But the government probably didn’t ever seriously imagine that these political messages could break through—even subliminally—to transfixed fans. In fact, the crowds did something close to the opposite of shaking their fists and yelping Islamic chants. They laughed the religious cheerleaders out of the stadium.
An unequivocal message to get the mosque out of the sport that the state ultimately heard. The regime stopped shoveling agitprop into soccer. It began to chart a more realistic course with a focus on cutting its losses and limiting the un-Islamic influences that might accompany the game. In this, it has been extraordinar-ily savvy. For some games, it insists on a slight delay in the broadcast, so that the censors have time to weed out the crowd’s foul language or political messages that might be overheard on television. For other games, it electronically softens fan noise to a barely audible din.
During the 1998 World Cup, the Iranian government lived in dread of its exiled opponents, especially a group of quasi-Marxists called the People’s Mujahideen, who filled the stadiums in France, bringing along banners and carefully preparing chants. To avoid transmitting their embarrassingly subversive messages, Iranian television didn’t shoot any footage of the actual crowd.
Instead, it edited in stock images, and not terribly convincing ones. The televised crowds were bundled in heavy winter coats, hardly attire suited to France in June.
So what does the regime fear from soccer? In a poignantly comic scene in the filmmaker Abbas
Kiarostami’s Life Goes On, set in the wake of an enormous earthquake, men struggle to adjust an antenna to receive a match between Austria and Scotland. These aren’t, it should be noted, giants of contemporary soccer. But that’s beside the point. Iranians crave international soccer because the game links them to the advanced, capitalist, un-Islamic West. When they broadcast games from the World Cup, they can’t avoid seeing the placards on the side of the pitch that advertise PlayStation, Doritos, and Nike, a way of life that Iranians are forbidden to join. Conservatives understand this connection. In their papers, photo editors blot out the advertising that graces the chests of Western jerseys.
But again, there’s only so much damage control that the conservatives can do. They can blot out the ads but HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE
not the players themselves. Any photo of David Beckham, for example, with his protean hair always shifting from buzz to mohawk to ponytail, represents an idea of freedom. It’s an idea that Iranian players have picked up on. Almost to a man, the national team plays without beards and with carefully coifed hair. They are heartthrobs, and many of them have gone on to careers in Germany, England, Singapore, and other outposts of the global economy. They couldn’t be more di¤erent from the ideal of pious Iranian masculinity that the clerics in the holy city of Qum would like to project.
The 1997 presidential election featured the great white hope, the cleric and intellectual Mohammad Khatami.
In his writings, he’d argued the compatibility of Islam and liberalism. His supporters daydreamed aloud that his election would usher in a new era of democracy, civil society, free speech, and greater rights for women.
While the hopes of so many rested on Khatami, most Iranians didn’t allow themselves too much optimism.
Khatami was the overwhelming underdog in the race.
His opponent Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, also a cleric, came with the blessings of the nation’s top mullah, Ayatollah Khameni, and represented the forces of establishment conservatism. And in Iran, the clerics can, almost at will, bring down their strong arm, using militias to force their way.
Khatami articulated bits and pieces of a more liberal agenda. But Iranian political discourse is hardly a model marketplace of ideas. Certain thoughts can’t be shouted. They need to be conveyed with subtext and symbols, like the athletes surrounding a candidate.
Among Iranian leisure games and activities, the most ancient and venerated is the zurkhaneh, the strong house. More precisely, the zurkhaneh isn’t a sport but a gymnasium where sport takes place—
indigenous games that involve the hoisting of heavy objects and other displays of brute strength that bear resemblance to wrestling and weightlifting. The rituals of the zurkhaneh are carefully prescribed. Moves begin with praise of the prophet’s family. Because of these Islamic roots, Iranian conservatives have an unsurprising aªnity for the zurkhaneh. Their newspapers devote heaps of coverage to the sport—and basically ignore soccer. In his campaign, Nateq-Nouri stumped with wrestling champions and let his devotion to the sport be widely known.
Unwittingly, Nateq-Nouri had turned himself into Khatami’s perfect foil. Without having to utter too many words about democracy or the West, Khatami could prove himself to the reform-starved Iranians by aligning himself with the soccer stadium. Khatami surrounded himself with famous players, who endorsed him. There’s no way to gauge the full e¤ect of this strategy. But the logic is clear enough. The burgeoning youth population of Iran looked West and toward soccer for inspiration. In their eyes, the alliance with soccer indicated where Khatami’s feelings truly rested. In the end, Khatami surprised the public and took the presidency.
But winning the presidency and satisfying the high hopes of your supporters are two di¤erent matters.
Unfortunately, Khatami could never fulfill the dreams of young, secularly inclined Iranians, because he was HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS ISLAM’S HOPE
never the creature they imagined. He was an intellectual without the courage or power to fully challenge the ruling clerics. More important, he was a traditional cleric himself.
For the past three years, from time to time, discontent with Khatami has emerged from its subterranean home. Many of these occasions of dissent have followed World Cup–related matches. As always, the regime has tried to preempt
