Jordanian national football Muslimat players: Interrupting Islamophobia in FIFA's hijab ban

Abstract

Background: Though musli m females exclusion from physical activities and sports has concerned scholars for years, they are still being theorized out of context and out of history and not as agents in their own lives. Within the prevailing context of the ‘War on Terror,’ muslim females are becoming more racialized in sports and are unnecessarily constructed as needing protection and void of any agency. In 2010, a crisis emerged out of the International Federation of Association Football's (FIFA) erratic interpretation of Law 4 which excluded muslim females players with a head/cover gear deemed unsafe on the field. This crisis highlighted the importance of understanding not only the targeted exclusion of muslim female players but also the importance of working with muslim female national football players and the possibilities of them resisting the racializing and gendering logics of a mega-sport institution such as FIFA.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand how five women football players on the Jordanian national team negotiated FIFA's ‘hijab ban’ of 2011. Particularly, it seeks the perspectives of the players themselves – whether they are wearing the head and/or neck cover or not and whether their muslimness is visible or not – and their stories of how they negotiated FIFA's ‘hijab ban’ (2011–2012).

Methodology: This paper is part of a larger critical qualitative study based on (1) dialogical interviews with five football players on the Jordanian national team, (2) material the players crafted and used to campaign against FIFA's ‘hijab ban,’ (3) players’ journals, (4) email correspondence and (5) web-based campaigning material. I deploy arab-muslim feminist scholars’ more complicated understanding of the hijab and theorize of how muslim women's bodies are regulated by two interconnected hijabophobias, the Islamist and Western-Islamophobic.

Findings: The findings are organized in the following themes: (1) experiencing humiliation and injustice, (2) exposing FIFA's Islamophobic standpoint and (3) resisting through solidarity and activism. The results suggest that the muslim female football players on the Jordanian national team exposed the FIFA's Islamophobic hijabophobia in its interpretation of Law 4. They acted with resilience and political savviness to regain the right to play while being muslim female under FIFA's laws. This suggests that muslim females are active agents in their own lives and on a global level. They are able to counter the racializing injustices produced by very powerful sport institutions. Non-muslim/Western policy-makers, researchers, teachers and trainers working among muslim women and youth need to consider this example as a frame to their participatory research, critical pedagogies, and physical education (PE) and sport curricula. They need to recognize that we are living a moment in history in which muslim women's bodies are sites of both the Islamist and the colonialist anxieties in their struggles for power. Thus, they need to urgently be engaged in the theories and pedagogical approaches that challenge both the Islamist and the Islamophobic hijabophobias in sport and PE.

Keywords:

• Islamophobia
• hijabophobia
• FIFA
• feminist
• Jordan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use the term muslim as a non-essentializing analytical concept that may help highlight the multiplicities of people's muslimness in different contexts and histories.

2. This is the Arabic noun for arab-muslim woman. It is used here as a political and analytic category for an arab-muslim feminist committed to social justice.

3. Islamism, islamawyy, political Islam.

Contemporary religious fundamentalism [that] has focused on reviving patriarchal hierarchy … Fundamentalists’ rhetoric states that male supremacy is ordained by God, and further that women's bodies are sinful and their public presence is a threat to social order morality and societal well-being … Across contexts, they have heralded their singular interpretations of Islam as the only version of the Islam – a version which must remain the purview of religious scholars to discuss and debate, but which must be respected by all. (Hélie and Hoodfar 2012, 260–261)

4. FIFA's Laws of the Game of 2011–2012, Law 4, ‘Safety: A player must not use equipment or wear anything that is dangerous to himself or another player' (20). This law is also amended by an IFAB decision that prohibits players from revealing basic equipment and clothing with ‘any political, religious or personal statements' (22). http://www.fifa.com/mm/document/affederation/generic/81/42/36/lawsofthegame_2011_12_en.pdf.

5. FIFA's mission and objectives for women's football; http://www.fifa.com/aboutfifa/footballdevelopment/women/mission.html.

6. IFAB makes three unanimous historic decisions; http://www.fifa.com/aboutfifa/organisation/ifab/media/news/newsid=1660541/.

7. According to Hélie and Hoodfar (2012),

‘Muslimness’ [in Islamist logic] is posited as impossible to challenge because it is a cast as deriving from an ahistorical ‘Muslim identity’ which is divinely ordained. The consequence is that alternative visions of what it may mean to be a Muslim [or different and dynamic forms/expressions of muslimness] are dismissed as culturally irrelevant; they may even be denounced as blasphemous … In short, the conventional, commonly used construction of ‘Muslimness’ derives from a conservative political agenda that seeks to implement an ideal ‘Islamic society’. (3)