Tag Archives: world cup

Protests in Iran: Football and Headscarves

By Hugh Beattie

The Iranian football team recently attracted some attention in Qatar, not just because of the games they played in, but also because the players did not sing the Iranian national anthem before the game with England. Their brief protest reminds us that after three months of demonstrations it seems that the government has still not got a grip on the widespread protests that began in September following the death of the young Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, on September 16, in hospital in Teheran following her arrest by the Guidance Patrol, known as the Morality Police.  

There have of course been serious demonstrations against the government before – in 2009 and 2019 for example, but these were relatively easily crushed. 

Rejection of the headscarf has become an important feature of the current protests. Women’s dress has been a controversial issue in Iran for many years, becoming a central symbol during the culture wars between more secular and more religious sections of Iranian public opinion. In 1936, as part of efforts to modernise the country, the government of Shah Reza Pahlavi brought in the Mandatory Unveiling Act which made it illegal for women to wear a veil. For some years the law was harshly enforced; one reason for what the historian Nikki Keddie calls ‘a later pro-veil backlash’ (Keddie 1981). When serious protests broke out against the government of Shah Muhammad Pahlavi (Shah Reza Pahlavi’s son) in 1978, wearing a cloak (chador) which covers the whole body became a symbol of women’s resistance to the Shah and his Westernising government. After the overthrow of the Shah and the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979, women were required to dress modestly. When they left the home they had to wear a manteau, a kind of overcoat, and a headscarf to cover their hair. Wearing a chador was not actually compulsory, but even the manteau and the headscarf have become increasingly unpopular during the past few years. In passing it is interesting to note the contrast with Turkey, where during the 1980s the headscarf was actually banned in public institutions, universities among them, and women have continued to argue that this is unfair and that those who want to wear it should be allowed to do so (like in this example). 

To return to Iran, the Tony Blair Institute recently published an opinion poll from Iran with some interesting findings – 

  • of the women interviewed 74 per cent opposed the compulsory wearing of the hijab (a headscarf that covers the head and neck; hijab can also refer to clothing that covers the whole body apart from hands and face) as did 71 per cent of men. 
  • 84 per cent of those respondents wanted ‘regime change’. 

Perhaps the most surprising result was that 76 per cent considered that religion did not play an important part in their lives (source). 

In response to the ongoing demonstrations in various parts of the country, government forces have so far killed more than 400 people and detained around 16,000 others. But two weeks ago, the Iranian Attorney General seemed to make a concession to the protestors when he announced that the Guidance Patrol, which enforces the laws on dress and personal behaviour, would be suspended. Roya Hakakian, however, suggests that the current protests are about more than the headscarf, and that the government’s recent suspension of the Guidance Police will not be sufficient to satisfy the protestors (see the recent piece in The Atlantic).  Certainly, the Iranian singer-songwriter Shirvin Hajipour refers to a wide range of grievances in his song Baraye (with English translation), which has been referred to as the anthem of 2022 protests. 

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Should we keep politics out of The Beautiful Game?

By Paul-François Tremlett

The 2022 World Cup is set to kick off. Thirty-two teams (including Wales and England) will play in Qatar in eight stadiums, seven of which were built from scratch for the tournament alongside transport and tourist infrastructure. As the build-up intensifies, voices calling for fans to simply “focus on the football” or to “keep politics out of football” have grown louder. But Amnesty International, the Guardian newspaper and the BBC, among others, have reported on poor working conditions, exploitation, bullying, poor pay and even deaths among the migrant workers recruited to build the facilities for the tournament. The Guardian, in a 2021 article, put the number of deaths since Qatar was awarded the right to host the competition by FIFA in 2010 as high as 6,500 (source: The Guardian). So, should we focus on the football and keep politics out of the beautiful game?   

I think the question has two dimensions – one ethical, the other conceptual. I’ll take the conceptual dimension first. This boils down to the demand that we focus exclusively on the football and ignore the treatment of migrant labour. It also means, however, that we ignore a range of other things like social media, racism, fashion, money, fandom that are also implicated in football. We hear similar demands from some quarters in religious studies that we need to focus squarely on the religion. But the late Bruno Latour insisted on this point; things don’t exist in a pure state or as discrete objects; rather, they are always hybrids, combining with other things. So, you should reject the call to focus solely on the football because, at a conceptual level football, very much like religion, doesn’t make much sense on its own, demarcated from everything else.  

Now for the ethical dimension. The demand to keep politics out of the beautiful game and simply focus on the football feels like a tacit admission that the ethical dimension really does matter. Events like these – events that are mired in controversy – might best be understood as “open cultural objects that provoke moral discussions” which can have a “fundamental role in the creation of specific moral publics” (2018: 237). Could a moral public, indignant at the treatment of migrant labour, produce social change in Qatar and beyond that improves their pay and conditions? That’s up to you. 

References 

Jedlowski, A. (2018) ‘Moral Publics: Human Trafficking, Video Films and the Responsibility of the Postcolonial Subject’, Visual Anthropology, 31 (3): 236-252.