The Greatest World Cup Ever
The event, after all, is called the World Cup. Not the European or Western Cup, or what many in England or France may be led to believe, the White World Cup.
I was still young, but I vividly recall Diego Maradona hoisting the golden trophy after winning the World Cup in 1986. It claimed a permanent plot in my mind for reasons that supersede football. He was an Argentine that would become a legend in Estadio Azteca, while I was another Arab child trapped within the crucible of war in Lebanon.
Maradona and me were on opposite sides of the world, and even further axes of existence. But I saw my brown face and black locks in him in that moment in Mexico. The image screamed hope, however distant he and tenuous it was, into a place surrounded by war. That portrait of possibility became a centerpiece in my mind. Maradona emerged into a figure of transcendence for a child that struggled to find symbols of resemblance on screens where war monopolized our relevance.
For that reason, the 1986 tournament in Mexico was my greatest World Cup. It introduced me to the beautiful game during the ugliest stage of my childhood and acquainted me with the small brown lion who darted past white giants, roaring hope into my heart with that signature black mane.
Thirty-six years and nine World Cups later, that very image of Maradona being hoisted up by his teammates in Mexico City rose in my mind as my plane landed in Qatar. Mexico and Maradona were my benchmark, and I left the plane rushing to catch the final stanzas of Morocco’s historic tilt against Spain.
The images in the airport were surreal, colored by Croats donning traditional Arabic thobes (towns) and green Mexican jerseys matched together with the Qatari headdress. These were only appetizers to the smorgasbord of cultural fusion I took in on the streets of Doha, and within the heart of its souks, were Brazilians celebrated alongside Saudis and English fans congratulated jubilant troupes of Moroccans whose Atlas Lions marched into history. The flavors of ethnic exchange were overpowering, and the cultures blending in a part of the world inextricably tied to war and woe told a radically different story.
What was taking place on the streets, in the souks, and at the stadiums was magical. Instead of having to impose an Arab face on an Argentine or find phenotypic and physical resemblance in a mythical figure, I just had to open my eyes. The World Cup was actually taking place in Qatar, an Arab nation, where the azan (call to prayer) summoned believers to prayer and sounded to the world, and everybody in it, that Muslims were dynamic participants in the global community.
The football matches, up through the electric final between France and Argentina, were gripping. But what set the World Cup in Qatar apart were the events and images, sights and sounds beyond the stadiums. The network of museums hosted programs showcasing Islamic history and interrogating modern Arab identity. Visitors from every point of the globe tasted Yemeni and Egyptian cuisine for the first time and toured the nation’s desert and coastline in between football matches. Fans from every background flocked to fan zones, where the absence of alcohol made way for the formation of friendships, ensured safety for children, and made it safe for women to walk about freely, without fear.
As an Arab living in America, the World Cup in Qatar reversed the course of daily life for me and millions of immigrants in the west. We are perpetually told to “assimilate” and “conform,” commanded to accept values inimical to our own and to shed symbols sacred to our faith. That ongoing process of sacrifice and surrender marks the very essence of being an immigrant in the west, particularly for Muslims in nations where Islamophobia is enshrined into law. Immigrants are incessantly told to conform and conceal, assimilate, adapt, or else, “go back to where you come from.”
However, the very same British and French, German and American voices that demand conformity from immigrants in their own countries demonstrated – very starkly and sadly – that they were unwilling to do the same as passing visitors in Qatar. These western voices, and the arrogant cultural currents they embody, refused to follow a standard for four weeks of a World Cup that they imposed on others for the duration of their entire lives.
As if we needed reminders of white supremacy or remnants of imperialism, the unilateral demands on Qatar and indictments that followed from western media outlets piled on. Like colonial excursions and modern wars, they sought to flatten what unfolded in Qatar into savage stereotypes and doctored misrepresentations. They conspired to supplant the realities taking place on the ground in Doha with nefarious narratives crafted in London, seeking to steal the joy and achievements of this World Cup from the small Arab nation and the millions who flew to the Middle East, for the first time, to see it with eyes untainted by Orientalist myths and political mirages.
Despite their best efforts, they failed. A BBC poll tallied after the close of the tournament provided more evidence that the world, particularly the white world, was tired of the rank hypocrisy and bigotry coming from western Europe.
The event, after all, is called the World Cup. Not the European or Western Cup, or what many in England or Denmark may be led to believe, the White World Cup. The tournament, if it truly seeks to live up to its name, is meant to travel to nations where customs are dissimilar to those of our own and converge with cultures that misalign with what many are accustomed to.
That discord is, at once, the beauty and struggle of cultural exchange. It is a dissonance that enables immigrants in America, or Muslims in Europe, to navigate a cultural terrain uneven with their identity free of the impulse of making it wholly in their image.
An impulse that drives many white pundits raging from western Europe to condemn the World Cup in Qatar before it kicked off, and far more desperately, to slam it again after another diminutive Argentine held up gold for a nation deprived of it since 1986.
Messi not Maradona, Qatar in place of Mexico. Two small Argentine icons who looked like everyman instead of athletes, held up into the heights of history in two distant centers of the nonwhite world.
I was no longer a nameless Arab child living through another Middle Eastern war, but a known commodity crafting history at the first World Cup the region has ever seen. Which for reasons tied to resemblance and resilience, subaltern solidarity standing against and silencing western supremacy, make this World Cup the greatest one ever.
Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit and the Berkman Center at Harvard. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims. You can find him on his socials at @khaledbeydoun.
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