General Conclusion and the Way Forward for Research on Sport in the Arab World

Abstract

This study of sport in the Arab world over the last ten years started in 2000, with my doctoral thesis on the modernization and professionalization of football in Algeria, which I completed at Loughborough University. The implicit questions that have arisen through this study are: What is to be an Algerian and, more broadly, what is to be an Arab? Ironically, I came to know about Algerian writers and novelists when I settled in the United Kingdom. Then I rediscovered Algerian authors such as Kateb Yacine, Mouhamed Harbi, Benjamin Stora, Assia Djebar, Malek Bennabi, Mouhamed Arkoun, Rachid Mimouni, Rachid Boudjera and others who were either ignored or censured in Algeria, accused of being too western and secular, or too feminist, or too Islamist, or too subversive. I realized the importance of reading their work in order to reconcile with my Algerianness, destabilized as it was by the experience of brutal violence in Algeria in the 1990s, and to relocate my new pluralist vision of Algeria to North Africa, to the Arab and Muslim worlds and the Mediterranean space, and also to Britain. Reading and writing in English, the language of globalization, helped me to move away from ideological and linguistic divides in Algeria between being francophone, which is presented there as secular-liberal, and being arabophone, presented as conservative-nationalist.KeywordsOlympic GameSport ClubArab WorldFootball ClubNational TeamThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.