and the celebrants’ shouting of the name of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the late shah—the roots of a nationalist uprising against Islam.
But is the football revolution the revolution that the U.S. wants? Not so long ago, secular nationalism looked like the great enemy in the Middle East. Dictators like Gamal Nasser, Muammar Qaddafi, and Hafez Assad were the biggest thorns in America’s side, sponsoring hijacking and making war against Israel. In the eighties, however, these Arab nationalists fell upon tough times. They no longer could turn to the Soviet Union for patronage, and Gulf War I exposed how Americans could easily crush even the most powerful of this bunch. What’s more, since the days of Nasser, these secularists had competed with Islamic movements funded by Saudi Arabia. Now, with the nationalists on the ropes, Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and radical Wahabi preachers have gained a serious upper hand in their battle for hegemony over the Muslim mind.
No doubt, the old dictators have caused many
headaches, but America basically knew how to deal with them. It could play them o¤ one another, and ultimately dismiss them as relatively harmless bu¤oons.
Islamists, on the other hand, were an unfamiliar, uncontainable problem. How to turn the tide against HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE
them? One answer has been to inject more globalization into the region. But so far it hasn’t worked. In places like Pakistan, a proliferation of KFC and Bolly-wood movies has arguably aggravated the problem. By displaying the western way of life, they draw attention to the Islamic world’s own humiliating lack of modernity. Another answer to the problem of Islamism, the neo-conservative solution, proposes that the U.S.
aggressively push the Middle East toward democracy.
But the mere fact that the U.S. is the only force seriously committed to democratizing means that blind hatred for the messenger will undermine the message.
The football revolution shows that the best antidote to Islamism might not be something new, but something old—a return to secular nationalism.
Indeed, the football revolution presages a promising scenario: That people won’t accede to theocracy forever, especially when they can remember an era of greater lib-erty before clerical rule. When they revolt, they might fleetingly plead for American help, but they’ll mostly rise up in the name of their nation. We might not always agree with the new nationalists—and they might take their rhetorical shots at the U.S.— but they may be the only viable alternative to government by Islam.
III.
The history of modern Iran can be told as the history of Iranian soccer. It begins just after World War I with Shah Reza the Great, King of Kings, Shadow of the Almighty, God’s Vicar and the Center of the Universe, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. Reza Khan, the man who would become Reza Shah at the ripe age of forty-seven, wasn’t born to the palace. He had been a semilit-erate soldier from the provinces who made his name leading a band of Russian-trained Cossacks. But in the eyes of the British, who lapped at the pool of Iranian oil and tried to quietly run the country, he was the perfect cipher—a man without political ambitions, accustomed to taking orders. In 1921, the general Sir Edmund Ironside, stationed in Tehran, humbly suggested that Reza might want to seize power. The old government had grown too nationalist and unreliable for Ironside’s taste. With the British blessing, Reza’s coup was a fait accompli. Four years later, Reza received the ultimate reward for his cooperation. He sent the old monarch packing to Europe, assumed his lengthy title and the full trappings of royalty. It was quite a leap for a simple village boy to make. But, as the British will attest, he proved to be far less of a pliant bumpkin than first imagined. He would use the military as his blunt instrument for remaking Persian society in the image of Prussian society, a modern nation to compete with Europe. Like his other role model, the great Turkish modernizer Kemal Atatürk, he built roads and railways and trampled traditional practices, belittling the mullahs and banning the chador. He legislated that men trash their robes and don proper western suits. To make a modern nation, he wanted to create a modern Iranian man who understood the values of hygiene, manly competition, and cooperation.
He became an enthusiastic proponent of physical education, a bow in the direction of German gymnastics, HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE
which he encoded in school curricula. Soccer soon became the regime’s activity of choice. Reza Shah ordered the armed forces to play matches, even in the provinces, where European shoes hadn’t yet made an appearance. “By the mid-1920s,” as the incisive historian Houchang Chehabi has put it, “football had become a symbol of modernization, and soon the game was promoted at the highest levels of the state.”
Just like Reza Shah himself, soccer owed its initial strength to the British. The Iranian elite had learned the game in missionary schools run by foreigners. And the Iranian masses learned the game by standing on the touchline and watching employees of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The idea of modernization in general, and soccer in particular, represented a shock to the Islamic system. Even though Reza Shah suppressed the clerics, they still waged a quiet resistance. In the
