Egypt's Football Revolution: Emotion, Masculinity, and Uneasy Politics

Abstract

Carl Rommel, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, has written an intriguing anthropological study on Egyptian football and politics set against the background of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Using media analysis, interviews, and fieldwork, this study reveals how prevailing political and emotional attitudes toward the game changed after Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's fall. Rommel's central argument revolves around what he refers to as an “emotionally charged and highly politicized ‘bubble’” (2): the intertwining of Egyptian football with the Mubarak family's political agenda, with hegemonic masculinity, and with an outpouring of uncontrolled emotion. When the regime fell and the bubble burst, Rommel claims, images of the game were transformed and stigmatized due to fear of the game's ability to produce extreme emotions that could be cynically exploited for political ends that do not benefit the people (siyasa).This thought-provoking argument is written in a clear and engaging style that will appeal to scholars from various disciplines. As the book's title and subtitle inform us, Rommel's narrative intersects several fields of study, yet the monograph's main theme is primarily directed to modern Egypt and Middle East scholars. Egypt's Football Revolution is an important addition to the recent wave of sports publications on the Middle East and the ever-growing literature that uses sport as a fruitful lens through which to examine social and cultural issues. Sport historians, in particular, will be interested by the study's claim that the emotions generated by sport are a product of politics.The book is primarily based on fifty interviews Rommel conducted in Egypt during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Thus, picky readers (mostly historians) will need to adjust themselves to sentences that start with: “When I have asked friends” (49) and “I often heard” (215). However, when the narrative forces Rommel outside of his interview-based comfort zone, his work becomes, as he stated, more “methodologically eclectic” (21). Such integration is especially clear in the first two chapters, which focus on the football bubble during the Mubarak regime. The lack of contemporary interviews compels Rommel to do some “real” historical research. But the selection of the newspaper articles, TV appearances, and other media sources is relatively scant. Moreover, the narrative decision to fluidly shift from examining “historical sources” to post-2011 interviews can sometimes lead to a messy integration of “history” and “memory.” In itself, this overlap is hardly problematic. As numerous postmodern scholars have convincingly shown, history and memory are connected by an intimate and reciprocal relationship. Nevertheless, if Rommel's thesis is correct and an emotional change toward the game indeed occurred after the uprising, the post-uprising interviews on their own can only indicate an altered perspective on the old regime's culture and not, as the book implies, provide definitive evidence of the existence of such a “bubble” during the Mubarak era.One element that might have further enriched and strengthened the book's argument is incorporating a more transnational perspective. For example, early in the text, when attempting to establish the connection between football and Egyptian nationalism, Rommel informs the readers that already in the interwar period “the team's performances in those [international] tournaments were followed with great anxiety among what was then an emerging national public” (7). That might be correct, but as the extensive work on the 1920s and ’30s has repeatedly shown, such a claim could easily describe many cultures in this pre–World War II era and their fear of “degeneration.” Similarly, Rommel argues that the revolution failed because of Egyptian politics’ inability to conform with the imagined needs of the nation. As he rhetorically asks in his conclusion, “If all actors striving to effect change are required to remain nationalist and nonpolitical, then what kind of changes are possible at all” (217)? However, this sort of political toothlessness is not exclusive to the Egyptian uprising, and it also describes to some extent the disillusionment of Occupy Wall Street and the 2011 global protests in general. Moreover, a more cynical reader might even say the story of contemporary Egyptian football is less about revolution, emotions, and bubbles and more about a winning team that was beloved by the people and the regime and a relatively mediocre team that is unable to repeat its predecessor's three consecutive wins in the Africa Cup of Nations.Despite these issues, the book is a welcome addition to scholarship on sport and society. The diverse themes and thought-provoking thesis make the study a fruitful object for future debates, and it is a must for scholars and graduate students of sport in the middle east.