But the old ways didn’t stand a chance against the might of the modernizers, backed by the powerful state. Reza Shah’s regime seized lands from mosques and converted them into football fields. Over time the state’s enthusiasm for the game grew even greater.
Where Reza Shah embraced the game for largely theo-retical reasons, his son adored it with the passion of a purist. The crown prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi played it at the Rosey School in Switzerland. Returning home in 1936, he lined up as a striker for the oªcers’ school he attended. When the British forced Reza Shah to abdicate the peacock throne to his young son in 1941, after he stupidly made himself cozy with the Nazis, they enthroned the biggest football fanatic in the land.
Even though Iran was far from both the Asian and European fronts, the Pahlavi push toward modernity su¤ered a major setback with the economic disloca-tions of World War II. In the country’s weakened condition, foreign influences—still the British and increasingly the American—became as pronounced as ever, culminating in the CIA-led coup that ousted the democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. In the cities, both the socialist intelligentsia and traditional clerics began to assert themselves. Important matters of state weighed on the new shah’s mind. Nevertheless, as a devoted fan, he couldn’t tolerate losses that the Iranian national team su¤ered in the 1950s. He began devoting resources to the creation of a great team.
In the second decade of his rule, the hard work paid o¤. As part of the regime’s continued program of hyperkinetic growth and modernization, the newly industrialized cities filled with millions of migrants from the provinces. These arrivals, for the first time enjoying a respite from the 24/7 grind of agriculture, began to fill their leisure time with soccer. The newly urbanized who couldn’t wrangle tickets to the stadium watched soccer on television—a medium that became increasingly mass in the late sixties. But the popularity of the sport rests largely on a single match played against Israel in the wake of the 1967 war. Unlike the rest of the Muslim world, the Iranians had a quiet HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE
alliance with the Jewish state that withstood the tumult of the late sixties. (Israel has often had great success cultivating non-Arab allies on the fringes of the Muslim world.) Because of this alliance, Iranians didn’t join with the other Muslim states, which had refused to even take the athletic field with Israelis.
The game was played as part of the quadrennial Asian Nations Cup. While the regime kept up relations with Israel, the Iranian people weren’t entirely on the same page. Earlier in the tournament, when Israel played Hong Kong, Iranians pelted Jewish supporters with bottles. As Houchang Chehabi has reported, the game with Israel was a case study in ugliness. Fans released balloons covered in swastikas. They chanted,
“Goal number two is in the net—a score. Moshe
Dayan’s poor ass is ripped and sore.”
Many theories explain the logic behind the shah’s decision to permit this contest to go forward. Many Iranians persuasively argue that the shah organized the match to harmlessly divert anti-Israeli sentiment. Others contend that the Israelis threw the match, 2–1, to buck up their friend, the shah. Whatever the shah’s rationale, Iran’s victory acquired a mythic significance.
Pop singers enshrined it in song. Players became national icons, whose jukes and crosses were recreated by children in thousands of rag-ball street games.
If the regime had subtly used the game against Israel to bolster itself, its exploitation was more obvious in the years that followed. The game boomed in the seventies, with intense club rivalries forming. Members of the royal family glommed onto the newfangled popularity and began publicly rooting for the club Taj (Crown). To cover the monarchy’s bases, the shah’s wife pulled for Taj’s great rival, Persepolis. With the monarchy so closely identified with soccer, the regime’s Islamist opponents inevitably targeted it, often disrupting games to stage their protests.
The shah’s regime had many faults, especially handling its opponents with undeniable brutality. But its greatest shortcoming, the one that did it in, was the shah’s modernization program. He pushed the country too hard, too fast, to become urban and industrial. Centuries of Persian life were uprooted and overhauled in the course of a generation of fevered transformation.
When the revolutionaries ousted the shah in 1979, however, they tried hard to reverse the sporting symbol of this modernization program. They appropriated the soccer field at Tehran University, reversing the seizures made by Reza Shah, and used it as a staging ground for Friday prayers. They nationalized the soccer clubs, changing Taj into Esteghlal (Independence) and Persepolis into Piroozi (Victory). In their papers and pam-phlets, the ascetic puritans made it clear that they considered soccer to be a debased calling. A typical revolutionary fulmination read: “Would it not have been better if instead of clowning around like the British and the Americans in order to ‘shine’ in international arenas, [the players] shone in the company of the brothers of the . . . jihad in our villages, where the simplest amenities are lacking? Have all our political, economic, and cultural problems been solved that we have turned to sport?” HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE
IV.
In a very brief period, the Islamic regime managed to virtually eliminate Iranian pop culture, purging the divas and crooners, rejecting any movie that showed excessive flesh. But when this clampdown extended to soccer, the regime’s position became untenable. It put the new government in direct opposition to a great passion of the Iranian people. And very quickly, the mullahs realized that eradicating soccer wasn’t worth the political price. Since the clerics couldn’t ruin soccer, they did the next best thing. They tried to co-opt it and milk the game for all
