context of opposition and rivalry that is inherent to the game itself as sport sociologist Giulianotti demonstrates (1999: 10–14). This is best illustrated in the novel when the two teams disagree on a penalty decision and the game descends into violence (p. 34). Had law been enforced, the players would not have resorted to violence to settle the matter. One may argue that the disorder that mars this football match reflects the chaos that envelops the nation itself. Eventually, the Islamist party recruits some to these frustrated and disgruntled youths for terrorist missions.

If Lalami employs football to depict how slum dwellers in Casablanca are excluded from the nation and are left without support from the state, Rabih Alameddine uses football to illustrate how women are pushed to the margins of Lebanese society. For Druze Lebanese Sarah Nur el-Din, football represents part of a traumatic past that she wishes to forget. Sarah attempts to write her autobiography but fails to go beyond the first chapter because she cannot tell a story about Lebanon’s civil war ‘without confronting the misdeed committed against her’ (Salaita, 2011: 52). In this sense, ‘[t]he disjointed narration allows the reader to remain confused about Sarah’s situation, much as she herself was confused as a child growing up and coping with such contradictions’ (Hartman, 2013: 345). Early in the novel, Sarah highlights the social and cultural hardships she has to go through as a Druze Lebanese girl:

Growing up female in Lebanon was not easy […] I was oblivious to such pressures, much to the consternation of many. As a child, I was a tomboy, unaware of how girls were supposed to behave. I became a good soccer player. (Alameddine, 2001: 78)

As the above quotation shows, Sarah highlights the difficulties that a girl has to endure. Yet, she celebrates her difference from the rest of the girls. Significantly, for Sarah, her uniqueness stems, inter alia, from her excellence at playing football.

In this sense, the novel employs football to foreground ‘the debate on women’s participation (or lack of) in sport in the Arab world’ (Amara, 2012: 8). More specifically, the novel foregrounds the ongoing debate ‘in relation to the body of the Arab and Muslim woman in sport as a site of struggle for feminine emancipation’ (pp. 8–9). In other words, the debate on sport and the (female) body has been viewed as part of an ongoing discussion between traditions and modernity. As Amara rightly puts it:

The visibility of women’s bodies in sport competitions is presented by secularized countries in the Arab world as a sign of their ‘progressive’ ideologies. To cover women’s bodies in sport is, for Islamist movements, a means of denouncing the westernization of Arab societies. The adoption of the veil by Muslim athletes is an opportunity for them to reclaim their rights over their own body and to define their body religiously, independently of male religious or feminist secular interpretations, but not necessarily in opposition to modern sport and norms of sport performance. (2012: 148)

Amara’s words are quite illuminating and highlight the precarious position Arab women athletes occupy in society. In other words, Arab women athletes have to carefully negotiate a wide array of social, cultural, historical and political difficulties.

In I, the Divine, Alameddine highlights the dilemma of Sarah by depicting the ups and downs she endures to achieve her goal of becoming a professional footballer. Sarah’s expectations and hopes are given a boost when her father moves her to a school which pays greater attention to physical education than her previous school. Sarah feels that she is about to fulfill her dreams and goals:

They played soccer primarily. I fit right in. If there was one thing at which I was superior to Fadi, and, as it turned out, every other boy, it was the beautiful game soccer. I had always been tomboy and I was blessed with a soccer-playing which amazed even those who knew nothing about the game. (p. 11)

But this sense of jubilation and expectancy is overturned when she confronts her PE teacher. Sarah’s disappointment is accompanied by a sense of isolation, alienation and humiliation:

I was wearing the school’s athletic uniform […] and pair of desert boots. The last was not part of the uniform, but since my stepmother refused to consider buying me athletic shoes, […] I had to make do. Our PE teacher, Mr. Najjar, could not believe his eyes. He ordered me off the field, screaming and hollering. (pp. 11–12)

The way Sarah improvises her football gear is emblematic of the way her identity is constructed. In this sense, football comes to represent Sarah’s fragmented and incoherent identity. Mr Najjar’s reaction to Sarah’s presence on the football pitch is neither unique nor unprecedented. Internationally, women have been excluded from football for many years. For instance, by 1921, the English Football Association ‘had banned women from the fields of Football League and Association clubs’ and ‘this antipathy towards women’s football permeated most of Europe’ (Williams, 2013: 186). It was not until the 1970s that the ban on women’s football was gradually lifted by national associations (p. 187).

In retrospect, Sarah ‘describe[s] Mr. Najjar as a male chauvinist pig with the intelligence of a four-year-old’ (Alameddine, 2001: 12). Once again, Sarah’s skill as a footballer is what condemns and vilifies her: ‘The final disappointment for him [Sarah’s father] was my skill at soccer. I had played the game as a child, on the streets with the boys. My father never considered this the problem my stepmother did’ (p. 35). Sarah’s stepmother turns her father against her, convincing him that his daughter is ‘a lost case, an embarrassment to the family’ (p. 35). Sarah’s stepmother fears that practicing football may lead Sarah to ‘become physically and mentally “masculinized”’ and that Sarah may damage the hymen while playing football, and hence, risk her future in a society that upholds virginity (Pfister, 2006: 14). Significantly, it is during a FIFA World Cup that her stepmother was able to turn her father against her:

However, during the years after the 1970 World Cup Finals, my stepmother was able to convince my father I was wicked. I watched the championship game with my family and saw the Brazilians tear the Italians apart […] From that moment on, I knew how the game was supposed to be played, and that knowledge marked the beginning of my spiraling descent into disgrace. (p. 35)

Sarah’s stepmother refuses to believe that Sarah is a gifted footballer. She is shocked to see her play football, a domain which Sarah should not be allowed to trespass because it is reserved for men only: ‘One day, my stepmother looked out from the balcony, saw me down on the street playing, and had a nervous breakdown’ (p. 36). For Sarah’s stepmother and indeed for many others, the only role acceptable for women in sport is that of ‘servicing both men’s and children’s sports’ (Scraton and Flintoff, 2013: 100).

As Sarah grows up, her ‘intensely traumatic memories’ of home haunt her (Fadda-Conrey, 2014: 118). For her, football is associated with a domain from which she has been excluded. Her wish to play football remains unfulfilled and her identity continues to be ‘scattered and fragmented in competing versions of her life story’ (Hartman, 2013: 355). If we seriously consider Sarah’s closing words at the end of the novel, then certainly being excluded from the football pitch is a watershed in defining Sarah’s identity:

But how can I expect readers to know who I am if I do not tell them about my family, my friends, the relationships in my life? […] I have to explain how the individual participated in the larger organism, to show how I fit this larger whole. (p. 308)

Evicted from the football pitch, Sarah is pushed to the margins of the nation. In this sense, football plays a pivotal role in engendering Sarah’s position in society. In other words, Alameddine draws on Sarah’s experience as a talented footballer forced out of the pitch to present to the reader a picture of a male-chauvinist and narrow-minded Druze Lebanese society. Sarah’s childhood memories emotionally, psychologically and socially paralyze her. Sarah, like Aboulela’s Nur and Lalami’s Youssef, lives on the margins of the nation.

Conclusion

The analysis of the works of Aboulela, Lalami and Alameddine shows that the authors have commented on a nation’s socioeconomic, political, cultural and historical circumstances through the prism of football. In other words, the above novelists have explored the relationship between the individual and the nation through depicting the experiences of football-fervent characters whose lives have been entangled with anti-colonialist and nationalist movements, state building and globalization. The paper shows that literary representations can help comprehend the specific ways in which football shapes and is shaped by the experiences of people from different backgrounds. By depicting how the daily experiences of Nur, Youssef and Sarah are entangled with discourses on football’s various facets, the three novels offer the reader imaginative and innovative methods of contextualizing football and identifying multiple and intersecting dynamics that play crucial roles in the way football is perceived worldwide.

The authors discussed in this paper draw on their experiences as Arab writers in diaspora to present in their works multidimensional images of football. Operating from ‘a multiplicity of centers – perhaps better defined […] as temporary positions or pivots on which to stand’ (Hayward, 2013: 323), Arab writers in diaspora show an acute awareness of the entanglement of football with endogenous and exogenous influences, and hence, they present the game as a site on which discourses on globalization, nation building and identity formation take place. The novels discussed in this paper may be read within a context of an increasing interest in football in Arab countries that manifests itself in the growing number of Arab investments in international football, the emergence of football superstars of Arab origin, the intersection between football and recent socioeconomic and political events in Arab countries and FIFA’s controversial decision to stage the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. Overall, since it first entered the Arab world in the late 19th century, sport, particularly football, ‘was a means of co-existence with colonial society’; simultaneously, it was used as a tool to subvert, with various degrees of success, colonialist ruling plans and policies and to ‘defen[d] the Arab cause in the international arena’ (Amara, 2012: 20).

Arab novelists in diaspora have also used football to supplement and clarify the themes their novels highlight. For Aboulela, the accident that befalls a promising and a talented footballer on the eve of Sudan’s independence portends the nation’s turbulent passage into a new era. Similarly, Morocco’s socioeconomic and political disorder is epitomized by the episode in which frustrated and disgruntled unemployed youths turn the football pitch into a boxing ring where they pugnaciously settle the score with each other. In fact, this masculine and muscular definition of football disallows Alameddine’s Druze Lebanese Sarah from treading on the football pitch simply because she is not a boy. For Sarah, football is part of a traumatic experience that she hopes to overcome. The three novels, in other words, have examined the relationship between the individual and the nation and showed that football is a cultural site that, when critically appraised and evaluated, illustrates many important details about a culture’s socioeconomic, political and historical circumstances.