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Abstract
This article details the agitated emotional reactions and heated public debate that surrounded Egyptian football in the weeks before and after two World Cup qualifying games against Algeria in November 2009. During the late Mubarak era, Egypt experienced unprecedented successes on the football pitch, triumphs that together with a rapid increase in media attention, created a politicized and highly nationalist hype around the game. Drawing on press material from autumn 2009 and ethnographic interviews from fieldwork conducted a few years later, this article argues that the Algeria games constituted both the pinnacle of this hype and the point in time when football began to lose its central position in many Egyptians’ lives. In particular, this article shows how the social and political role of football, in the weeks after the matches came under increased criticism from Egyptian intellectuals and Islamists. During a brief and intense period, this debate over the appropriate status of football turned into a struggle over how Egyptian nationalism and Egyptian national subjectivity should best be constituted and embodied. In this contestation, ‘respectfulness’ stood against ‘vulgarity’, and different notions of Egypt's position vis-à-vis continental Africa and the rest of the Arab world were repeatedly employed.
Acknowledgements
During my fieldwork in Cairo I was supported by the SOAS Additional Research Grant, Sixten Gemzéus stiftelse, Helge Ax:son Johnsons stiftelse, and Svenska Sällskapet för Antropologi och Geografi. I was affiliated with the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology and Egyptology at the American University in Cairo during parts of my research period in Egypt.
Funding
The main support for this work was provided by a School of Oriental and African Studies’ Research Scholarship.
Notes
1. In this article, I am using a simplified version of the system for transliteration of Arabic used by the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Only two diacritical marks are used: (‘) for ayn and (’) for hamza. When appearing in the beginning of a word, the mark for hamza is omitted. In the passages where spoken Egyptian Arabic has been transliterated, I have tried to stay as close to the Egyptian pronunciation as possible. Also Arabic proper names have been transliterated using the IJMES system, but in cases where a different, commonly known version of the name exists, I have used that one instead. The same is the case when the person himself (all people in this article are men) prefers a particular transliteration of his own name.
2. See also Iskandar (Citation2010) for a similar account in English that draws heavily on Tawfiq's book.
3. In my Ph.D.-thesis in-process, a central argument is that the cultural work that football does in Egypt cannot be fully understood if considered ‘marginal’, a ‘replacement’ or an emotional ‘smokescreen’ for ‘real’ politics. Rather, I show that it was a constitutive part – emotionally, affectively and discursively – of the political realm in Egypt, in particular in the late Mubarak era.
4. The exact reasons for why Omdurman was chosen as the venue are accounted for below.
5. One of few exceptions seems to have been the Egyptian football website FilGoal.com, which was heavily criticized for publishing reports on injured Algerians players and fans, similar to those featuring in the western media (personal conversation with Ahmad Said, editor at FilGoal.com). In al-Shuruq, this side of the story was either neglected or reported on in a tone that indicated that the Algerians had made it all up (e.g. November 14, 2009).
6. This newspaper has exactly the same name as the Egyptian daily which this article frequently refers to. The two papers are, however, not in any way related.
7. One of Fouad's most emotional and famous call-ins is found in this YouTube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWiJhvcz9tI (accessed November 28, 2013).
8. This was also confirmed by an Egyptian man I met in Cairo in 2012, who due to his blond complexion was taken for an Algerian and almost beaten up by a mob inside his local supermarket in Cairo a few days after the match in Khartoum.
9. One of the most famous interviews that are available on YouTube is this one with Muhammad Fouad calling in to the popular talk show Bayt baytak on Egyptian state television a couple of days after he had returned from Sudan http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfJBh4_g5ew. Another one is this with a very angry Alaa Mubarak calling in to the same programme http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYTH6Vn7zIQ. Both of these clips include some very heady nationalist rhetoric and harsh anti-Algerian agitation (both were accessed November 28, 2013).
10. Due to his long experience and high reputation, Hassan al-Mistakawi is one of few Egyptian sports journalist who could also be considered a muthaqqaf.
11. As I will discuss below, most Egyptian intellectuals had previously quite actively avoided to discuss the booming football phenomenon.
12. Al-Aswani is most famous for his novel The Yacoubian Building from 2002 (2004 in English translation).
13. When Egypt reached the World Cup in Italy in 1990, the attention was also enormous but sports media was much less developed (in particular television). Compared to some newspapers from the time of the African Cup of Nations that Egypt won in 2008, it was in particular the coverage outside the sports pages that was much more extensive in al-Shuruq in autumn 2009.
14. Iskandar similarly describes the bitter loss as bringing ‘the little tranquilizing effect football success had on Egyptians to an abrupt end’ (Citation2010).
15. For example, al-Irhabi (1994), Ana mish ma‘hom (2007) and Wahid sifr (2009).
16. See also Armbrust (Citation1996), for a discussion about discourses on vulgarity in Egypt in the 1980s and 1990s.
17. An early example of this was the violence that erupted after a decisive qualification match for the Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984, a match that Egypt won. The most commonly referred precursor was, however, the almost identical copy of the match in Cairo that was played at the same stadium 20 years earlier, on the 17th of November 1989, when Egypt last time claimed a spot in the World Cup. Also then the Algerian team had come to Cairo to play a final decisive match in the group, and also at that occasion there had been endless media reports and rumours about violence between fans, players and officials before as well as after the game. Later, similarly troublesome matches between the two countries are the two World Cup qualifiers in 2001, and most recently in summer 2009 when the Egyptians allegedly were poisoned at their hotel in the hours before the two teams’ first match in the same qualification group in Blida, Algeria, a match which Algeria won 3:1 (al-Shuruq, November 14 and 18, 2009; Montague Citation2009; Oliver Citation2009; Thabet Citation2010, 119–123).
18. As mentioned above, al-Mistakawi called for calm in many of his columns prior to the second game in Sudan.
19. See Mbembé (Citation2001, 173–211) for an intriguing discussion about some disastrous and very violent consequences that potentially follow the perception of the (post-)colonial relationship as one between a father and his child. It is also worth noting that many Sudanese intellectuals were very irritated by the Egyptian media's one-sided reporting about the ‘chaos’ in Khartoum. At one point, it even went so far that the Sudanese Journalist Union demanded their own government to expel all Egyptian journalists from the country (al-Shuruq, November 20, 2009).
20. The governing body of international football.
21. In my still on-going Ph.D. research which this article represents a small piece of, I explore in detail how this transformation from hype to disinterest and apathy should best be understood. There, I also discuss at length the new phenomenon of young Ultras fans, who were the ones killed in Port Said and who in the years right before and after 2011 have drastically transformed the way that football, politics and nationalism relate to each other in the country.
22. The important exception is the Ultras fans of al-Ahly and al-Zamalek, who were very active in the revolutionary struggle, and who especially in 2011 and 2012 figured frequently in media discourses as well as in the on-going street politics, demonstrations and protests. I discuss these issues at length in my Ph.D. dissertation that is currently in the making.