How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, Franklin Foer [reading eggs books txt] 📗

last decades of the shahs, it hadn’t locked its women in black burqas. They had been high government oªcials, writers, lawyers, and fans of the beautiful game.

With so many people flowing through the Azadi’s turnstiles, it’s impossible to ensure conformity with the finer points of Islamic law. Fans will curse in the foulest, most clearly verboten language. They will throw punches that can’t be justified by any reasonable interpretation of the Koran. Some of these men are clean-shaven and dressed in suspiciously baggy clothes.

Under closer inspection, it would become clear that these men aren’t even really men. Risking severe punishment, Tehran’s women have been unable to let go of the Azadi. They have suppressed their breasts, tucked away their long hair, dressed in man’s garb, and snuck into the stadium.

This corps of aggrieved, soccer-starved women, it is reported, included the daughters of important clerics, the only women in Iran who actually had a voice in the governance of the country. Their unceasing complaints apparently struck enough of a fatherly chord to overcome juristic precedent. In 1987, the country’s spiritual and political dictator, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a new fatwa that revised the regime’s absolute prohibition of female fandom. Speaking through his long white beard, he decreed that women could watch soccer on television, which would carry games for the first time in the Islamic era, but still disallowed trips to the testosterone-laden stadium. And for a while, the Khomeini compromise satisfied all.

But even the mullah’s rare stroke of Solomonic reasoning couldn’t placate the deep desires of the Iranian women. Like all good fans, they understood that television is a poor substitute for the real, flesh-and-blood experience. In hindsight, it was inevitable that women would demand to be let back into the nation’s stadiums. Still, such a bold demand requires great courage HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE

and pretext. The heroics of the national team in November 1997 gave the women of Iran both.

Iran’s campaign to qualify for the World Cup turned on a single playo¤ game against Australia, played in Melbourne. For most of the match, the Iranians knocked the ball around as if their government had ordered them to throw the match intentionally, to ward o¤ victory celebrations in Tehran that might spin dangerously out of control. But in the last fifteen minutes of World Cup qualifying—frantic, desperate

moments—the Iranians tossed o¤ their lethargy and struck two stunning, salvaging goals. Iran would advance to the World Cup for the first time since Khomeini’s 747 returned the exiled ayatollah to Tehran eighteen years earlier.

Because the regime possesses a Roman nose for

self-preservation, it began immediately bracing for celebrations, knowing that euphoric people take leave of their rationality, and without rationality guiding them, they might be crazy enough to take to the barricades.

Already, the soccer scene had begun to reflect the aspirations for a new, more liberal Iran—the same spirit that had catapulted the reformer Mohammad Khatami to the presidency a few months earlier. For the first time in the history of the Islamic republic, a foreign coach led the squad, a Brazilian named Valdeir Vieira.

When he paced the sideline, he wore a necktie — a fashion that the shahs had pushed as an emblem of modern Iran and the clerics had rejected as a European imposition. Many of Vieira’s players made their careers in European and Asian leagues, hopeful examples of Iran interacting with the global economy. Indeed, the government had been right to feel anxious. After the victory, the streets of Tehran filled with revelers. Their joy led them to dispense with the oªcial morality. Dancing and drinking and western pop music, normally confined to homes, the private sphere, became the stu¤ of public celebration. If the revelers had been men, that might have been one thing. But in the well-heeled neighborhoods, and especially among the young, the celebrants reveled in mixed company.

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