The Qatar World Cup is about to shatter colonial myths

As a substitute of mimicking ex-colonial powers, the occasion may also help decolonise biased fascinated with Arab and Muslim cultures.

FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 mural at Katara Cultural Village in Doha, Qatar [Sorin Furcoi/Al Jazeera]

Qatar will quickly make historical past. On Sunday, it should turn out to be the smallest nation ever to host the world’s largest sporting occasion. To understand the distinction, consider the huge nations that hosted the earlier two iterations of the FIFA World Cup: Russia and Brazil.

Whereas the “comfortable energy” and “good energy” in Qatar’s diplomatic stock have been credited by many for this second, the World Cup deserves to be checked out by means of extra than simply the lens of worldwide relations. As postcolonial students like Edward Mentioned and Gayatri Spivak (PDF) have argued, the Euro-American creativeness has lengthy dictated what's “good” whereas figuring out how the Oriental “different” is represented.

The World Cup gives an opportunity to reset these narratives.

In any case, there's something magical in regards to the World Cup occurring in Qatar. Since successful the bid to host the twenty second version of the World Cup, Doha has been readying itself for the worldwide showpiece, placing earnings from its hydrocarbon business to good use modernising the nation’s infrastructure – particularly roads, transportation and know-how.

Qataris have more and more reworked themselves into avid data know-how customers. Doha continues to be modernised at a swift tempo, from a pearling village into a sensible metropolis and residential to numerous expatriate communities. It's geared up with state-of-the-art know-how, giving Qataris larger digital accessibility and connectivity, whether or not in e-governance, environment friendly banking or well being.

But whereas soccer fields are presupposed to encourage worldwide unity and a spirit of sportsmanship, there is no such thing as a escape from constructions of otherness in world encounters like soccer’s largest carnival. On this case, that exhibits within the systematic, relentless and racially prejudiced marketing campaign within the West in opposition to Qatar within the years main as much as this World Cup.

How else can one clarify the way through which Qatar has been topic to vilification like no host earlier than it? Not different small nations with excessive climate, similar to Switzerland in 1954. Not superpowers like the US, the place the Los Angeles space hosted the World Cup last in 1994, simply two years after witnessing a few of the nation’s worst race riots in a long time. Not Mussolini’s fascist regime and Argentina’s brutal navy junta. Not Brazil, the place folks residing in favelas had been evicted because the nation appeared to cover its poverty from followers travelling for the 2014 World Cup. Not Russia, which held the 2018 occasion amid rising homophobia.

These nations had been seen as authentic hosts – it doesn't matter what they did – as a result of, in some way, soccer was and is seen as belonging to them. In contrast, Qatar was seen with disdain the second it received its bid, handled as an outsider gatecrashing a celebration of the elite.

In truth, like different Arab, Asian, African and South and Central American nations, soccer got here to Qatar through colonialism, when the nation was a British protectorate between 1916 and 1971. The Anglo-Persian Oil Firm (APOC), the precursor to British Petroleum (BP), started oil exploration and manufacturing within the late Nineteen Thirties. Soccer adopted within the Nineteen Forties. The Doha Stadium was the primary soccer enviornment with a grass pitch within the Gulf area. League competitors began within the Nineteen Sixties, a number of years earlier than independence.

Sarcastically, postcolonialism research have had little to say about soccer – regardless that most of the slums of former colonies have produced main stars, from Pele in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to Raheem Sterling in Kingston, Jamaica. Many Arab gamers – from Algeria’s Rabah Madjer to Egypt’s Mohamed Salah – have made related journeys to Europe’s wealthy golf equipment.

The soccer World Cup should not be merely an train in new types of cultural mimicry of former colonial powers. At the same time as soccer within the West struggles to handle racism – Brazilian participant Richarlison lately had a banana thrown at him in a Paris pleasant – the Qatar version of the World Cup might assist decolonise biased fascinated with Arab and Muslim societies by utilizing their numerous cultures to counterpoint the worldwide expertise of soccer.

For example, Qatar’s alcohol-free stadiums throughout the World Cup might set an instance. They are going to permit a broader part of individuals to return to matches with out worrying in regards to the alcohol-fueled violence, racism and foul language that’s widespread in European soccer arenas. As Qatar hosts followers from world wide, it might probably showcase an alternate solution to benefit from the sport – one that doesn't import a generic expertise of being a soccer fan whereas ignoring Qatar’s native values.

Qataris are accustomed to residing with foreigners and the World Cup is one more probability to show their affinity with multiculturalism to counter the Western stereotype of the “fanatic Muslim” – as seen lately in Islamophobic and racist French cartoons depicting Qatar’s nationwide crew.

By presenting an alternate narrative to the way in which each the Muslim world and soccer have been seen within the West, this World Cup might assist decolonise the language of the game. “European soccer” will not be white. “African” or “Arab” soccer are usually not indicators of color or of ethnicity. But these labels are used as codes for dominant ethnicities and races far too usually in the way in which the game is roofed.

That’s the place postcolonialism can function an antidote, by inserting – to paraphrase Harvard College professor and demanding theorist Homi Okay Bhabha – the ex-colonised in-between totally different worlds and outlooks.

The Arab world is stuffed with literary minds which have tackled stereotypical representations and unequal encounters of their work – and that may function inspiration because the area seems to be to host the world on its phrases. Sudanese author Tayeb Salih’s 1966 guide Season of Migration to the North captures the essence of the in-betweenness that Bhabha highlights.

The good Saudi Arabian novelist Abdulrahman Munif coined a particular time period: al-teeh (loss, confusion). His basic compound novel of 5 tales, Cities of Salt (Mudun al-Milh, printed in 1984), is without doubt one of the finest examples of postcolonial literary research. It tells a story of political, financial, environmental and cultural devastation when neo-coloniser (American capitalism and petrodollars) and neo-colonised (the Gulf) meet.

These writings are poignant reminders that internet hosting and organising the FIFA World Cup is an event for far more than parading Westernised lives.

In colonial instances, Arabs fostered anti-colonial resistance by, amongst different issues, carrying native costume and making certain that they preserved their conventional tradition. At present, they don the Arab “thobe” (ankle-long tunic) comprised of cloth that hails from Japan. That displays the mingling of the worldwide and the native – in a method that Qatar and the Arab world might draw upon because the area hosts main sporting occasions.

The FIFA World Cup needs to be a shared area for a brand new modernity that isn’t white or colonial. A modernity that speaks to Arab, Asian, African, Indigenous and Latin values of tolerance, human rights and good governance, and challenges the stereotypes which are usually thrust upon the World South.

A modernity that seeks a extra simply, equitable and – actually – decolonised world, and questions and resists neo-colonising hierarchies. A modernity that calls for rights to cultural self-determination, and asserts shared futures and experiences on phrases of mutual respect.

By means of Qatar’s World Cup, “the gorgeous recreation” may also help subvert colonising tendencies and cultural narcissism in our multicultural world.