How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (25 page)

Some women threw o¤ the
hijab
and partied without any of the mandated head coverings. When the
basiji,
members of the religious paramilitary militia, arrived to shut down the demonstrations, they were persuaded to join the roistering themselves.

Some delicate defusing was now in order. The government asked the team to meander back from Australia, taking a leisurely layover in Dubai, buying time for the situation in Tehran to cool down. Radio broadcasts warned citizens against secular celebrations that give Allah short shrift. Other messages specifically appealed to the women of the country, our “dear sisters,” urging them to stay home during the homecom-ing celebrations.

When the team finally returned, three days later, the government held the celebration in the Azadi. The heroes arrived in the stadium via helicopters, as if Silvio Berlusconi had planned the event. But the real spectacle wasn’t inside the stadium. Thousands of women defied the state’s pleas and gathered on the other side of the Azadi’s gates, in the 27-degree chill. As the anthropologist Christian Bromberger has reported, when the police refused to admit these women to the
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE

stadium, they began shouting “Aren’t we part of this nation? We want to celebrate too. We aren’t ants.” Fear-ing the horde, the police let three thousand women into special seating, segregated from the rest of the stadium.

But what about the two thousand women on the other side of the turnstile who hadn’t wormed their way into the Azadi? The admission of their dear sisters did nothing to placate them. Determined to get their own piece of the celebration, they broke through the police gates and muscled their way into the stadium. Intent on avoiding a major fracas that could steer the raw emotions of the day in a dangerous direction, the police had no choice but to overlook their entry and concede defeat.

II.

When future historians write about the transformation of the Middle East, they will likely wax lyrical about this moment, which already has come to be known as the

“football revolution.” Like the Boston Tea Party, it will go down as the moment when the people first realized that they could challenge their tyrannical rulers. For the Iranians, the event has served as the model uprising, so much so that every subsequent high stakes World Cup qualifying match has led Iranians into the streets. Over time, the political subtext of these outpourings has become increasingly explicit. During the 2002 campaign, with each Iranian win—over Saudi Arabia, over Iraq, over the United Arab Emirates—festive fans chanted
“Zindibad azadi”
(long live freedom) and “We
love America.” But even this may underestimate the significance of the football revolution. It is more than an event. The football revolution holds the key to the future of the Middle East. This future could be discerned in the waving of the pre-Islamic national flag, the graªti that praised the “noble people of Iran,”

and the celebrants’ shouting of the name of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the late shah—the roots of a nationalist uprising against Islam.

But is the football revolution the revolution that the U.S. wants? Not so long ago, secular nationalism looked like the great enemy in the Middle East. Dictators like Gamal Nasser, Muammar Qaddafi, and Hafez Assad were the biggest thorns in America’s side, sponsoring hijacking and making war against Israel. In the eighties, however, these Arab nationalists fell upon tough times. They no longer could turn to the Soviet Union for patronage, and Gulf War I exposed how Americans could easily crush even the most powerful of this bunch. What’s more, since the days of Nasser, these secularists had competed with Islamic movements funded by Saudi Arabia. Now, with the nationalists on the ropes, Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and radical Wahabi preachers have gained a serious upper hand in their battle for hegemony over the Muslim mind.

No doubt, the old dictators have caused many

headaches, but America basically knew how to deal with them. It could play them o¤ one another, and ultimately dismiss them as relatively harmless bu¤oons.

Islamists, on the other hand, were an unfamiliar, uncontainable problem. How to turn the tide against
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE

them? One answer has been to inject more globalization into the region. But so far it hasn’t worked. In places like Pakistan, a proliferation of KFC and Bolly-wood movies has arguably aggravated the problem. By displaying the western way of life, they draw attention to the Islamic world’s own humiliating lack of modernity. Another answer to the problem of Islamism, the neo-conservative solution, proposes that the U.S.

aggressively push the Middle East toward democracy.

But the mere fact that the U.S. is the only force seriously committed to democratizing means that blind hatred for the messenger will undermine the message.

The football revolution shows that the best antidote to Islamism might not be something new, but something old—a return to secular nationalism.

Indeed, the football revolution presages a promising scenario: That people won’t accede to theocracy forever, especially when they can remember an era of greater lib-erty before clerical rule. When they revolt, they might fleetingly plead for American help, but they’ll mostly rise up in the name of their nation. We might not always agree with the new nationalists—and they might take their rhetorical shots at the U.S.— but they may be the only viable alternative to government by Islam.

III.

The history of modern Iran can be told as the history of Iranian soccer. It begins just after World War I with Shah Reza the Great, King of Kings, Shadow of the Almighty, God’s Vicar and the Center of the Universe,
founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. Reza Khan, the man who would become Reza Shah at the ripe age of forty-seven, wasn’t born to the palace. He had been a semilit-erate soldier from the provinces who made his name leading a band of Russian-trained Cossacks. But in the eyes of the British, who lapped at the pool of Iranian oil and tried to quietly run the country, he was the perfect cipher—a man without political ambitions, accustomed to taking orders. In 1921, the general Sir Edmund Ironside, stationed in Tehran, humbly suggested that Reza might want to seize power. The old government had grown too nationalist and unreliable for Ironside’s taste. With the British blessing, Reza’s coup was a fait accompli. Four years later, Reza received the ultimate reward for his cooperation. He sent the old monarch packing to Europe, assumed his lengthy title and the full trappings of royalty. It was quite a leap for a simple village boy to make. But, as the British will attest, he proved to be far less of a pliant bumpkin than first imagined. He would use the military as his blunt instrument for remaking Persian society in the image of Prussian society, a modern nation to compete with Europe. Like his other role model, the great Turkish modernizer Kemal Atatürk, he built roads and railways and trampled traditional practices, belittling the mullahs and banning the chador. He legislated that men trash their robes and don proper western suits. To make a modern nation, he wanted to create a modern Iranian man who understood the values of hygiene, manly competition, and cooperation.

He became an enthusiastic proponent of physical education, a bow in the direction of German gymnastics,
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE

which he encoded in school curricula. Soccer soon became the regime’s activity of choice. Reza Shah ordered the armed forces to play matches, even in the provinces, where European shoes hadn’t yet made an appearance. “By the mid-1920s,” as the incisive historian Houchang Chehabi has put it, “football had become a symbol of modernization, and soon the game was promoted at the highest levels of the state.”

Just like Reza Shah himself, soccer owed its initial strength to the British. The Iranian elite had learned the game in missionary schools run by foreigners. And the Iranian masses learned the game by standing on the touchline and watching employees of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The idea of modernization in general, and soccer in particular, represented a shock to the Islamic system. Even though Reza Shah suppressed the clerics, they still waged a quiet resistance. In the villages, mullahs ordered the stone pelting of Iranian soccer players. By playing in British uniforms, the Iranians had slipped into shorts and out of compliance with shari’a, which dictates that men cover their legs from the navel to the knees.

But the old ways didn’t stand a chance against the might of the modernizers, backed by the powerful state. Reza Shah’s regime seized lands from mosques and converted them into football fields. Over time the state’s enthusiasm for the game grew even greater.

Where Reza Shah embraced the game for largely theo-retical reasons, his son adored it with the passion of a purist. The crown prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi played it at the Rosey School in Switzerland. Returning home in 1936, he lined up as a striker for the oªcers’
school he attended. When the British forced Reza Shah to abdicate the peacock throne to his young son in 1941, after he stupidly made himself cozy with the Nazis, they enthroned the biggest football fanatic in the land.

Even though Iran was far from both the Asian and European fronts, the Pahlavi push toward modernity su¤ered a major setback with the economic disloca-tions of World War II. In the country’s weakened condition, foreign influences—still the British and increasingly the American—became as pronounced as ever, culminating in the CIA-led coup that ousted the democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. In the cities, both the socialist intelligentsia and traditional clerics began to assert themselves. Important matters of state weighed on the new shah’s mind. Nevertheless, as a devoted fan, he couldn’t tolerate losses that the Iranian national team su¤ered in the 1950s. He began devoting resources to the creation of a great team.

In the second decade of his rule, the hard work paid o¤. As part of the regime’s continued program of hyperkinetic growth and modernization, the newly industrialized cities filled with millions of migrants from the provinces. These arrivals, for the first time enjoying a respite from the 24/7 grind of agriculture, began to fill their leisure time with soccer. The newly urbanized who couldn’t wrangle tickets to the stadium watched soccer on television—a medium that became increasingly mass in the late sixties. But the popularity of the sport rests largely on a single match played against Israel in the wake of the 1967 war. Unlike the rest of the Muslim world, the Iranians had a quiet
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE

alliance with the Jewish state that withstood the tumult of the late sixties. (Israel has often had great success cultivating non-Arab allies on the fringes of the Muslim world.) Because of this alliance, Iranians didn’t join with the other Muslim states, which had refused to even take the athletic field with Israelis.

The game was played as part of the quadrennial Asian Nations Cup. While the regime kept up relations with Israel, the Iranian people weren’t entirely on the same page. Earlier in the tournament, when Israel played Hong Kong, Iranians pelted Jewish supporters with bottles. As Houchang Chehabi has reported, the game with Israel was a case study in ugliness. Fans released balloons covered in swastikas. They chanted,

“Goal number two is in the net—a score. Moshe

Dayan’s poor ass is ripped and sore.”

Many theories explain the logic behind the shah’s decision to permit this contest to go forward. Many Iranians persuasively argue that the shah organized the match to harmlessly divert anti-Israeli sentiment. Others contend that the Israelis threw the match, 2–1, to buck up their friend, the shah. Whatever the shah’s rationale, Iran’s victory acquired a mythic significance.

Pop singers enshrined it in song. Players became national icons, whose jukes and crosses were recreated by children in thousands of rag-ball street games.

If the regime had subtly used the game against Israel to bolster itself, its exploitation was more obvious in the years that followed. The game boomed in the seventies, with intense club rivalries forming. Members of the royal family glommed onto the newfangled popularity and began publicly rooting for the club Taj
(Crown). To cover the monarchy’s bases, the shah’s wife pulled for Taj’s great rival, Persepolis. With the monarchy so closely identified with soccer, the regime’s Islamist opponents inevitably targeted it, often disrupting games to stage their protests.

The shah’s regime had many faults, especially handling its opponents with undeniable brutality. But its greatest shortcoming, the one that did it in, was the shah’s modernization program. He pushed the country too hard, too fast, to become urban and industrial. Centuries of Persian life were uprooted and overhauled in the course of a generation of fevered transformation.

When the revolutionaries ousted the shah in 1979, however, they tried hard to reverse the sporting symbol of this modernization program. They appropriated the soccer field at Tehran University, reversing the seizures made by Reza Shah, and used it as a staging ground for Friday prayers. They nationalized the soccer clubs, changing Taj into Esteghlal (Independence) and Persepolis into Piroozi (Victory). In their papers and pam-phlets, the ascetic puritans made it clear that they considered soccer to be a debased calling. A typical revolutionary fulmination read: “Would it not have been better if instead of clowning around like the British and the Americans in order to ‘shine’ in international arenas, [the players] shone in the company of the brothers of the . . . jihad in our villages, where the simplest amenities are lacking? Have all our political, economic, and cultural problems been solved that we have turned to sport?”
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE

IV.

In a very brief period, the Islamic regime managed to virtually eliminate Iranian pop culture, purging the divas and crooners, rejecting any movie that showed excessive flesh. But when this clampdown extended to soccer, the regime’s position became untenable. It put the new government in direct opposition to a great passion of the Iranian people. And very quickly, the mullahs realized that eradicating soccer wasn’t worth the political price. Since the clerics couldn’t ruin soccer, they did the next best thing. They tried to co-opt it and milk the game for all its worth. For a time, agents of the regime infiltrated crowds of fans and attempted to lead chants praising Allah. The regime also experimented with plastering its slogans on the placards that surround the pitch. Instead of flogging Toshiba and Coke, the boards screamed, “Down with the USA” and “Israel must be destroyed.”